Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn
In pretty much every regard save a niggling few it's my perfect rpg.
-Compelling story and narrative? Check.
-Entertaining and believable characters? Double Check!
-Well written and fluid dialogue? Check!
-Good use of the DnD license? Check!
-Tactical and strategic combat? Check!
-Wide variety of enemies and combat scenario? Not sure how many times more I can type it, but Check!
-Beautiful high resolution 2D panoramic artwork? Check!
-Active modding community providing new content? CheckCheckCheckCheck!
About the only things I would change would be to tighten up the combat slightly, tweaking a few spells and abilities that really aren't very good to at least make them useful, better character models and more visual diversity in terms of character customization, and a bit more stat dependent dialogue, situations where what you say is dependent on what your character is capable of. More clearly seeing the consequences of your actions in a few places would be nice as well, since it's often left quite vague.
That's about it! It's not actually a perfect game, pretty much no game is perfect save an elite few like Tetris or PacMan, and even then it's debatable. But in terms of what I want from an rpg experience is as close as a game has gotten to date.
Others worth mentioning are Vampire: Bloodlines, Planescape: Torment, The Witcher 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Fallout 2.
Not much into Japanese rpg obviously. Played a couple of the Final Fantasy games and that's it.
