Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Is GameSpot’s Game Of The Year 2025
In 2023, Final Fantasy Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida indicated his distaste for the term JRPG, saying that Square Enix doesn’t go into its games trying to make a JRPG. “We go into them thinking we’re going to create RPGs,” he explained.
Before this, Nintendo producer Hitoshi Yamagami, who worked with MonolithSoft on Xenoblade Chronicles X, echoed similar sentiments, saying, “I feel like we just make RPGs, I don’t need anyone to add the ‘J’, personally.”
In these two instances, there is both a direct and an implied acknowledgement that although there can be positive connotations attached to the label, “JRPG” can also feel limiting and discriminatory.
