interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
Right, but up until post 2000-2010 every JRPG was turn based. CRPG might be too broadly labeled (in fact a couple of the ones I found listed like PoE are also labeled Isometric RPGs)
It’s more problematic when compared to tactics RPGs, because similarly every tactics RPG is turn-based, but to a dramatically different sense from the JRPGs.
Most, if not all, the RPG labels are insanely broad in a literal sense.
I’ve seem some now refer to CRPG as Classic-RPG rather than Computer-RPG which is much more fitting for the type of game that it is used to describe.
Similarly, ARPG is often used to refer specifically to Diablo-clones, although I’ve seen this usage start falling out of favor.