/vr/ - Retro Games

>WRPG: very deep gameplay, lots of freedom and customization, real challenge, but incredibly dull world and characters, old ones also stupidly inaccessible and have lots of autism
>JRPG: very accessible, remove most of autism, memorable world and characters, but often very linear, with dumbed down gameplay and no challenge, making it seem like babby RPG
how come there's no middle ground genre between those? early JRPGs were often challenging and (relatively) deep, but as the genre progressed they threw away most of the challenge.
what games came the closest to bridging that gap between JRPG and WRPG? obvious ones are dungeon crawlers, but what else?