Everything Everywhere Once A Week (3/10/2023)

Hello and welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, a weekly newsletter about the gaming industry and what’s going on in it. It’s Mario Day, a day to celebrate all-things Mario, and a number of things have happened this week including a Starfield delay, Forspoken sales, a Resident Evil 4 demo, and more. And we’ll get to that, but I wanted to hit a subject that’s been on my mind recently.

Is JRPG a Distasteful Genre Name?

If you know me, you know I think genres are generally bullshit. They’re occasionally useful for categorization, but by and large most games defy simple genre labels by being multifaceted and mechanically dense. You have to get incredibly broad and fairly non-specific for these things to matter as information conveyance, like saying “First-person shooter” to accurately describe Call of Duty but also to describe Splitgate, Apex Legends, and Cyberpunk 2077 — three games that are all pretty different from Call of Duty in various ways. It’s better to just compare games to close cousins than try and use a genre name without a ton of explanation and qualifiers. And I think largely we have moved in that direction both in the industry and in gaming discussion spaces.

One genre name that has endured, however, is the JRPG. I first came across the term in the PlayStation 2 generation, when it was used to delineate between games like Final Fantasy and Knights of the Old Republic, though it surely was used in circles before then. The latter was referred to with multiple different monikers, including CRPGs (for Computer), WRPGs (for Western or sometimes White), and D&DRPGs, which I don’t think ever really took off.

A few weeks ago during the Final Fantasy XVI preview (which we discussed with hands-on impressions here), producer Naoki Yoshida commented that he didn’t necessarily like the term “JRPG.” From Kotaku’s transcription:

“For us as developers [in Japan], the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term,” explained Yoshida. “As though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past.”

“It wasn’t a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan. We understand that recently, JRPG has better connotations and it’s being used as a positive but we still remember the time when it was used as a negative.”

The comment sparked off a debate about the use of the phrase, its history, and what place it has in a modern game industry.

I feel like it is important to note that saying Yoshida is correct about this is not really a defense of Final Fantasy XVI’s more ridiculous aspects, such as the off-putting argument it makes about a lack of racial and ethnic diversity being more realistic. I need to make that clarification because a person who is wrong about X thing can still make a valid complaint about something else. I know this because I am often wrong about things. In fact, I think Yoshida’s point is well past due and maybe, separate from my general opinion about genres being outdated, we should all just abandon the term.

If you weren’t gaming in the mid-2000s, or weren’t connected to enthusiast gaming circles, you might not have a good sense for how weird anti-Japanese sentiment got about games from the east. The Japanese industry was dealing with growing pains from western competition, HD development, the futility of proprietary video game engines, and a market that was increasingly looking for Grand Theft Auto over Asura’s Wrath. The media reflected these changes, or maybe even drove them, and it lead to a lot of shit like this from gamers trying to be funny because that’s just what you did. Nuke jokes were just all the rage back then.

But even if you weren’t witness (or party) to these events, you definitely saw it in other aspects of entertainment culture. There was a period from the late-90s to, like, Obama being elected where making fun of Japan was just the height of comedy. Anime parodies, replete with Speed Racer-style voice acting, were a primary comedic vehicle alongside portraying it as a nation of game show wackiness and garbage English. If your show didn’t have a Pokemon parody where people squinted really tight and said made-up asian-sounding words then the train was leaving the station without you on it.

That Japanese gaming was falling behind the desires of the western market and failing to properly internationalize was a mockable thing, and also true. But it being true was wildly disproportionate to the prevailing sentiment that the Japanese game industry was dead and its creatives hopelessly stuck in the mud due to cultural or I guess ethnic limits that prevented them from writing video games as well as Bioware. The term JRPG was not a genre description so much as a reason to qualify any hope you might have for a game being good.

As Yoshida notes, that sentiment has been coming around in recent years. A game being labeled a “JRPG” is not slanderous like it once was and is now used primarily to describe a type of game rather than a regional variant. Titles like Chained Echoes are labeled JRPGs because of the way it hearkens back to classics like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, despite being created in Germany. The same is true for Child of Light, Battle Chasers, Undertale, and more. The term “JRPG” does not just mean what it used to mean and is no longer widely derisive.

But also that history doesn’t just wash away. It still happened and it has been internalized by the people creating it, to the point where they’re eager to get away from it.

If someone started labeling my work as “Good for Brown writing,” I’d have several thoughts about it, regardless of what that person meant by it. They could say that my “Brown writing” is the best writing they’ve ever seen and I’d still feel incredibly put-off by being placed in this box that identifies me by my ethnicity alone. This doesn’t mean my ethnicity isn’t a part of me and my identity, but I get to decide when it is.

Sometimes we have all the best intentions in the world with something and are using it in a way that makes total sense to us and the idea it could be used nefariously or ignorantly is ridiculous. I don’t think the world will end tomorrow if we continue to use JRPG as a genre description, but we’ve long moved past its usefulness. Even the occasional Chained Echoes or Octopath Traveler appears and would benefit from a four-letter descriptor rather than a two-sentence one, the term has so much baggage that it’s best to just move on from rather than trying to find the best way to fit a Square Enix peg into a round hole.

As an aside, I also feel pretty similarly about calling non-animated things “anime.” Just kind of feels like a blanket xenophobic term. But that’s another subject altogether.

Starfield Delayed

Microsoft announced this week that Starfield, the latest game from Bethesda Game Studios, will get its own “Direct” in June after the Xbox Games Showcase that is not tied but is parallel to E3. In the process, they revealed that Starfield will actually release in September of this year, three months from the anniversary of last year’s showcase, which stated that every game shown was to be released in the following 12 months.

Which, sure. You could delay a Bethesda game seven years and not stomp out every bug, but if three months helps a little, then go nuts. I’m mostly just concerned that now that Starfield has broken the seal, the mostly-unrelated Silksong might also not make it before June.

Square-Enix Calls Forspoken Sales “Lackluster”

In a February financial briefing, outgoing Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda said that sales of Forspoken were not up to their expectations. He noted that while there was positive feedback about several aspects of the game, reviews for it were “challenging.” The developer, Luminous Studio, is being folded back into Square Enix proper, though their structure had pretty much always left that time bomb ticking for tax writeoff reasons so that’s not a major shock.

Matsuda had been pretty confident in Forspoken during its development and moved his office closer to the game’s development studio to keep his eye on it. He had also done this previously for Avengers for the same reason, so maybe he’s not great at picking them out. That said, Forspoken seems to largely be at least considered “Okay” and it has likely broken the curse of Square Enix releasing one of the worst games of the year every January.

If Forspoken is somehow the worst game of 2023, then it’s going to be a pretty good year overall.

• Other Things:
  
  New Materia Possessions next week! I’m going to talk about Wo Long, which might be the easiest Soulslike I’ve ever played after its weird difficulty-spike of a first boss.
• There might be some reviews on the way soon, too.