I'll start by stating my opening position - I'm not an RPG canon fanatic. There are those for whom any deviation from their favourte RPG is heretical. Mine is a broad RPG church. though I'd draw internal distinctions between the the western and Japanese RPG lineages and action RPGs versus narrative driven or dialogue-heavy. What sorts of features are normally present in games considered to be RPGs, and which of these are truly integral to the genre? For the first part of that question, consider some features commonly found in RPGs:
- Character creation and / or development.
- Dialogue choices.
- Moral choices.
- Inventory management.
- Levelling up or some kind of quantitative character improvement.
- Non-linearity.
- Fantastical or science-fiction setting (are there any real-world based RPGs? I can't think of any).
- Party management.
What's striking about this list is that it's easy to think of games that have most of these missing, yet are still unmistakenly RPGs. Equally, there are games where these mechanics feature, sometimes quite prominantly, yet they are not considered RPGs. As a genre, it has become quite difficult to define. Of the features in this list, it is incredibly difficult to identify those that produce a canonical, undeniable RPG.
Take a game like Darksiders. It has levelling up. It is non-linear. Yet it's not an RPG. Why not? For me, it's because there's no narrative choices for the player to make. There are tactical choices. Which upgrade, which weapon etc. But no choice that affects the story arc. And yet, if memory serves, many JRPGs do not feature such choices either. The Final Fantasy games do not allow players to dictate the direction of the narrative, only the pace at which it proceeds. Yet they are considered RPGs; they certainly contain many signature features - character levelling, party management, non-linearity. Perhaps what makes an RPG is a critical mass of features from the grab bag of RPG mechanics - a compound key, rather than a primary one.
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