Overall, JRPGs, though only the best ones, a lot of them are garbage with obnoxious colorful teenagers. The ones that look like anime bug the hell outta me, I like old ones and darker ones.
Just some of my favorite JRPGs: Demon's Souls (THE best game ever to me), Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, and Paper Mario/Mario & Luigi
May not be a ton of them but the great JRPGs are the best. They tend to be truer RPGs, WRPGs are often glorified action games with some moral choice element (a la Mass Effect, great game, but much more of a TPS than an RPG) and very basic upgrading. At very least JRPGs include an at least somewhat complex leveling up system, as well as involving tons of strategy in weapon choice and how to handle your upgrades, as well as a moral choice system. Take my favorite game, Demon's Souls, it may be a hack 'n slash rogue game at heart, but the enormous amount of strategy combined with the world/character tendencies total up to a much greater RPG experience than most WRPGS though. It's literally all strategy, you could be the most talented action game player on Earth and it would still be difficult for you to get past one of the later levels if you weren't careful with your upgrades and never thought about what strategically would work best for what you're doing. I find it to have one of the best moral choice systems in gaming as well. While Bioware games like KOTOR and ME tend to give you a conversation in which you can choose the "Nice", "Neutral", or "A**hole" response, which decides everything for you. In Demon's Souls every little thing you do can change your tendency. You can kill any NPCs, which will make your tendency black. Certain kills will make others hostile towards you and then of course there are side missions that can completely alter both world and character tendency.
These are at least the types of things I find constitute a true RPG, not an action game where you're literally given a menu to choose what you want with your goal in mind, you're not even role playing, you're choosing whether you want to be bad, neutral, or good, not doing what feels right or anything. This isn't to bag on Bioware games like Mass Effect and KOTOR. Those are both excellent games, KOTOR being one of my favorite RPGs and Mass Effect a series I plan to start playing very soon with my newly acquired free 360, but I see Mass Effect as pretty much entirely a third-person shooter (based on my rental time), while KOTOR is a bit more of an RPG, having combat more reminiscent of it, but it becomes more like action/turn based strategy (in real time, which makes no sense without context, but I'm sure some will understand what I mean). Great games, but not totally RPGs.
