By this logic, bulletstorm is an RPG game because you can buy ammo upgrades for the guns.
Yeah I agree actually. I already had a big rant about genre labels, but one I forgot about is when they get deprecated by becoming meaningless.
That's what happened with "RPG." For a hot minute in the 1990s it became cool to say a game had "RPG elements." Thing is "RPG" itself was one of those terms that we kinda just accepted--it was a holdover from pen and paper and really made more sense there. In video games though, the elements that make something an "RPG" could easily be applied to literally anything else, to the point where I've seen nerds argue about what constitutes an RPG and consistently been unable to find an answer because for anything you'd think of as a traditional "RPG element," you can either A) think of hundreds of games that have it but aren't RPGs, or B) thing of games that
should be RPGs but don't have those exact elements.
It really is a term that needs to be replaced entirely, and just keeps getting used out of a sort of inertia.
What? Character Action Game is the established term and describes what kind of game it is sufficiently enough. I admit Spectacle Fighter sounds kinda cool though.
Continuing my rant, one of the problems I recall people brought up about the term "RPG" is that it literally means "Role Playing Game," a game where you play a role. A troll on a forum I used to frequent even managed to make a perfectly cogent argument that
Tetris is a "role playing game."
Similar issue with "Character Action Game." So its a game where a character takes action? Isn't that... every game ever?
Like I said I tend to prefer Spectacle
Brawler since "Fighter" in my mind implies a game like Street Fighter II or Marvel vs Capcom, whereas "Brawler" makes me think of things like Final Fight, which is what games like DMC are in some ways the descendants of.
