Gaming

Really well-done article, thanks for posting.

This is interesting because I can see where he's coming from, but like others I see it as more of a distinct genre from Western RPG. There is no general RPG genre which a game can be categorized as to represent "the norm" which jrpgs are aberrant from. That being said, labelling western rpgs and jrpgs doesn't indicate the design philosophy which is actually indicated by those terms. The west has produced many jrpgs and Japan has produced many western rpgs, and that doesn't make sense unless you know what those terms actually mean.

I wonder what these genres could be called which would be better indicators? Dragon Quest-likes and Ultima-likes?

Honestly feels like a bit of a gross misuse of the word "othering" given what material horrors are associated with the process. Especially bitter coming from Mr Naoki "economics justifies transphobia" Yoshida.

I feel like there's an important point in the valence of the word shifting as the American games industry and its colluders in the gaming press started trying to cut foreign and indie developers out. I think I completely missed out on the process of the word becoming pejorative, because I was mostly playing Nintendo and retro games during that era and not really talking about them online outside of people that also liked those kinds of games.

I do think it's interesting and sad though that negative valence can be attached to an entire region, and specifically a region outside "the West". "Slavjank" would be another example; meanwhile the endless litany of very poor quality games coming out of the UK in the 80's and 90's was never given a simple and catchy term...

But that leads to a point that there's also something to be said that valence can be contextual. "Jank" means different things to different people and can be meant appreciatively or pejoratively.

Within my friends with the same background and from the same (console) generation as me, and who like the same kinds of game as me, there is definitely a subgenre of RPG with a high degree of mechanical depth and novelty, typically made in Japan, that we crave more of; so some kind of catchy subgenre term is useful.

Half serious but I think the real solution is to start describing mechanically over-streamlined Hollywood wannabes as WRPGs.

I disagree, it's the same as distinguishing romance novels from other fantasy novels.

Final Fantasy 16 is not really like a typical jrpg. As a dev the dev shouldn't really care about which genre a certain game has, just make a good game and don't care about jrpg, action game or whatever your game is. We player decide the genre to know which group of gamers are maybe interrested in the game.