When I was a kid and gaga for RPGs of any kind, there wasn't "JRPGs" and "Western RPGs" - nobody said that, there was just "Console RPGs" and "PC RPGs". Implicit in this, if you knew enough, was that Console RPGs were JRPGs, and PC RPGs were Western RPGs, simply because Japanese software devs almost exclusively designed for home consoles (themselves, manufactured by Japanese companies), and Western software devs almost exclusively made their RPGs for PC (themselves, mostly the purview of Silicon Valley). But it's only implicit if you knew enough about how the sausage was made; to a kid like me who didn't even realize that console games mostly came from Japan, all these games were just... games. No need to gender them with nationalities. There was a big schism after Wizardry, and the two schools of RPG making went in divergent paths for many generations. If you didn't mix ecosystems and stayed loyal to just console gaming or PC, you wouldn't even necessarily know there was a difference. And for their part, Japanese companies went to great lengths to hide the fact that you're paying Japanese companies for things, because at that time, racism and paranoia against Asians and imported Asian goods was at an all-time high.
Then comes the Xbox-360/PS3 era, where Western devs decided to defect and port their games to consoles en masse, and Microsoft started paying bounties for Japanese companies to make games exclusively for their platform. Suddenly, all RPGs are now Console RPGs, and we need a new way to differentiate between the games that followed the Dragon Quest branch on the family tree, versus the ones that followed after Ultima and Bard's Tale, etc. And because humanity is awful, everyone defaulted onto a nationalistic/racial way of dividing and classifying games. Which honestly, I find intensely problematic. Just calling things "Western" versus something Other is fraught with the baggage of centuries of racism and colonialism. Suddenly, games all of us grew up with thinking of as ours and as normal, are suddenly being given Othering labels. They're Japanese games, and PC games are now our games - "Western" games. There is probably a really good master's thesis in here dissecting the tonal shift in how games out of Japan are discussed - like statistically analyzing how much more often derogatory, othering language got used in the 360 era and beyond when discussing games originating from other cultures in say, games media.
It's one of those things where the average person doesn't really think it's weird or wrong to make this kind of division. Because there's just an obvious difference and everybody intrinsically knows it. Asian-Americans know that thought process though, it's the same thought process that the Supreme Court used to perpetuate institutional discrimination against us. (see: Ozawa vs the United States) Labels matter, and affect how we perceive and experience things, with centuries of meaning and baggage imbued into words.
And even if you disagree with this entire screed, it just increasingly doesn't make sense anymore. There's a multitude of Western devs that grew up playing Console RPGs and have decided to take them as their primary influence when designing their own. And this trend isn't just the West aping Japan, it's a proper cultural exchange where tons of Japanese devs are implementing all kinds of influences from Western games into theirs. Just like how rigid genre definitions like TRPG/SRPG/Action RPG are all completely obsolete, so too is the title JRPG. When Western devs without a single Japanese person on their staff, Nikkei or otherwise, decides to call their game a Japanese RPG, what's even the point of that differentiation then? Can't we think of better ways to talk about our games that don't use Othering language?
/endrant
