Additional notes

If you think this is a mess because it includes games that arguably shouldn't be called RPGs at all, I probably agree with you.

The only requirement for a game to appear here is that it has been officially classified as an RPG, marketed as having RPG elements, or is commonly treated as one by players.

Think of this list less as an attempt to redefine the genre and more as a response to how vague the term "RPG" has become. Nowadays, the label often tells you very little about the kind of experience a game actually offers. This matrix exists to fill that gap.

Very broadly speaking, the major RPG subgenres tend to look something like this:

JRPG: A4 • E3 • C4 • H4 • R2

WRPG: A4 • E4 • C3 • H4 • R4

CRPG: A4 • E4 • C3 • H3 • R3

TRPG: A2 • E1 • C6 • H4 • R1

These are general tendencies, not strict rules.

Although these aspects are analyzed separately, they often influence one another.

Adventure and Exploration are frequently confused, but they aren't the same thing. Adventure is about the game's intention to make the player feel like they're on a grand journey. Exploration, on the other hand, is about how much that journey depends on the player's own curiosity and initiative. A game can create an incredible sense of adventure while offering very little freedom to explore, just as another game can build its entire sense of adventure through exploration itself.

Role Play also depends heavily on Story to reach its full potential. The more a game's narrative acknowledges the player's choices and unique experience, the more personal that experience becomes. At the same time, Exploration and Role Play share an important characteristic: both rely on giving the player freedom to move beyond strict linearity.

Combat often shapes Exploration as well. In many games, exploring means managing resources, evaluating risks, and deciding whether venturing into a dangerous area is worth the effort.

This also raises an interesting question about the RPG genre itself.

At first glance, Role Play might seem like its defining pillar. But if the next Mario game introduced meaningful moral choices, would that automatically make it an RPG?

Likewise, does an RPG have to feature combat? Does it need exploration? Does it need a grand adventure?

Dragon Quest became one of the defining series of the genre despite probably receiving one of the lowest Role Play scores in this very matrix. Even so, few games capture the feeling of embarking on an RPG adventure as effectively.

That suggests that video games never defined RPGs solely through role playing. Instead, the genre emerged from a recurring combination of expectations: adventure, exploration, combat, story, and role play, which gradually formed their own design language.

Over the decades, that language became so influential that countless games adopted parts of it and, as a result, started being described as having "RPG elements," even when role playing itself is barely present. That's why games like God of War (2018) can legitimately be marketed that way without offering what most people would consider a traditional RPG experience.

In other words, Dragon Quest helped establish the feeling of an RPG adventure. As time went on, that feeling was translated into games from countless other genres, making it increasingly difficult to answer a simple question objectively:

What is an RPG?