Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth creative director Tetsuya Nomura and producer Yoshinori Kitase can't seem to agree on whether the term JRPG is a bad thing or not.
JRPG, of course, refers to Japanese role-playing games - a genre popularized by series like Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, and Final Fantasy, even if the most recent entry, Final Fantasy 16, is strictly an action-RPG. For literal decades, the acronym seemed a harmless enough differentiator between Western and Eastern RPGs, but earlier in the year a debate was sparked when Final Fantasy producer Naoki Yoshida, AKA Yoshi-P, expressed his contempt for the term.
Fast forward to a recent interview with The Guardian, and a pair of JRPG visionaries are chiming in with opposing takes on the conversation. Nomura, Kingdom Hearts director and veteran Final Fantasy developer, says he's "not too keen on" the term JRPG.
"Certainly, when we started doing interviews for the games that I started making, no one used that term – they just called them RPGs. And then at some point – I can't remember exactly when – people started referring to them as JRPGs. And I'm not really sure what the intent behind that is. It just always felt a bit off to me, and a bit weird. I never really understood it – or why it's needed."
Meanwhile Kitase, who directed the original Final Fantasy 7, isn't bothered in the slightest. "Personally, I don't see it as that derogative," he said. "I think obviously with modern gaming, titles developed in the west are the majority now. So if [JRPG] is only used in terms of differentiating – maybe showing off a slightly different approach to games or a unique flavor in terms of Japanese-made games – I'm absolutely fine with that."
While it would be nice to have a consensus on whether it's appropriate to use one of the most commonly used genre descriptors ever, it's definitely interesting to see two pioneers of the genre disagree like this.
If you're at all interested in reading more on this needlessly complicated debate, my colleague Dustin wrote up a wonderful piece earlier this year that asked earnestly: If we're not supposed to say JRPG anymore, just what the heck are we supposed to call these games? Trust me when I say this is a much more difficult question to unpack than it seems at first blush.
Whatever we do with the term, let's never get rid of the best JRPGs ever.
