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Hideki Kamiya thinks Japan should be proud of ‘JRPG’ and wants to use ‘J-Action’
04.08.2023 - 14:13 / videogameschronicle.com / Naoki Yoshida / Hideki Kamiya
PlatinumGames vice president Hideki Kamiya has said he thinks Japan should be proud of the term ‘JRPG’, amid fresh claims it could be considered discriminatory to Japanese developers.
The ‘JRPG’ term was popularised in the early 90s as a means for press and video game fans to differentiate between PC RPGs, which were mostly made by Western developers, and console RPGs, which were mostly made up of Japanese franchises such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
However, in the years since, as interest in Japanese-made RPGs declined, there were some instances of discriminatory language used to describe them, by both critics and developers (as summarised in a report by Polygon), and some Japanese creators spoke out against the term.
Earlier this year, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida told Skill Up that he wasn’t a big fan of the ‘JRPG’ term at all, saying that in the past, it felt like a discriminatory term with negative connotations.
“For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said.
In a recent interview at PlatinumGames’ headquarters in Osaka, VGC asked famous Japanese designer Hideki Kamiya, creator of Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, if he shared Yoshida’s views.
Kamiya’s answer was extensive, and he argued that the term is something Japanese developers should be proud of and, in his opinion, cultural differences justified the differentiation in subgenres.
“I have a lot to say on this,” Kamiya replied. “Just to be clear first though, I have a positive sentiment when it comes to the term JRPG. Indeed, I think it’s something that we should be proud of.
“In my creative life up until now there have been two things that left a huge impression on me, which I still think about to this day. The first of these was a localisation issue with the manga of Fist of the North Star.”
Kamiya went on to explain in depth (which can be read in full in VGC’s interview) that the first issue of the manga had a scene where a group of thugs on motorbikes were standing at the top of a hill, overlooking a village.
In the background the manga uses an onomatopoeiac ‘dodododododo’ sound to represent the pressure of the scene, and while it wasn’t an actual audile sound, it was being used to create tension.
In the localised version, however, this sound was changed for the literal ‘vrooooom’ of the bikes, something Kamiya says was different from the original manga artists’ intent.
“Using language to express a unique atmosphere such as this is something that’s fairly unique to Japanese creative tastes, in a
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