This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
s5555: Eastern/Western RPG is not a Genre. Why would a game's nation of origin affect the kind of gameplay aspect it has? Case-in-point: Etrian Odyssey has more in common with Wizardry (and likely so) than with Dragon Quest, with no central or main protagonist. Likewise, take the Australian-developed Shadowrun for the Super Nintendo, which borrows many of the so-called "Eastern" aspects like a central figure and linear progression.
There's a lot more credibility in the classification of Computer/Console RP Gs (in which the interfaces are streamlined to suit the platform). Nihon Falcom, in particular, makes many Wizardry-esq games for PC.
Agreed. Let's face facts: the real difference is that Japanese RP Gs are more likely to have anime styled characters, some people just don't like that style, and for that reason, great pains have gone into grouping games with vastly different gameplay styles so that they will fit into JRPG or WRPG. No one would dispute, for example, that Final Fantasy XII is a Japanese RPG, but it fits more of the criteria of the western rpg page (open combat, open world). Demon's Souls was made in Japan, but it gets to be Western based on this flimsy classification. Borderlands isn't even an rpg, and it gets included on the WRPG page, I guess because you can choose the color of your avatar. There's nothing inherently Western about sandbox environments and nothing particularly Eastern about fixed plots and characters. It would be better to classify RP Gs by gameplay elements than by region.
