Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
Not surprising. There have been D&D fans bitching about Japanese RPGs since the first Dragon Warrior. It's nothing but elitism. All this fussing over the term to begin with is dumb anyway since "role-playing game" is so vague that you can apply it to practically any game, so big whoop if it gets applied to something slightly different from what it was originally used for.

The funny thing is that it's the other way around in my mind. When I see Western RPGs, they usually don't feel like "real" RPGs to me. Unlike the D&D followers who define an RPG by the level of customization and how open-ended the world is, I define RPGs by the gameplay just as I do with practically any other genre of games. And to me, RPG gameplay stems from the Dragon Warrior school of design. Most Western RPGs look like hack & slash action to me, making them more akin to Zelda-style adventure games in my mind. Granted, plenty of Japanese RPGs are getting more active-based gameplay, but they still have some level of structure to them.

But that's just my perspective and I know it's pretty unconventional.
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.