JRPG est-il un bon mot? Persona 5 le réalisateur et le créateur de personnages se prononcent avant leur nouveau jeu Metaphor ReFantazio: “Vous pouvez appeler cela un JRPG si vous le souhaitez”
Director Katsura Hashino and character designer Shigenori Soejima, both Persona 5 veterans now filling the same roles on Atlus’ new game Métaphore: Refantasia, don’t mind if you call these games JRPGs. En fait, Soejima says the term is a “positive” for him.
The term JRPG, commonly used in the West as a shorthand genre descriptor for Japanese RPGs generally featuring mechanics and aesthetics and other design sensibilities common to and first incubated within Japan, has seen some re-evaluation in the past few years. Many Japanese developers, from Final Fantasy 14’s Yoshi-P à Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s Tetsuya Nomura à former Platinum Games director Hideki Kamiya, have had their say, with mixed views across the board. It begs the question our own Dustin Bailey explored last year: If developers don’t like the term JRPG, what do we use instead?
I recently spoke to Hashino and Soejima at Fête du jeu d'été after getting some hands-on time with Metaphor: ReFantazio and absolutely falling in love with its UI (the rest of the game looks great, trop). This is a question I always like to ask Japanese developers whenever possible – plus tôt cette année, I put the question to the solo Japanese creator of one of the weirdest RPGs in recent memory – so I was eager to get their thoughts with Persona being one of the biggest JRPGs of today. (There it is again!)
“I apologize if this is a really basic answer,” Hashino tells GamesRadar+ via interpreter. “Some people think JRPG is a good thing, it’s a good genre, they’re positive about the concept. Some are negative about the concept. I think that’s up to the individual. It’s up to each person to determine what they like and what they want. For us, we don’t think about JRPGs, we don’t think about RPGs. We just want to make a fun game. That’s all we’re trying to do. You can call this a JRPG if you want.”
Soejima was even keener on the term. “For a character designer, when you add the J to the RPG, it kind of embodies the entire movement of what pop culture from Japan is,” he argued. “It means they’re not just a creator working on a game, but they’re part of the anime and manga and style that exists in Japan. They’re a Japanese creator giving to the world. For me, as a creator, it’s a positive that I can be considered to be making a JRPG.”