interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
Dark Souls is a JRPG
https://neverendingrealm.com/opinion/the-new-debate-is-dark-souls-a-jrpg/
>calling zelda an action-rpg
>calling zelda a jrpg
this is worse than the “a hotdog is a sandwich” thing.
Every game is an RPG
I hate when people do that. like no, just because you play a role in a game doesn’t mean it’s a rpg. though honestly genre names are so horribly named. like wtf even is an “action adventure”? aren’t most games adventures where there’s action?
Correct. But the genre names usually have a history how they originated. Problem is, while the games changes, the names of genres did not. It’s a mess. To be honest, it was a mess from the beginning, but it got worse over time.
I personally see “genres” like tags grouping a game in a few words. With the possibilities and variety of games of today and the ancient genre names of the past, classifying games based on a single genre name does not workout always, especially with terms as broad as Action/Adventure. We even have genres or “game types” named after games titles, such as “Metroidvania”, “Souls-like” or even “Breath-like” (yeah, some use that term too…).
Some even classify GTA as a racing game; it’s ridiculous! But on the other hand, sometimes genres are descriptive of what the game is about to a certain degree “Fighting”, “Racing” or “MOBA” are examples of useful groups. That does not mean games can’t be classified in multiple groups (hence why I said it makes most sense to use these like tags).
the fact that people started using “breath-like” as a genre just shows botw isn’t a zelda game. if it were sufficiently similar to other zeldas, they’d say zeldalike but they don’t.
Action games and adventure games used to be two separate genres, deleted
That’s actually not the case. Action adventure games are neither adventure games nor action games. Adventure games refer to text adventures. “action adventure” then is an adventure game, but that isn’t turn/text based (hence “action”). Similarly, an “action game” is something like pong.
It’s just an unfortunate name due to the weird history of game genres.
or “simulation” games. like every fucking game is a simulation!
or “music” games, what game doesn’t have music?
I think music games are pretty straightforward. It’s games where the music is a part of the game play. Sure most games have music, but most of them don’t have it as a full on mechanics in the game. Meanwhile something like Beat Saber is obviously a music game, as the music is a huge influence on the game itself.
Most games aren’t simulations. The difference between a simulation and a game that isn’t a simulation is that… the game is usually way more fun, and a simulation is usually very difficult to play. Take racing games. Cars handle way differently in racing games than in real life, which someone will find out if they try to drive a race car simulator and find themselves quickly spinning out. (Hopefully they learn it on a simulator. I’ve seen people learn it in real cars; it is an expensive lesson.)
so it’s a simulation of a car that works a bit different from real life
Nope.
The opposite of simulation is arcade, “simulation” meaning “as close to real life as we can get it” and “arcade” meaning “let’s optimise this for gameplay instead”.
Don’t try to dictionary your way around genre descriptors that’s not how they work.
The classical action adventure is something like King’s Quest. The genre roots in Colossal Cave and its golden days weren’t action but puzzle adventures, things like Monkey Island.
If you look at the definition of the genre yep RPGs usually are adventures, but not all adventures are RPGs. Also you can’t takes those things too seriously as strictly speaking e.g. Tyrian qualifies. In the end genres operate pretty much on a “I know it when I see it” basis and have quite fuzzy borders.
Chaotic neutral
If everything is a member of a group, then the group doesn’t exist. Categories, genres, any language used to define a group is just a useful tool to talk about and around subjects. Reductionism of categories is pointless. Doom-clone used to be a category, and same with Rogue. Now FPS, and rogue-lite genres exist.
I’m just being reductive for the sake of emphasizing how non-descriptive the term RPG is especially when tons of games have “RPG elements” (ie. stats/level progression).
Yeah no worries, I personally think RPG is an overly used term and perhaps the genre definition is too broad. Anything with stats, is a pretty low bar to meet being an RPG.
How everyone defines these is wobbly though, I feel a JRPG must have some kind of party system, based on all the classic JRPG have parties. Where as I feel an RPG is a game where player power is tied non-exclusively to player skill. Such as Picross is not an RPG as 100% of player power, is tied to player skill. So then I feel Souls games are an RPG, but not a JRPG because you only play as yourself. I think the J in JRPG is just an old carryover, and maybe we should call them Party RPGs, but that’s pretty easily confused with Party games, which is totally unrelated.
You can’t determine the meaning of a word or phrase just by interpreting its linguistic roots. Yes, Dark Souls is Japanese, and a Role Playing Game (I guess; I haven’t played it), but the term “JRPG” doesn’t merely mean “Japanese Role Playing Game”. It refers to a particular style of game that, until quite recently, was exclusively made in Japan. This is what puts the “J” in “JRPG”, but the term wasn’t invented to split Japanese RPGs off from other RPGs just because they were Japanese (as the linked article suggests). There’s really no reason to do that. If that’s all it was, we’d just say “RPG”. It was invented to describe a particular aesthetic that was very distinct relative to other CRPGs.
I can see the logic behind redefining the Legend of Zelda as a JRPG. That said, it would have been an invalid classification at the time, as there was a world of difference between something like Dragon Quest and something like The Legend of Zelda, and the entire point to the acronym “RPG” was to distinguish the two. Weirdly, we called LoZ an “adventure game”, though there is no relationship between the term “adventure game” on the console scene, which described what we would now call an “Action RPG”, and “adventure game” on the PC, which described what we would now call by names like “Object Hunt” and “Visual Novel”. Words are weird, and their meanings can’t be deduced simply by breaking apart their linguistic roots.
Action adventure would be fair for Zelda as the RPG elements, at least in the SNES era (haven’t played anything else) were, well, not really present, from what I gather the series evolved towards puzzle/action adventure. More like Tomb Raider. We certainly didn’t perceive Zelda as an RPG back in the days. Things like Secret of Mana are more clearly RPGs, but also not JRPGs. I’d firmly place it as an ARPG.
And, just to give my own disparaging take on JRPGs: They’re Visual Novels for Excel-fans.