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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9844359" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah, it used to be a pretty common opinion, not one I personally held, but I think for a long time there was a pretty clear distinction between Western RPGs, which could be, as you correctly identify, boiled down to:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">WRPGs typically let you create at least one character (even if they had some pre-determined stuff like their role in the setting), sometimes the entire party. JRPGs typically did not let you create any characters at all.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">WRPGs usually gave you some choices in the story, and those choices became increasingly meaningful ones over the 1990s. JRPGs typically did not offer any choices or those offered were false/circular choices.</li> </ul>The double-whammy of "no character creation" and "no story choices" was thus seem as disqualifying JRPGs from being "an RPG" in the same sense western ones were. But neither was universally true - there were (rare) exceptions in both directions, and by 2001 we had stuff like Anachronox, which was very well-regarded and seen as a "Western JRPG" (just like Expedition 33 today), and there were always JRPGs where you could customize the main character just about as much as you could customize, say, The Avatar from Ultima, or The Nameless One from PS:T.And that's only become more common over time. The term JRPG was also flung at a lot of games which really were more similar to Western RPGs than JRPGs, like King's Field (1994) (which had more in common with Ultima Underworld (1992) than Final Fantasy). King's Field was even developed as a PC game, only becoming a PSX game because the PSX was wildly more powerful than most Japanese PCs at the time. Hell, there were games like Sorcerian (1987, also on PC) which, whilst kind of a mess, where extremely interesting in that they had full character creation and complex (and really annoying) advancement, and were not turn-based or the like, but almost more like a side-scroller or platformer. Dungeon Master was a big hit in Japan and had some Japan-only sequels too. And JRPGs often had huge mechanical development customization - often more than most WRPGs.In general as story has become more important in RPGs, they've become more like JRPGs in that you typically don't from-scratch create any character but the main one (at most a game might have some token nonsense where you can hire "mercenaries" with no personality if you really want a terrible experience and to miss out on a ton of character/story/quest stuff), and even the main one will have some clear story associated with them and/or role in the setting.I just can't play games as buggy as even patched and patch-mod'd FO3/4/NV without the ability to save and reload myself. It's just too likely you're going to get hit by some truly ridiculous bug, like getting stuck on a rock and reloading doesn't fix it.</blockquote>

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