| neerdowell said: I am largely in disagreement with just about everyone on this one. For me, an RPG is a "ROLE PLAYING GAME", which to me means assuming a PRE-DETERMINED ROLE, such as when an actor plays a role. What most consider an RPG I consider more creating your own role, which I guess should be titled RCG - "ROLE CREATING GAME". This means that JRPGS to me are actually the true RPG's. |
That is actually directly contrary to what RPGs are about. The Gamemaster never hands out characters to the players and determines how they develop it. The players play a role, yes. But in difference to acting they invent that character and script the character themself. Try play a Pen&Paper, you will see what I talk about. And the videogame-RPGs are descending from Pen&Paper. Mostly did descend from D&D, the influences are very good to see, with levels, classes and whatnot.
With JRPGs you probably mean FF and not Pokemon. That has other roots. The companies Square, Enix and Nihon Falcom started with Visual Novels, that are game that tell a story, with no or near to no interaction at all. Modern games are more about cinematics, so they could be called interactive movies.
JRPGs like FF are not a good way to define RPGs. They are definitely late to the party, the genre already was created, first by pen&paper (1974 was the first D&D released). Then followed fast first 'western' RPGs for computers, 1975 and 1976 already started pedit5, Dungeon and Dnd. 1980 was Rogue released, a game that was so popular that it spawned it's own sub-genre: rogue-like. The first MUD (online RPG) started 1978 and also created a big subgrenre of hundreds of games. The very influental games Wizardry and Ultima were released 1981. The first Dragon Quest released 1986, the first Final Fantasy 1987. At this point existed already hundreds of RPGs.
