Quote Originally Posted by Skyblade View Post
Finally, you've utterly failed in the same area that EVERYONE who has ever made the argument against the JRPG/WRPG terms has: You were unable to produce a viable term to use in it's place. It's a genre. You KNOW it's a genre, because you were able to single it out and define it, and everyone knew exactly what you meant. It's a individual style of games and game design that follows distinct conventions that are recognized universally by gamers, and who have given it a clear and obvious term based on that style's origin and history.
Except of course, there are a fair chunk of players who consider Dark Souls a JRPG.

And I can never seem to get people to agree on exactly what criteria they consider 'JRPG'. I mean, almost without fail, people will say that both Final Fantasy Tactics and Hyperdimension Neptunia are JRPGs. But what do they share, exactly? Mechanically, FF Tactics is closer to both XCOM and Planescape: Torment than it is to Neptunia. In terms of narrative style and delivery it's much closer to those classic western CRPGs as well. And yet FFT is still widely accepted as 'JRPG'. Hell, I've seen Gravity Rush described as a JRPG!! What's the common link here? The art style is kinda anime-like? Surely that's not the depth of our genre definitions.

You're right in that critics of 'JRPG' don't provide alternatives, but that's because I feel that it's a nonsense 'genre'. It's simultaneously extraordinarily broad in scope (see the above example) while also encouraging an extremely narrow view of the games within it. I mean I cannot think of any other genre where people discuss and criticise the so-called "tropes" as much as they do for JRPG. So the reason I don't provide an alternative is because I don't think the games accepted as being within it have any right being grouped together as part of the same genre.

I would argue fairly strongly, that Final Fantasy XV is in the same genre as The Witcher 3, and not in the same genre as Final Fantasy VII. But what genre label would y'all give XV?