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oooo....someone actually cared enough to read it and discuss it with me. You're my new favorite forum poster, guy. much love. Now on to the discussion.

Well I disagree with you that Monster Hunter fits the bill under my definition. The most important part of the definition is that the character themselves have stats that can be changed over time, while in Monster Hunter the base character remains the same and it is only their equipment that changes. The reason I think Tokyo Jungle would count as an RPG is that the stats of the character itself are changing from generation to generation which is separate from the equipment that you can get to improve their performance. It's a minor distinction but without it you get a lot of games that I don't think anyone would usually call RPGs leaking into the genre. Increasing a character's damage and health through equipment is fairly common in Action titles particularly, such as things like the recently released Darksiders 2.

As for your definition, I hope you don't mind but I'm going to try and poke holes into it. That's how I settled upon my definition was trying to find things that fit my definition but I didn't think they should or usually are thought of as RPGs. If the only requirement is that you have some control over how the character plays through your decisions throughout the game then I think you'd have to include a whole lot of action games like God of War where you gain red orbs by killing enemies and you can use those to upgrade different weapons dependent on what you prefer to use. To me this fits your definition but I personally would not think of God of War as an RPG.

Feel free to poke holes in my definition as well, I'm already happy enough that you just read the article and gave it some thought, so you'd have to try really hard to hurt my feelings.



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