Excellent post, Sir darth.

I'm wondering. You up for traveling through a wasteland sometime next week and finding bottlecaps? Maybe even go assault a den full of giant car-sized Scorpions that can survive a shot from our guns that fire mini-nukes?

Sure, while we're at it why not pay a visit to a that weird vault where a weird machine can take us to a Black n White town where people are manipulated and controlled by a Cat?!

The King has spoken.

I love Todd Howard. And he is right of course. We all know this about Western RPGs and realism.

And by calling Red Dead Redemption an RPG, you should know what he meant. The game gives you an experience just like an RPG, and you have character progression and you get stronger by picking items etc.

they are indeed far more realistic..... but I find too much realism in gameplay boring

Different strokes for different folks.  I've liked both the western and Japanese ones, but I think I like the western ones more (or just like Bioware haha).  Only issue I sometimes have with Japanese ones, is some of them are a little to weird for my tastes (guess I need to be Japanese to not feel as weirded out by them haha).  But none of them are realistic and that's the beauty of video games.  Video games are about creating new worlds, not showing us the real world again.  We play games to escape that haha.

So for a realistic JRPG it would have to be set in medieval times? 

Using logic will not deter me!!!

Yeah! After that we can get abducted by aliens.

its not like VAT really freezes time.  its a game function for ease of targeting specific regions of the body.

Or maybe in a wasteland populated by interbred people, mutants, giant scorpions and cannibals.