The 26 Best RPGs according to Gamepro

[Comrade Tovya]

triplebph said:
"Anyway, starting with a Link to the Past, you had pretty much free reign to do what you wanted to do with Link. The games don't force you to go from A to Z on a designated path... they start you at A, and give you free reign to decide how and when you get yourself to Z."

Yeah, but the object of the game is to complete the adventure and not to have fun tooling around in like in GTA. If Zelda is an rpg, then games like Metroid and Castlevania are too. Even GTA could be considered an RPG and so could Tomb Raider, God of War, and Resident Evil. Any game where you collect things to build up an arsenal that you can use in the game would also be an rpg. But if you are talking about the generally accepted definition of a turn based jrpg or a western corridor crawling, dungeon clearing rpg, then it doesn't quite fit. It is an action adventure which is the genre ign places the Zelda games in or an action rpg, but not a traditional rpg.

How would you differentiate action adventures from action rpgs and traditional rpgs? Bouzane does a good job imo.

 

I don't neccesarily think you can draw a box around a game and declare, "now this is an RPG". 

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.

I believe that the RPG category has sub categories.

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