What defines a JRPG has been diluted

The blurriness of role playing games

JRPGs tend to have snappy turn based combat with characters that practically fly at their enemies and hit them. Sometimes they rebound back, other times they'll stay where they are to continue. It's definitely a genre within the overall RPG genre. I'd define it as party based rpgs with random battles, long slow growth curves, characters defined by the creators not the players and mostly linear story and gameplay that sometimes has a manga or anime feel to it. This discussion has been had many times before and a consensus has never been reached. There isn't a better term to define the collective of tropes and mechanics that define jRPGs and with both eastern and western developers borrowing inspiration and mechanics from each other, the lines can be blurry at times. jRPG can signify many things, it can signify an aesthetic, a type of story-telling, a bunch of game mechanics, a type of music but there's no encompassing term that would fit all the games we believe are jRPGs.

Some people still argue, for example, that Dark Souls as a jRPG which I find completely absurd. If you call Dark Souls, Monster Hunter or Dragon's Dogma jRPGs the term has no meaning whatsoever.

But there's no other term where you can put Xenoblade Chronicles, Fire Emblem, Pokemon, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Bravely Default, Shin Megami Tensei and many others under the same umbrella. Those are very different games/series but most people understand that despite their differences there are elements, which are not common to all of them, that link them together under the same genre.

One of the better arguments to differentiate the two genres came from an old Extra Credits video that explored the differences between them and the major differentiating factor they concluded that (and excuse me if I'm wrong, this video is quite old) it was a focus on narrative versus expression.

Typically, jRPGs focus on telling a narrative (that isn't to say western RPGs don't have narratives) whereas western RPGs tend to focus on expression. A player's ability to make a unique character and make unique decisions that help shape the world. A jRPG typically isn't interested in player choices outside of gameplay ones, they just want to tell a story and let players experience it.

Even with that in mind, there are exceptions and games that we clearly consider to be part of one of those genres may be more story driven than they are focused on player expression, and vice-versa so it's not a perfect definition but it's the one I found to be the closest to describing the main difference between a jRPG and an RPG.

JRPGs have their roots in Wizardry and Ultima. The first JRPGs, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Ys, etc all borrowed heavily from these western games. Back then, it would probably be accurate to just say that JRPGs are RPGs made in Japan. That was over 30 years ago, several console generations, and obviously there's been some fairly significant genre divergence since then. Style, tone, gameplay, themes, etc have evolved down different paths. And these days with development being a more global community, there are westerners making games with more in common with JRPGs and Japanese developers making games with more in common with WRPGs.

In my mind, the whole point of genres and subgenres is to help us categorize things so we can more easily find similar things we enjoy (or don't enjoy). If you liked Fire Emblem and Chrono Trigger and games like those, then I'm far more likely to recommend Xenoblade Chronicles to you than Dark Souls.

This is less of a story and more of an article than anything I figured that I would use this topic as my first post here on this site. Due to my love for Nintendo and the jrpgs that come out on their systems generation after generation, I figured that I would use this topic for my very first initial post on the site. My plan is to make future content be more story-based. So I hope that you will enjoy.