mai said:
No, there're some key differences between the genres, pretty enough for those terms to be valid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_differences_in_role-playing_video_games BTW Demon's Souls isn't a jRPG, being developed by japanese studio doesn't automatically make a game jRPG, the same goes for wRPGs. |
Both rooted from the same genre. Look at Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Phantasy Star, and you wouldn't dare to call them a different Genre from Wizardry or Ultima. It wasn't until the snes and more significantly the PS where they started to differentiate. Back then they were called Console RPGs and Computer RPGs. I think it is easy to tell why this eventually became Jrpg and Wrpg. If you can't, I'll just say that back then almost all console developement was in Japan while PC developement in the West. Anyway Computer RPGs headed toward real-time and adventuring gameplay, making it more akin to Action-Adventure games, and Console RPGs kept the old turnbased but made it deeper, therefore making it like Strategy games. Later Japanese games tried to go real-time, but instead of focusing on Adventuring they are more focused on Action, similar to Hack N Slash games. The genres are starting to merge again, and the only difference you can see really is story. So I would say that it is better to just make a general RPG genre and specify its gameplay type(i.e Adventure, Action, Strategy, Traditional, Turn Based, Real Time) than to say where it was developed. Demon Souls is a game of neither genre, and seems more similar to when the genre's were one, having aspects from both.
