KylieDog said:
WRPG are generally more realistic in design of both worlds and environments, the 'RPG' side of things are very deep routed in character building with a focus on individual stats for characters and usually armours and weapons too. There tends to be a lot of choice in the story as well as progression of the world also.
JRPGs tend to be very anime or cartoon styled, aside from a general level up the RPG side of things tends to be very light and while can get new weapons or armours sometimes the focus isn't on individual stats of a character or equipment and offers little to no choice in character build. The story has little and often zero choice for the player and the world opens up along with story.
Where a game is made doesn't matter. WRPGs are named so as that style has been championed by western devs and is found mostly in western made RPGs, JRPGs because it is mainly Japan who make that style (especially due to Final Fantasy's popularity boom in the 90s).
What would you call an Australian made RPG? Using your logic it certainly isn't a WRPG, Australia isn't in the west, it isn't JRPG because it isn't made in Japan either despite being so close. The real answer is you base it on the actual game, not where it is made.
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The problem is that there is so much variability within both Western- and Japanese-developed games that trying to isolate a "style" for each region's RPGs ultimately ignores that variation. Western franchises like Fable, Diablo, World of Warcraft, or Jade Empire have cartoon-styled visual design, Japanese franchises like Demon's Souls and Monster Hunter focus on character building and armor/weapon customization, some Western franchises have set player characters like Geralt in The Witcher, and some Japanese games feature a lot of dialogue choices like Persona.
The entire RPG genre in general is this massive collection of different types of games, where if you asked ten people what makes an RPG, you'd likely get ten different responses. Thus, I don't subscribe to the idea that WRPG or JRPG are distinct genres. To me, when someone says JRPG, the only objective way to use that as a classification is to simply denote the game's region of origin.
