My good pal Joel Windels and I put our heads together and thought, how can we piss off a bunch of people? Take the piss out of JRPGs! I’m kidding. We were discussing the definition of roleplaying and decided to approach it as a co-operative article. But you wouldn’t know that from the way people are reacting on N4G.
Genres in video games are already confusing mazes of definitions: action games, adventure games, platformers. As gaming technology develops, some genres slowly become obsolete, such as top-down racers and on-rails shooters, yet we as an industry cling to ancient terminology and archaic descriptors for modern games. This leads us to ask what exactly is a role-playing game, and how can Western and Japanese versions of the same genre differ so dramatically?
Traditionally an RPG would have taken the form of a pen and paper game, like the timeless Dungeons and Dragons. It may also be live action - known as LARPing - yet no matter where you look, the basis for such games will be individuals assuming the role of an imagined or pre-created character.
If this is the sole prerequisite for a game to be considered to be an RPG, then almost every video game is one, as players have been assuming avatars for the past thirty years, from Pac-Man to Mario. Instead of having a human game master, however, the actual game environment and rule-set become the limiters and directors of the role playing. We no longer bother to classify a film if it has sound or color as practically all of them do, so what on Earth is the point of having a genre called RPG within a field almost entirely made up of them?
Japanese RPGs remind me more of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type stories, with some RPG syntactic sugar between the cutscenes.