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The ‘JRPG’ label has always been othering
(www.polygon.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Every game is an RPG
I hate when people do that. like no, just because you play a role in a game doesn't mean it's a rpg. though honestly genre names are so horribly named. like wtf even is an "action adventure"? aren't most games adventures where there's action?
or "simulation" games. like every fucking game is a simulation!
or "music" games, what game doesn't have music?
Most games aren't simulations. The difference between a simulation and a game that isn't a simulation is that... the game is usually way more fun, and a simulation is usually very difficult to play. Take racing games. Cars handle way differently in racing games than in real life, which someone will find out if they try to drive a race car simulator and find themselves quickly spinning out. (Hopefully they learn it on a simulator. I've seen people learn it in real cars; it is an expensive lesson.)
so it's a simulation of a car that works a bit different from real life
Action games and adventure games used to be two separate genres, but their similarities caused people writing magazine articles to group them together, under a single term "action-adventure". You can think of it as "either or", rather than some weird neologism
That's actually not the case. Action adventure games are neither adventure games nor action games. Adventure games refer to text adventures. "action adventure" then is an adventure game, but that isn't turn/text based (hence "action"). Similarly, an "action game" is something like pong.
It's just an unfortunate name due to the weird history of game genres.
Correct. But the genre names usually have a history how they originated. Problem is, while the games changes, the names of genres did not. It's a mess. To be honest, it was a mess from the beginning, but it got worse over time.
I personally see "genres" like tags grouping a game in a few words. With the possibilities and variety of games of today and the ancient genre names of the past, classifying games based on a single genre name does not workout always, especially with terms as broad as Action/Adventure. We even have genres or "game types" named after games titles, such as "Metroidvania", "Souls-like" or even "Breath-like" (yeah, some use that term too...).
Some even classify GTA as a racing game; it's ridiculous! But on the other hand, sometimes genres are descriptive of what the game is about to a certain degree "Fighting", "Racing" or "MOBA" are examples of useful groups. That does not mean games can't be classified in multiple groups (hence why I said it makes most sense to use these like tags).
the fact that people started using "breath-like" as a genre just shows botw isn't a zelda game. if it were sufficiently similar to other zeldas, they'd say zeldalike but they don't.
If everything is a member of a group, then the group doesn't exist. Categories, genres, any language used to define a group is just a useful tool to talk about and around subjects. Reductionism of categories is pointless. Doom-clone used to be a category, and same with Rogue. Now FPS, and rogue-lite genres exist.
I'm just being reductive for the sake of emphasizing how non-descriptive the term RPG is especially when tons of games have "RPG elements" (ie. stats/level progression).
Yeah no worries, I personally think RPG is an overly used term and perhaps the genre definition is too broad. Anything with stats, is a pretty low bar to meet being an RPG.
How everyone defines these is wobbly though, I feel a JRPG must have some kind of party system, based on all the classic JRPG have parties. Where as I feel an RPG is a game where player power is tied non-exclusively to player skill. Such as Picross is not an RPG as 100% of player power, is tied to player skill. So then I feel Souls games are an RPG, but not a JRPG because you only play as yourself. I think the J in JRPG is just an old carryover, and maybe we should call them Party RPGs, but that's pretty easily confused with Party games, which is totally unrelated.
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