Quote Originally Posted by ubersaurus View Post
I don't think it's elitism at all.

You play the role in a role playing game. In most JRPGs, or other games like even Mario or Mega Man, you're just playing the character. Yes, there is a difference, a huge one. When you're role playing, you're making decisions, and you deal with the consequences of those, and I don't just mean statwise. How you reach major plot points and what happens because of your actions there affect the game, and that's something few JRPGs do. In Mario, for example, everything is laid out ahead of you, and you're just jumping your way through. There's no decision other than what power up you want to grab; you don't get an option to let Koopa do his thing... Mario has his goal, and you are just controlling him as he gets to it. Same with Cloud in FF7.

They have the stats, but they ARE linear stories that you effectively walk through. That isn't necessarily bad, but I can see why he'd want to make the distinction. The best example of a JRPG I can think of that doesn't take the usual tack is Chrono Trigger, and even that is only sort of halfway there (mainly, it involves the Magus decision.) Trying to compare something like Final Fantasy 13 to a Bioware game or Starflight is comparing apples and oranges. Yeah, they're both fruit, but that's about it.
But is that really what an RPG is? I think you AND the Bioware guy are just getting hung up on the words "role playing" rather than actually getting into what makes an RPG. Whether an RPG is linear or not doesn't change that both are RPGs. Creating a character doesn't make a game an RPG, making decisions in a game that affect how the game plays out doesn't make it an RPG. In fact, those things have just about nothing to do w/ whether a game is an RPG or not.