Excuse me if I’m being utterly dumb (knowing me, this could well be the case), but I have encountered something that totally confuses me.
For me, a game genre sums up the main game play elements. Are you going to grind away and level up? Punch people? Command an army? Soil myself with fear, and so on. So with that in mind, I have a pet hate for “JRPG”. For anyone who has not encountered the term yet, this means Japanese Role Playing Game.
Why do the Japanese get their own special genre? Do they even use this genre themselves?
If an RPG is made in the UK, and translated to Japanese, does it become a JRPG once it’s been produced for that country? (You’re all going to say “no”, but hear me out), the game, after all, has become Japanese – it’s probably been translated and altered by people from the country, the cover art is likely to get its own special makeover designed to appeal to them, and if there’s a script involved it could be read by Japanese voice actors.
FFX: The American voice actors made it feel so… Japanese
I don’t mean to be anal (although I accept that’s exactly what I am being), but what’s the point in specifically labelling a games’ genre ‘Japanese’ when you are playing the game in English? How does it become any different to play, for an English person, compared to playing an RPG that was developed in America? Everything that was Japanese has been interpreted and changed so that the player can understand it.
I’m not going to play an RPG, and later discover it is a JRPG and go “Oh, it was made in JAPAN. Now it all makes sense!”, or read a review, see the genre of the game in question is a JRPG, not an RPG, and think, “Oh, a JRPG. That does/doesn’t interest me. If only it was an RPG then it would/wouldn’t.”
No-one labels an American shooter “AFPS”, a British RTS “BRTS” or “UKRTS”. Does anyone genuinely choose to ignore or purchase a game purely due to the country it was developed in? (If so, doesn’t that make you a little racist?)
Surely in any case if you are psyched about a game, you’re interested in what’s in the game, not where it was made.
To further this pointless argument, if you took a studio in Japan, that was full of Japanese employees, and placed them in America in a bubble, would the game they’re working on no longer merit a “J” in the genre? And what’s wrong with simply using this layout:
Genre: RPG
Country of origin: Japan
Is it really that awkward to type four extra words? If I’ve missed something obvious or useful about classifying a game’s genre by its country of origin please let me know, and label my stupidity. Or tell me about your own pet hates within video games. (Wooden crate, anyone?)
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.