RPG Classifications or "What the hell is an RPG?"

[Sephiroth]

Darksiders is considered by many people as "mature Zelda" and RPG-ish.

That's why I used it to segue to the rest of the argument :P It's also very God of War in combat, so it helps blur the line for people either leery or eager to open the flood gates and categorize "everything" an RPG

Eh, you very much exaggerate with your conclusions though because the more transitions you make the more aspects are lost. It does not make much sense to disregard Game 2 after transition 1 as RPG just because Game 11 after transition 10 is not an RPG. You check if there are still criteria for it to be considered an RPG and then say "okay after that transition it has lost all of the possible characteristics" but you do not say "this one doesn't have it so the other one also" if "this one" possibly still has a lot of things that "the other one" might have lost already. I for example see one game that is considered RPG as no RPG at all because I see it as "its very own genre that adopts from RPGs" and that is Pokémon. If anything I can accept is as its own new subclass of the superclass RPG but that's really it. As long as it is clear that it kind of has its own niche and is not comparable to the standard. And for Zelda I see that very similiar. I consider Zelda an RPG way easier than Pokémon because while Zelda "has no HP and EXP and blabla" there are still fundamental aspects of it that I see as necessary for an RPG. And that something has puzzles and no EXP is not really an RPG-No-Go for me. As said, for me Zelda is a mix. And Action-Adventure-RPG. And Darksiders is pretty much the same thing then. I cannot say too much about God of War because I have never played it. Your transitional thinking of "Chain Member 1 is an RPG so Chain Member 10 is also" is incomplete as long as you do not define how many criteria are still fulfilled BUT for your specific examples we actually can see where the chain should stop because certain aspects are lost at one point.,