What is an RPG?

[Jumpin]

Wman1996 said:

It's far more complicated to define now than it was 15 or especially 30 years ago.
Some in the past and present call most of the Zelda games RPGs. I don't think any of them, not even BOTW/TOTK are RPGs. The upgrading is really simplistic compared to most RPGs, there's not an XP system, etc.

That was mainly certain factions of Nintendo fans trying to explain that N64 had RPGs too when it was just Quest 64 and Earthbound 64 on the horizon. You'd get responses like, "How is Zelda not an RPG? It's a GAME and you PLAY the ROLE of Link!"

The misclassification was a form to manipulate the views of people reading the criticisms of the N64 into thinking criticisms like "this console has almost no RPGs, while Playstation has plenty" because it was important to game fanboys at the time. RPGs were the most prestigious genre of the late 1990s, and for many Nintendo fans it was important to tell people the best one was on N64.

It's kind of akin to Orwell's criticism of language corruption for the purpose of political confusion and manipulation... except in the realm of video game fandom.