Action RPG

"Retake the city using the classic Diablo technique of hitting everything until it's dead, leveling up to unlock new ways to make things dead, and looting the world for items to make things dead faster."

—PCGamer.com preview of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls.

A Role-Playing Game mixed with Action-Adventure. In practice, "action RPG" (ARPG) usually means that the RPG in question gives the player direct control over the Player Character in real-time battles, as opposed to turn-based and menu-based combat. Even though you will often hear "action RPG" touted as a "subgenre" of role-playing video games, there is no consensus about that, since it only narrows down how combat works in a game. Those who expect more than combat from RPG gameplay think of it as more of a "genre modifier" (see Video Game Genres).

The ARPG genre first originated in the west, with titles such as Gateway to Apshai (1983), a more actionized take on the 1979 RPG Temple of Apshai. From the Eastern tradition other such games emerged around the same time, most notably the 1984 titles The Tower of Druaga, Dragon Slayer, and Hydlide, in response to the turn-based and menu-driven combat featured in role-playing games at the time. This eventually culminated in The Legend of Zelda, an influential Action-Adventure influenced by Druaga and Hydlide. The rival Turn-Based Combat mechanics were then rigidly codified by series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy (though the latter eventually moved away from it to its signature more action-y, but still menu-based Active Time Battle), and ever since then, the "turn-based RPG" and "action RPG" camps became firmly separate in the East, before eventually blurring the line between the two in more modern times.

Although western developers had made ARPGS before, the RPGs in the west were still predominantly turn-based and it wasn't until 1987 that real-time combat elements began entering the mainstream, with The Faery Tale Adventure (as well as Dungeon Master in a semi-real-time form).

By the time the move to real time (and, as it happens, to 3D) was completed, the term "action RPG" came to describe several specific types of gameplay:

Hack and Slash games with RPG Elements, usually played in third-person to show off flashy melee moves. This style was largely influenced by The Legend of Zelda.
Isometric point-and-click dungeon crawlers. These games are often referred to as Diablo clones.
First-person RPGs. This style was codified by the Immersive Sims Ultima Underworld, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex.
TPS/RPG hybrids. This style was largely influenced by TPS like Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War.

Combat-oriented games that did not fall under any of these categories (such as the Icewind Dale series, which featured a tactical Real Time with Pause) were not considered action RPGs, while those that did, even when combat was just one type of gameplay they offered (such as Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which had FPS-like ranged combat and Hack and Slash-like melee), were. In the early 2000s, so-called "RPG Elements" started bleeding into Action Game subgenres, leaving role-playing video games with a severe identity crisis: What is an RPG? When does an RPG become an action RPG? And when does an action RPG stop being an RPG?

By the strictest definition, an ARPG is an RPG where combat success depends equally on player skill and Player Character skill. But the loose and more commonly accepted definition of ARPG (at least, of the contemporary ones) basically boils down to "the fights in this RPG occur in real time and you can play it with a controller". It's no surprise, then, that games as different as The Witcher 2 (a choice-driven narrative game), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (a Wide Open Sandbox), Diablo III, Dark Souls I, and Final Fantasy XV all get labeled "action RPG", despite being barely comparable in terms of gameplay. This is, perhaps, indicative of how meaningless the label is, where it's becoming more and more synonymous with simply "RPG".

Compare Beat Em Ups, from which many Action RPGs derive their basic gameplay, but do not contain the RPG Elements.