Hideki Kamiya Weighs in on the Controversy Around ‘JRPG’

PlatinumGames’ Hideki Kamiya said that he wants people to use the term “J-Action” to describe Japanese roleplaying games and that he’s also proud of the term “JRPG,” which has recently been criticized for being a discriminatory label.

Speaking with VGC, Kamiya used the original God of War and Bayonetta as examples. God of War was in a genre that was becoming increasingly popular, and the franchise’s protagonist, Kratos was muscular and bald. Creating a character like Kratos was difficult and wasn’t unique to Japanese culture. So Bayonetta was born out of Japanese sensibilities.

“When you look at Bayonetta as a character, she doesn’t look strong like Kratos, she doesn’t look like she could take on these massive demons,” Kamiya explained. “But she was very unique in the way she was created, in the way we view action game heroes, from a unique Japanese viewpoint.

Kamiya also touched upon the term “JRPG” and said that as a Japanese creator, he’s very proud of the label. He suggested that people use the term “J-Action” to describe real-time action games like Bayonetta instead.

“It’s more focused than the broad genre of action, and it highlights the unique elements that only Japanese developers can make,” he explained. “So yeah, if you wanted to do that, go for it, we’d be proud more than anything else.”

The JRPG label recently caught on to controversy when Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida said that it became a different subgenre of video games when Japanese developers had no say in the matter. This resulted in a period during the 2000s and early 2010s when Japanese RPGs were looked upon more negatively than Western ones.

“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,” Yoshida said at the time.

He later clarified to IGN that “we don’t go into [development] thinking, ‘we’re going to make a JRPG’, or ‘We’re going to make a Western RPG this time.’ We’re just going to make the RPG that we want to make. We’re going to make that action RPG that we want to make.”

Yoshida’s comments opened the door for a complex conversation about the term’s history and the overall history of the genre.

Reacting to this conversation, PlatinumGames producer Yuji Nakao said he had the opposite viewpoint of Yoshida and that JRPGs as a subgenre are unique. He mentioned that he doesn’t feel like it has any negative connotations to it.

Kamiya also brought up the differences between the Japanese and American versions of the Ultraman TV show and its portrayal of Ultraman taking off from the ground. The latter focused more on realistically matching sound effects to visual effects, while the former focused on creating more unique sounds.

He explained that it ultimately wasn’t a case of good versus bad or Japanese versus American, but ultimately how the differences in culture affect creativity.

The latest release from PlatinumGames is the DLC for The Wonderful 101 Remastered called The Wonderful One: After School Hero, which is a side-scrolling action game. The studio also launched Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon for Nintendo Switch earlier this year.

George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.

When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey