#1 Take the attention to story, the love for cuts scenes and the desire to actually tell you a tale that you can get interested in, characters you can get attached to, dialog trees and full voice acting for everyone possible of your typical RPG (W or J).
#2 Throw the combat totally in the trash can. The only RPGish thing to keep is inventory, modifications of items and real deal stats (not your acion game stats where its like, "combo", "super move", "health").
#3 Take the action from ANY OTHER GAME... Halo, Ninja Gaiden, God of War, Dead or Alive, Call of Duty 4, Marvel vs Capcom, hell even Madden, NBA 2K series or Forza.
I get so mad that RPGs are the only genre that cares about story and characters enough to really work hard and create good ones like 100% of the time. Even a bad RPG has a better story, dialog and characters than like the best non-rpg games. Every once in a blue moon a non-rpg will have these things on the same level as an RPG, but thats sooooooooooooo rare. Its like maybe 3 games per generation that pull this off.
Outside of Mass Effect and Chrono Trigger, I get so mad that RPGs usually have crap combat. JRPGs use like the worst of turn based systems. Chrono Trigger was by far the best. I wish the whole genre would have just blatantly copied that and kept trying to improve upon it. Real-time combat in a RPG (J or W) usually just means mindless brainless button mashing or something like Fallout 3 or Jade Empire where the action is terrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrible if you compared it to a real action game in a similar genre (ie compare Fallout 3 to any FPS or Jade Empire to like Ninja Gaiden, God of War, etc).
