[quote=@Chrononaut] To answer your question with another question, what makes Western Rpgs roleplaying games? Most limit your choices, wheres in a "real" rpg, like DnD, you literally have unlimited choices you can make, not ones they just program in for you. You might have a DM like that, but it's much less restricted generally and the plot can literally leave his control if you're clever enough. Roleplaying just means you "play a role". Acting is a form of roleplaying, even though you don't make any choices. The main appeal of JRPGS are the stories and the simplistic gameplay, namely. Before we had the technology to make the sprawling expanses we have today, tech was a lot more limited. You did have some titles like Fire Emblem which combined tactics with a leveling system, but these were few and far between and much harder to make. I honestly don't like console rpgs though, I think the only time rpgs were ever good was Planescape, Fallout 1 and 2, and Baldurs gate era + the recent release of new CRPG games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, and Wasteland 2. Dark Souls feels much more like a Metroidvania game and The Witcher series has always felt more action rpg than "typical" rpg. Also what [@Fabricant451] said. [/quote] It's funny how most of the RPGs you listed as the good ones were made by the same general group of people (Black Isle, which became Obsidian and Troika). With Fallout the developers said in interviews that it was their aim to recreate the depth of the tabletop experience as closely as possible. I think that's always been an undercurrent, but the early computers lacked the technology to do much except bring in the dungeon crawling and stat based combat aspect of tabletops RPGs, which were fun enough that they became the defining features of the genre.