LogFAQs > #937238494

Xiahou Shake posted...

I straight up disagree with this. RPG isn't some vague term that a ton of games can fit - we know exactly what they are. RPGs are all derived mechanically from DnD; you hand-waved strict adherence to mechanical keywords but if they don't have those mechanics then they're actually something else.

the fact that people are calling dark souls an rpg i think pretty much qualifies it for being a vague term. We don't know exactly what they are that's why a very large amount of subgenre rpgs exist. So like if someone wants to argue that it doesn't matter what type of game mechanically an rpg is and that it just has to follow a set of known mechanics that rpgs tend to have (like exp) means its application is pretty vague or I guess too liberal would be a better term.

All shooters are technically action games but you usually will not suggest a shooter when recommending an action game. It's just that the "action" genre is also very broad so it fits into a lot of things, we just have better classifications for things. If anything I'd say Dark Souls is like an Action Dungeon Crawler. I know that dungeon crawlers were derived from RPGS but I think by now it's been accepted that they've become its own standalone genre.