JRPG's are dead

[lestatdark]

SmoothCriminal said:

Wagram said:

badgenome said:

You can put a J in front of it, but it's not an RPG.

You can keep telling yourself that. Because it is no matter what you or the others say.

In order for a game to be an RPG, it must involve role-playing, something that most JRPGs tend to not have. As far as I'm concerned, Final Fantasy is just as much an RPG as The Secret of Monkey Island. The real distinction should be between western and eastern adventure games, as that is what they really are.

Actually, at one point in time, FF had as much role-playing elements as WRPGs did. Final Fantasy II was probably one of the rare cases of JRPGs that used a system of learn by doing. You could define your role by the actions that you partake during the game, pretty much like the Elder Scrolls series does. 

And you do play as a role in JRPGs. The main difference is that the roles are usually more defined and rigid than in WRPGs. Unfortunately, most of the recent WRPGs have also use a very rigid structure to how each character's role progresses. 

To be completely fair, neither WRPGs nor JRPGs should be called true RPGs, as your choices are pretty much irrelevant. True RPGs (board ones) give you total freedom to affect the development of not only your character, but how that role ends up affecting and shaping the entire flow and history of the game. In video games, that structure is extremely limited, because you can only allow so much freedom before you have to fix a story/stories that have to be followed, no matter your choices.