I always thought that the term RPG was being misused when it was applied to JRPGs. I never uderstood how they were labeled as such considering the almost complete lack of any similarities to D&D. Only WRPGs have any real amount of role playing in them and I agree that it is limited when compared to the real thing. However, I disagree that the industry will automatically move towards true role playing. The only way that would happen is if WRPGs incorporate more of the elements of real role playing and become increasingly popular and I doubt that this will happen considering what has happened to Deus Ex, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, etc...

"I definitely don't agree in your "turn based" decision making thought, because that would eliminate the Fable, WoW, other great games that most people consider to fall within the RPG category."

Fable is not an rpg but an action rpg. WoW is not an rpg but an mmo or persistent world rpg.

"I believe that the RPG category has sub categories."

Well, that is correct.

"I don't know if you are old enough to remember, but when games like Wolfenstein 3D first came out, they were just called "shooters" but then other types of shooters came out and the category sub'd off into "1st Person Shooter", "Third person shooter", etc, etc."

I played the original Wolfenstein on my PC Jr. It was a better game.


"I think that the RPG category is the same. There are sub-categories within it, each with it's own style of game handling."

And I think if you're compiling a list of the best rpg games, you don't throw a bunch of action rpgs on it. Maybe strategy Jrpgs and mmo games fit but not action rpgs. I guess in retrospect the only thing I agree with rhis list on is that FFVII is a better rpg than the Zelda games they put on the list.

Yeah who really knows...

I think it will happen at some point.  As long as one genre gets more realistic than another, they'll keep improving each one.  Secondly, as long as Nintendo, Sony, and MS duke it out, each one will try to do that new "incredible" thing to beat each other in the console war.  It's still probablly a few generations away, but no one would have thought back in the 80s that a game could look & feel so realistic as they do today... and no doubt later on we'll look back and say the same thing about this generation's so-called-RPGs.

"I always thought that the term RPG was being misused when it was applied to JRPGs. I never uderstood how they were labeled as such considering the almost complete lack of any similarities to D&D."

I think that is true to an extent if you're talking about old school D & D. However, I think a shift happened with D & D in the mid to late eighties with the Dragon Lance modules and books where the characters in those modules and the story of the world of Krynn became more important than the game rules themselves. This was also carried on into the Forgotten Realms and Ravencroft ( I think that's what it was called) worlds.

Certainly traditional jrpgs like Final Fantasy and a game like Bioware's Baldur's Gate seem to have a much closer connection to the original SSI D & D computer rpgs like Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and Death Knights of Krynn to me than do games like Oblivion and Fable which seem more closely related to Akalabeth, Wizardry, and Might and Magic on one hand and Zelda and Populous on the other.

Okay, so it looks like we agree that the term "RPG" is much too broad, and they have to be broken down into sub-categories.  Heck, every genre is like that.  I actually adore strategy games.  When I was a kid, all we had were "turn-based stategy" games, but we just called them "strategy games.

And then when AI and computing processor technology leaped forward making real-time strategy possible, the whole category was broken down into multiple different ones.

And then there are games that can fall into strategy, RPG, and shooter categories at the same time... so where do those go?  Another sub-sub-category?  Who knows.

At the end of the day, a game is what any given person says it is... and more importantly, the "top list" of any given category is best decided by yourself anyway, and not IGN, or whomever else tries to make such claims of supremacy.

So the moral of the story is, we are all right, and we're all wrong... but the only opinion that really matter when it comes to games is your own.

Now that opens a whole 'nother can of worms. 

Since we all agree that TSR pretty much wrote the book on what an RPG is (literally actually)... then we certainly can't call their console or PC AD&D games RPGs either.

So, it seems to me that the definition of an RPG for a gaming machine and for a group of people getting together with some books and notebook paper are completely different?  Right?

At least there's no Zelda in this list.  I still can't believe that they put an action adventure game into an RPG list.

"Now that opens a whole 'nother can of worms.

Since we all agree that TSR pretty much wrote the book on what an RPG is (literally actually)... then we certainly can't call their console or PC AD&D games RPGs either.

So, it seems to me that the definition of an RPG for a gaming machine and for a group of people getting together with some books and notebook paper are completely different? Right?"

I think they called them both D & D rpgs, so they might have been mixing the genres themselves. Also there were other games that SSI put out that were also counted like Hillsfar where you completed mini action games to build up stats for your characters in the more turn based module type PC games and Dragon Flight which was a Dragon flight simulator like Panzer Dragoon, Lair, Drakken, and Drakengard where they tried to simulate dragons the way they were portrayed in the Monster Manuals in the world of Krynn that came with some nifty postcards with all of the dragons on them.

Well, I won't force you to make your list, but what games do you think shouldn't belong to my list? I'm interested in what you think about those games

@triplebph

When I think of D&D I always think about the old school D&D, I never really followed the changes. Now-a-days I play a slightly different form of role playing created entirely by a friend of mine, it's somewhat simplified but it resembles old D&D.

@theRepublic

I can't get over how Zelda always finds its way onto RPG lists, it's always there. Oddly enough, I've never seen any other action adventure game on an RPG list, why the special treatment for Zelda?