Final Fantasy is often thought of as the flagship of JRPGs, but it seems that Final Fantasy's standard-bearer did not always like to be called this. Naoki Yoshida (a.k.a. Yoshi P.), producer of Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 14, said in an interview with SkillUp (opens in new tab) that Japanese developers were not enthusiastic about this classification when it first appeared, and even considered it "discriminatory" . It was not a compliment to many Japanese developers," Yoshida recalled."

SkillUp asked Yoshida about how JRPGs have progressed (or not) as a genre, and he found himself inadvertently tripping over old wounds. Yoshida said that when the term JRPG first came into use among people, some Japanese developers felt that they were being "ridiculed for making these games,"

while Western players felt that they were "compartmentalizing what we are making into the JRPG box."

After all, Yoshida noted, Japanese developers were not trying to create something called a "JRPG," but were "just making RPGs. He points out that "the term 'JRPG' is used by Western media, not by Japanese users or media."

It's something I've never considered, but it makes sense: isolating JRPGs into their own subcategory of the RPG genre implies that, due to some quirk or flaw, the games do not meet the standards required of "real" RPGs. Of course, the same could be said for genres such as CRPGs and ARPGs, but at least in those genres there does not seem to be anything troublesome that would limit a game from a particular country to a different category.

On the plus side, Yoshida recognizes that "JRPGs are being used in a more positive way with better connotations" these days, but says that Japanese game makers still "remember when they were used negatively." The interview gave the impression that Yoshida himself does not yet like the term, as he took pains to explain that what the Final Fantasy team wanted to create was an RPG and not a JRPG. So while he may not abandon the term at this point, he might want to be a bit more careful about how he deploys it.