People talk about turn-based role-playing games and JRPGs the way academics fret about the novel. Much ink is spilt over what defines the form and whether it’s dead, only for a great piece of work to come along and briefly revitalize hope that it’s as alive and relevant as ever. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was this year’s jolt of lightning, proving turn-based RPGs still have some gas left in the tank, but Persona director Katsura Hashino seems to think the genre’s best days are still ahead.
The lead developer behind Metaphor: ReFantazio and Persona 5 recently gave a talk at the G-Star 2025 gaming conference in South Korea with the heady title ‘When experience becomes memory – designing lasting impressions through art and structure’ in which he argued there are three main eras of the JRPG, according to a report by 4Gamer that was translated by Gamesradar.
According to Hashino, JRPG 1.0 encompasses the “true classics,” which seems to include everything from the NES through at least PS2. Then there’s JRPG 2.0, which refers to the modern era of the genre. The director doesn’t seem to specify the boundaries, but lets peg it at Persona 4 through ReFantazio, a period which Hashino describes as being “higher quality due to how much more responsive they are to the player.”
Most importantly, there is “JRPG 3.0,” which refers to the next generation of games that haven’t yet been defined. How will the genre stay fresh in this new era? “There will be a greater dimension to these games and they’ll change the genre’s structure and presentation at a fundamental level,” he says, according to Gamesradar.
Is Clair Obscur the future or the past?
I have no idea what any of this means, but I’m excited that Hashino seems excited. He doesn’t sound dogmatically wedded to the past or necessarily burnt out on what has become a very successful but somewhat predictable formula for Atlus RPGs. Will that push the team to try and reinvent the wheel a bit with Persona 6, or whatever P-Studio has coming in the future? I certainly hope so.
There’s been a meme going around aimed at lampooning self-identified JRPG fans who sometimes seem to pretend like nothing good came out of the genre between Final Fantasy VII and Clair Obscur. But there’s a kernel of truth in both stances. There have been plenty of great JRPGs during this period, and they weren’t just called Persona. The Xenoblade Chronicles are a particular bright spot, while Trails, Tales, and other series have grown bigger as well.
This is unironically how some of y’all treat this genre https://t.co/pL8tIDXfcU pic.twitter.com/wwswKZrRS0
— Red (@kitsuneredFES) October 24, 2025
But it’s also true that Clair Obscur has pulled in lapsed fans in a way few other games have. A timeline with only FFVII and Clair Obscur on it is JRPG erasure, but it’s probably a not entirely inaccurate picture of your average casual gamer’s relationship to the genre.
The French GOTY front-runner is in many ways a very traditional turn-based role-playing game, but it has just enough unique twists on old tropes and mechanics to feel bold and novel. It recontextualizes the past more than it points to some revolutionary future, but maybe, as with Metaphor and other turn-based games experimenting around the fringes, it can be a bridge to something new. Or maybe I, like a lot of fans, just want to be tricked into feeling like what we’re nostalgic for is actually doing something fresh.