In a recent interview, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leads Tetsuya Nomura and Yoshinori Kitase shared their feelings on the term JRPG, both having different perspectives on it.
Earlier this year, Final Fantasy 14 and 16 producer Naoki Yoshida spoke about the term JRPG, and how he doesn’t like it as when it first started to be used it felt like it was “a discriminatory term.” It’s an understandable point of contention, as while the genre is quite popular now, go back a couple of decades you’d find plenty of people being rude about the games just because they were Japanese. Now, in a new interview with The Guardian, Nomura, creative director of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Kitase, producer on the game, have shared their thoughts on the term.
Quite notably, Nomura expressed distaste for the term, whereas Kitase wasn’t as put off by it. “I’m not too keen on it,” Nomura said. “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.”
But not every rpg from Japan is a JRPG. Not all JRPGs are from Japan.
If you don’t want to be put into the JRPG box, make something that isn’t a JRPG. They’re in a box for a reason, and it’s because they’re markedly different from other RPG formats.