Final Fantasy XVI Producer Doesn’t Like The Term “JRPG”

Final Fantasy XVI’s producer Naoki Yoshida recently shared that he doesn’t like the term “JRPG” when referring to the role-playing games Square Enix creates.

Ahead of the release of the next mainline Final Fantasy game, the producer has sat down with multiple media publications to discuss the upcoming entry. During a particular interview with Skill-Up, Yoshida talked about creating Final Fantasy XVI for both longtime fans of the series and new players, as well as how this specific entry broadens the potential audience of players.

At one point, Skill-Up asked Yoshida about a previous comment he made about how the action game genre has advanced and was now the norm, and if he was implying the JRPGs hadn’t advanced in the same way.

Skill-Up explained that it seemed Yoshida didn’t like the phrasing of the question, to which his translator said, “The thing that [Yoshida] wants to get across is that when we are creating games, at least with our team, we don’t go into them thinking that we’re going to be creating JRPGs, we just go into them thinking we’re going to create RPGs.”

When asked to elaborate, Yoshida said, “This is going to depend on who you ask but there was a time when this term first appeared 15 years ago, and for us as 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 JRPG can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past.

“It wasn’t a compliment to a lot of developers in Japan,” he continued. “We understand that recently, JRPG has better connotations and it’s being used as a positive but we still remember the time when it was used as a negative.”

Final Fantasy XVI is set to launch on June 22 for PS5. Yoshida recently confirmed that although the game does have a six-month exclusivity deal on the PS5, the PC version won’t launch after that period.