Retro RPG Games

Thanks iPad auto correct. That should be Grandia not Grandma!!!

Forget what everyone above says. Play Legend of Dragoon!

(actually don't because it might put you off the genre completely, it almost put me off games completely).

That extra credits video doesn't really explain much.

For me Western RPGs have their roots in old school D&D. The combat mechanics are secondary to player choice. You have stuff like Baldur's gate where the combat consists of dice rolls in the background and the odd spell being thrown around or ability or skyrim where it's just kind of naff first person combat. However the player choice and freedom that defines D&D is carried over to WRPGs. In a good WRPG you shouldn't be trying to be good or bad but roleplaying a character.

JRPGs on the other hand are mostly influenced by Wizardry and Ultima 3, but mostly Wizardry. Wizardry is just a dungeon crawler really. Successive JRPGs have built on the combat of wizardry and modified it so much that it's just branched out into countless variants, some of which bear no resemblance to the original source. It's all about the combat system in JRPGs. Some are ****e (shudder, Legend of Dragoon) while some are magnificent ( Grandia, Persona 4 etc.). There's usually a lot of narrative in JRPGs but it's usually linear with no real player choice.

Unfortunately a lot of JRPG narratives are based on dull and boring anime tropes mostly popular stuff like Final Fantasy and Tales of, which gives JRPGs their bad name. However look outside those and usually the narratives, universes and characters are far better than anything in WRPGs which are pretty much all the medieval tale of an ancient evil coming to destroy the world (replace the space marines in Mass Effect with Knights and you have the same bloody thing Bioware have been telling for years).

Really again what defines RPGs is choice, while WRPGs focus on choice in terms of narrative JRPGs focus on choice in their battle mechanics. Some of the best battle systems like FFV and FFVIII give the player so much choice that the whole fun of those games is find exploits in the systems to completely break them and you are encouraged to do so.

Of course there's exceptions to the rules. Fallout 1 and 2 and planescape torment have settings and narratives that can hardly be called cliche and boring. Then there's Shin Megami Tensei and it's spin-offs like Persona that forgo the linear narratives or JRPGs and give the player a lot of choice over their narratives.

I don't mind random battles as long as the battle system is quick and the encounter rate isn't excessive. Both of those things can kill a game very easily.