É porque "JRPG" pra eles é um imaginário americano de um gênero que não existe de fato, baseado em percepções alheias e não num contexto histórico e cultural

You can still just be a "RPG" and still be part of the same game genre of these japanese titles. There's a reason why Undertale is so beloved by so many japanese creators and fans, becoming now an influence to new devs. The story ressonates with them beyond borders, you don't need the J to do that.

I don't like JRPG as a term, but if it needs any meaning it should be just based on country of origin. The creator doesn't even need to be born there, but to have at least lived that culture. Some people will bring up "chinese food" comparisons, but you can see how it's more complex than that.

This is why "JRPG" comes off as superficial. I know not everyone will be like this and some love it, but the term itself pushes a generalized concept of many games while at the same time ignoring the culture it comes from as influential to its works. Pokémon is closer to Metaphor than E33 is.

But what is "talking like real people"? The way people talk changes based on their culture and language. As for acting, it will also change based on the history of performative arts and literature in different countries. You can't expect Japan to be the same as an european country in this regard.

And as western hegemony of culture is a thing, it also ends up creating criticism of the genre not conforming to western expectations. Here's an example of it: "talking/acting like real people". It's a regular criticism being made of "JRPGs" in the wake of E33's reception.

It inevitably pushes the idea of JRPG as a style, ignoring the variety these games have. It tries to put them in a box based on western perception of them and as I explained, there are several blind spots with that. Be it the exaggerated FF focus or the "lost decade" when media ignored handhelds.

They got to make something different that became part of a broader otaku culture in Japan, but it didn't become "a japanese work" by doing that. And that's fine. A western RPG can "talk" to japanese creators, just like Wizardry did in the past. So what I see as issues with calling them JRPG?

So what I see isn't that you can't create a work based on that foreign culture, but that this transformation happens because art is based on cultural experiences. The place where you live and grow up, your language, a shared culture is a huge part of art.

A few years ago Blue Archive, a korean gacha, exploded in popularity in Japan with a narrative extremely influenced by japanese otaku media. The main writer had some interesting things to say about it, how culture can shape the same narrative through different cultural lens.

There's certainly relevance in pointing out the different branches of RPG as a genre and how cultures shaped it. But that's the issue with calling a western game a "JRPG", it takes an otherized image based more on aesthetics and treats it as a japanese-style, but defined by the west.

This chase of the "FF Golden Era" from the SNES to the PS2 became a running point about the "downfall of the JRPG", something that never happened in the country that the J is meant to represent.

The term itself existed to otherize, not to understand a different culture, said by some japanese devs.

But as the PS3 pushed for higher fidelity gaming, japanese RPG developers mostly moved to handheld systems such as the DS and PSP. The mainstream media saw this era as a "JRPG Crisis" as they didn't follow the developers to these systems and instead called them a "dead genre".

As they became more popular console-wise, Final Fantasy shaped the idea of what a JRPG was. It was much more popular than Dragon Quest in the west and Pokémon, the other series that sold more, was seen as a handheld thing. So perception of JRPGs was closely linked to what FF did through SNES to PS2.

In the west though, mainstream media treated JRPGs as games where a guy with a sword fight monsters in turn based combat. This idea of JRPG as aesthetic can be seen clear in how, to this day, Pokémon is often treated as a different thing, even though it's a turn based RPG based on Dragon Quest.

Yet it's not like everything was just Dragon Quest, different styles and subdivisions started to show up over time. Megami Tensei went for sci-fi occult trend, Mother was a parody series, etc. Certainly wasn't a static genre that you could define by visual aesthetics alone.

So yeah, japanese RPGs were born influenced by western fantasy, yet as they became popular on consoles in Japan, the same popularity wasn't seen in the west and they kept influencing each other in its own subculture. Dragon Quest became basically a staple to every other RPG.

So basically, JRPG is a term created in the west to differentiate the traditional RPG of the time, more associated with PC, to the japanese console focused ones. Funnily enough, these console games were already influenced by western games such as Wizardry, but branched into a different route.