WRPG

Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age.

JRPGs for character design, story, battle system, humor among other things. WRPGs look unattractive and boring to me...

fallout all day everyday

TURN-BASED----------------> button smashing hacknslash rpg's from this gen

I gotta admit I'm rather shocked by the low number of WRPG supporters...and in some regard by the age of the general populous here.

I'm going with WRPGs because of fond memories and replayability that's been kept intact over the years. Games that I've enjoyed for hundreds of hours, like Morrowind, Gothic, Fallout 3, Diablo 2 and games that I've admired, though not really have a change to play myself, such as the Witcher games or Planescape Torment - which is a game I really wish to pick up again soon -.

I haven't really had the patience to play an entire JRPG since Final Fantasy X I believe. I would boot up a game, play a while, get frustrated by extremely bad design choices or dialogue straight out of a grade B anime, and some of the most cookie cutter characters ever presented in the digital medium. Final Fantasy XIII I simply could not stand because of the incredibly dim and boring characters, most of which were simply tropes lifted wholesale from anime or past FF games - Lightning being to me a much less interesting Squall -.

So yeah, I'll keep to the WRPG side of the fence as it resonates a lot more with my personal sensibilities. Once I would have thought anime was attractive...after a few hundred shows, I know better.

Been around Demon's / Darl Souls lately? Or Dragon Age? Or Risen? Or Bastion? Or Witcher? Or Mass Effect? Or Fallout?

*And yes, I know the Souls series is Asian born, but its artistic and gameplay sensibilities lie in the West, so I think it's safe to add to the WRPG side of the equation.

This gen I liked only Xenoblade from jRPG. As for the wRPG, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Witcher 2, Fallout NV and Borderland owned all japanese studios hard.

I like both but probably lean more to western developed games in recent years.

First on, the distinction probably make no sense. Back in the golden times of RPGs there was no distinction, as no JRPGs existed. They came into existence later and for some reason some people started to distinct between JRPG and WRPG. But what makes the difference? Is it only the country of origin? Because games like Pokemon or Xenoblade Chronicles have the classic qualities that are often attributed to WRPGs. So if the distinction is only made of the country of origin, then cannot be one chosen over the other. But if the distiction is made on the style and way to develop story or character, it means the JRPGs are the one with fixed storyline and character-development, that the player cannot change. That is great to develop cinematic gameplay. The WRPGs in this distiction focus more on explorable world and many option for the player to customize characters and/or story. In this case Xenoblade Chronicles and Pokemon are WRPG, additional to all the classical RPGs as Ultima, Wizardry, Might and Magic and so on. Also in both cases the best RPG of all time - Baldur's Gate - is a WRPG. So I have to chose WRPG.
But I really think you have to rethink this classification.

JRPGs have the edge, love both though.