Naoki Yoshida has revealed that he dislikes the term JRPG and he often thinks of the term as “discriminatory”.
This information was revealed by Naoki Yoshida during an interview with YouTuber SkillUp. If you are interested in Square Enix games, you can check out our other articles here.
Naoki Yoshida Dislikes the Term JRPG
Speaking with SkillUp, Naoki Yoshida was asked about the state of JRPGs vs western RPGs and he was visibly upset. Michael-Christopher Koji Fox then answered the question:
The thing that [Yoshida] wanted to convey is that when we make a game, at least with our team, we don’t go into the game thinking that we’re going to make a JRPG, we just go into the game thinking that we’re going to make an RPG.
Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, Localisation Director of Final Fantasy XVI
Yoshida went on to explain why he dislikes the term JRPG and that he is not the only developer who would prefer everyone to drop the letter ‘J’ when referring to Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XVI.
It will depend on who you ask, but there was a time when this term first appeared 15 years ago, and for us as developers when we first heard it, it seemed like a discriminatory term. It was as if we were being made fun of for making these games, and for some developers, the term JRPG can be something that might trigger bad feelings because of what happened in the past.
Naoki Yoshida, Producer of FInal Fantasy XVI
More specifically, Yoshida recalled an unnamed media outlet calling Final Fantasy VII a JRPG. According to him, he was offended that the media was “compartmentalizing what we created into a JRPG box”.
Final Fantasy XVI will release on PS5 on June 22, 2023.
