As a genre, role-playing games have survived the rise of Nintendo and the fall of cartridge-based home consoles; they've outlived the fighting game boom and weathered the arcade bust. But as competition increases and more and more games integrate elements once exclusively found in RPGs, the real question is: Can the RPG survive itself?

What makes a role-playing game a role-playing game? Is it the character-building, the intricate story line? Likeable characters? Or some mix of the above? It's interesting that such a seemingly narrow genre definition, role-playing, can be used so effortlessly to describe games as wildly dissimilar as Diablo II and Final Fantasy X.