^ I agree the man's comment is a bit arrogant and pretentious. I feel at the heart of most RPGs still lies the remnants of their ancestor the "paper/pen" RPG but it seems obvious that both versions (JRPG and WRPG) have gone in very different directions and both seem have grabbed on to one and two elements that made the original form of RPGs specials and ran with it.

I do feel that JRPG's tend to have a much more loose idea of what constitutes an RPG but to be fair, yet it can also be argued that WRPGs drop some major elements since most of the time combat is basically an Action game (usually FPS style if its the Elder Scroll series) with stats attached to them whereas the turn based combat in JRPG's is much closer to emulating a bunch of guys in battle using speed ratings to determine attack over and reading through their character sheets for their skills and spells to use in combat while calculating the damage through the game's mechanic system and the trusty dice.

The genre has been sleeping around and now the whole industry is filled with its offspring from other genres.