interesting article for consideration from Polygon writer Kazuma Hashimoto. here’s the opening:
In February, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida sat down in an interview with YouTuber SkillUp as part of a tour to promote the next installment in the Final Fantasy series. During the interview, Yoshida expressed his distaste for a term that had effectively become its own subgenre of video game, though not by choice. “For us as Japanese developers, the first time we heard it, it was like a discriminatory term, as though we were being made fun of for creating these games, and so for some developers, the term can be something that will maybe trigger bad feelings because of what it was in the past,” he said. He stated that the first time both he and his contemporaries heard the term, they felt as though it was discriminatory, and that there was a long period of time when it was being used negatively against Japanese-developed games. That term? “JRPG.”
Action games and adventure games used to be two separate genres, but their similarities caused people writing magazine articles to group them together, under a single term “action-adventure”. You can think of it as “either or”, rather than some weird neologism
That’s actually not the case. Action adventure games are neither adventure games nor action games. Adventure games refer to text adventures. “action adventure” then is an adventure game, but that isn’t turn/text based (hence “action”). Similarly, an “action game” is something like pong.
It’s just an unfortunate name due to the weird history of game genres.
I deleted most of my comment because what i had written was basically nonsense.
The main point that i was going for is that “action adventure” isn’t a useless category, since it’s a hybrid of two separate genres.
You can have non-action adventure games. Something like A Short Hike comes to mind. It didn’t need to turn/text based explicitly, but that’s common.
You can also have action non-adventure games. You mentioned pong, but this could be anything that requires real time responses and control. Beat-em-ups are common.
Action-Adventures are hybrids of the two: real time inputs with discovery elements