Xplay and Attack of the Show were shows on the now defunct G4 cable TV network. (EDIT) Though that Wikipedia article says there was a revival at some point? Hell if I know. I still have no interest in it. (EDIT 2) Guess I should've read a bit further, because it apparently died again just a year or so later. (/EDIT 2)(/EDIT) And... that's about all the familiarity I have with them, because I never watched them myself, outside of clips that would occasionally get embedded into a Kotaku or Destructoid or similar article (under which is usually where I saw the proto-GamerGate fuckwits complaining about "fake gamer girls" or whatever). And the clips never made me want to seek out more of it.
And yeah, pretty much every genre, Western or Japanese, is going to start to seem samey after the first dozen entries in said genres, if even that many. I don't see how JRPGs were or are supposedly any more samey than any other genre, such as FPS games, like you said, or sports games. If you want fucking samey, just look at each yearly addition to whatever American sportsball game you care to look at, and I know damn well sure that was the case back in the 2000s, too. See also MOBAs and MMOs, fighting games (either of the 2D or 3D variety), and... really, again, any genre, once it becomes popular enough. Hell, I'll just point to all the look-alike Vampire Survivors clones that have come out in the past year. It's the whole cookie cutter/jump on the bandwagon mentality. If a developer, Japanese, American, European, or whatever, sees a game that is popular and making a lot of money, they're going to want to make one of those, too. I heard a joke recently, regarding devs on games already in progress, where someone would come into the office and say, "You guys, I've got horrible news. Our project lead played [insert contemporary flavor of the month video game] over the weekend." I've been watching though Matt's"What Happened?" series (from oldest to newest, with the one on Star Fox Adventures being the most recent one I've seen), where he talks about games that had troubled development. Far too goddamn many games have been ruined (or else ended up cancelled entirely) after some empty suit would come into the room and tell the devs to drop everything and change the game to make it more like whatever happened to be the new hot shit that had just come out at the time.
As far as "JRPG" being an offensive term in Japan, honestly, Woolie and Pat talking about that in that previous video was the first I ever heard of that, too. Like you, I always just thought of it as a descriptive term that made sense, but if Japanese devs (in general, and not just the one guy) are associating it with that asinine "then we nuked them and that's when they became a real country" type of dogshit, then yeah, I can see why they'd not like it. But, as you say, I'm not really sure what else to call them. If it becomes a true Issue™ moving forward, I'm sure someone will come up with something better. Or at least new and different.
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And yeah, pretty much every genre, Western or Japanese, is going to start to seem samey after the first dozen entries in said genres, if even that many. I don't see how JRPGs were or are supposedly any more samey than any other genre, such as FPS games, like you said, or sports games. If you want fucking samey, just look at each yearly addition to whatever American sportsball game you care to look at, and I know damn well sure that was the case back in the 2000s, too. See also MOBAs and MMOs, fighting games (either of the 2D or 3D variety), and... really, again, any genre, once it becomes popular enough. Hell, I'll just point to all the look-alike Vampire Survivors clones that have come out in the past year. It's the whole cookie cutter/jump on the bandwagon mentality. If a developer, Japanese, American, European, or whatever, sees a game that is popular and making a lot of money, they're going to want to make one of those, too. I heard a joke recently, regarding devs on games already in progress, where someone would come into the office and say, "You guys, I've got horrible news. Our project lead played [insert contemporary flavor of the month video game] over the weekend." I've been watching though Matt's "What Happened?" series (from oldest to newest, with the one on Star Fox Adventures being the most recent one I've seen), where he talks about games that had troubled development. Far too goddamn many games have been ruined (or else ended up cancelled entirely) after some empty suit would come into the room and tell the devs to drop everything and change the game to make it more like whatever happened to be the new hot shit that had just come out at the time.
As far as "JRPG" being an offensive term in Japan, honestly, Woolie and Pat talking about that in that previous video was the first I ever heard of that, too. Like you, I always just thought of it as a descriptive term that made sense, but if Japanese devs (in general, and not just the one guy) are associating it with that asinine "then we nuked them and that's when they became a real country" type of dogshit, then yeah, I can see why they'd not like it. But, as you say, I'm not really sure what else to call them. If it becomes a true Issue™ moving forward, I'm sure someone will come up with something better. Or at least new and different.