Is there a possibility that the usage of anime is also othering? In Japan, "anime" means animation, and if you ask a Japanese person what their favorite anime is, they might say Disney movies. If you translate "anime" into Japanese, it will become "Japanese anime"

However, it seems that there are some animators who think that there is a difference between anime and animation.

Oof. Thanks for mentioning this.

Yuck, I just looked up his statements about that. Yeah, I don’t know if I will be playing FFXVI. There are plenty of games that don’t have that problem. Diablo 4 is a good example.

You can't determine the meaning of a word or phrase just by interpreting its linguistic roots. Yes, Dark Souls is Japanese, and a Role Playing Game (I guess; I haven't played it), but the term "JRPG" doesn't merely mean "Japanese Role Playing Game". It refers to a particular style of game that, until quite recently, was exclusively made in Japan. This is what puts the "J" in "JRPG", but the term wasn't invented to split Japanese RPGs off from other RPGs just because they were Japanese (as the linked article suggests). There's really no reason to do that. If that's all it was, we'd just say "RPG". It was invented to describe a particular aesthetic that was very distinct relative to other CRPGs.

I can see the logic behind redefining the Legend of Zelda as a JRPG. That said, it would have been an invalid classification at the time, as there was a world of difference between something like Dragon Quest and something like The Legend of Zelda, and the entire point to the acronym "RPG" was to distinguish the two. Weirdly, we called LoZ an "adventure game", though there is no relationship between the term "adventure game" on the console scene, which described what we would now call an "Action RPG", and "adventure game" on the PC, which described what we would now call by names like "Object Hunt" and "Visual Novel". Words are weird, and their meanings can't be deduced simply by breaking apart their linguistic roots.

>calling zelda an action-rpg
>calling zelda a jrpg

this is worse than the "a hotdog is a sandwich" thing.

I mean, I do understand that JRPG is somewhat problematic.

The problems it's not going to change because it's too deeply ingrained, and if you try to introduce another term it's just going to end up being either nobody understanding what you mean, or what is already happening where we try to briefly describe JRPGs as something else and people point to this other genre with that one mechanic that is still massively different from JRPGs.

Like we could just say "Dragon Quest-Clone", or "Final Fantasy-Clone", or "pokemon clone" but that'd be significantly more insulting to devs I feel, but really what people want are the kind of turn-based combat you'd see in Pokemon, Earthbound or Final Fantasy. But like the only way it's changing 30 years later is if you use a term that's much more "There's no way you don't know what this is" than JRPG.

I've heard some people try to use "eastern RPG" instead, but I'm not sure it's caught on.

For what it's worth, "western RPG" (or "WRPG") seems to have caught on; some people call this style "computer RPG" or "CRPG", but I'd say that even more inaccurate of a label. So yeah, WRPGs and JRPGs.

And meanwhile, we also have action RPGs, which can be subdivided into games that are more similar to something like Diablo (action WRPGs) vs. games that are more similar to something like Ys (action JRPGs).

And then we have strategy RPGs. And then we have MMORPGs. And then we have dungeon crawlers. And then we have roguelikes, which are distinct from dungeon crawlers despite also involving going around a dungeon.

Okay let's be frank here, "role-playing game" itself was never a great name to begin with in the first place. There's the famous comment that if you're playing any Mario game you're playing the role of Mario. But rather, "RPG" is just the broad umbrella for games that are descended, however distantly it may be, from D&D. Kinda. (I've heard that at one point Zelda 1 was called an "RPG", though obviously the meaning of the term has become a little more specific since then.)

JRPGs definitely did get dunked on sometime within the past couple decades. There was definitely commentary going around about how JRPGs were somehow bad because they're too linear and tended to have too many similar story tropes/character archetypes and random battles were bad, yadda yadda. Some people even speculated that the genre was dying out. (That prediction obviously turned out to be wildly inaccurate.)

I guess it could be argued that some people did dunk on it for culture-specific reasons, especially for the anime art.

The "J" isn't othering any more than any other genre modifier. It sets up my expectations for what type of RPG it is, just like a "C" does. It also doesn't mean that the game comes from Japan, because Sea of Stars looks to be a JRPG, and Anachronox already was back in the day; it just means it's the Japanese style, which is neither inherently good or inherently bad.