At the Korean gaming conference G-Star 2025, Katsura Hashino, creative producer and game director at Atlus, presented a talk alongside fellow Atlus art director, Shigenori Soejima exploring the impact of visual storytelling: "When experience becomes memory—designing lasting impressions through art and structure".
Hashino also discussed how he's gearing up for what sounds like a literal upgrade to the JRPG genre, except there are no patch notes yet. As reported by 4gamer and translated by GamesRadar, Hashino sees the genre as three distinct eras—the past (JRPG 1.0), present (JRPG 2.0), and future (JRPG 3.0). The 'ghosts of JRPG past, present, and future' would have switched up the story of A Christmas Carol a bit, and now I'm wondering what that looks like.
According to Hashino, JRPG 1.0 encompasses the "classics", which is not a small number of enduring pioneers, including Final Fantasy—which continues to release entries to this day after more than 35 years—alongside Atlus' own Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series. JRPG 2.0 is the genre as it is now, the modern iteration with "its current style, which feels higher quality due to how much more responsive they are to the player".
While this may seem like a fairly generalist overview of how the genre has evolved, Hashino hopes to be a part of creating "JRPG 3.0" which cannot be strictly defined just yet, but he believes that "there will be a greater dimension to these games and they'll change the genre's structure and presentation at a fundamental level".
As the conversation turns to the influence of Korean entertainment, such as K-Pop, Hashino touches on how we can now enjoy the same things "all over the world"—and in JRPG 2.0, developers globally are fondly creating their own 'love letters' to JRPGs due to its influence. It'll be interesting to see what the next evolution of the genre is and how much of it will be an amalgamation of influences, as we're seeing now in games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and beyond.
