If that right there is a "genuine" RPG, then the genre is truly dead. Age of Decadence is absolutely awful and perhaps not the best of examples to use.

Age of decadence is a great game, if you don't like it, you're simply not up to the challenge.

People easily get a bit anal about the RPG term, as if it was some mathematical definition. It's a vague idea, made of a vague notion and a series of devices that aren't all necessary. It's like most words. It does convey a general idea, even if the exact communication intent sometimes needs to be precised in a second movement ("when i said rpg i meant this and that"), or even if it sometimes gives a misleading impression due to people giving a different weight to the presence or absence of some features. No big deal.

It's when geeks pretend to use everyday language like they use program commands or mathematical operations (or legalese) that things get unnecessarily tedious.

Although I completed the game eventually, I found the experience very disappointing. I like a challenge, that's why I play such games, although the main challenge in Age of Decadence was how badly implemented the game mechanics were.

Interestingly, whenever there's criticism of Age of Decadence, there's always someone who pipes up with words such as "challenge" or "hardcore" to define the game. It was a melting pot of great ideas, I'll grant you that, although they were all very poorly implemented.

My biggest gripe, considering the game sold itself on the basis of choice and consequence, was how utterly badly that central aspect of the game was handled. Instead, it was an illusion of choice and particularly when it came to shaping character builds.

Playing anything beyond a combat-heavy character was an utter mess and pointless for the most part, skill checks are a joke and nothing more than scripted fluff, and combat was laughably bad.

What about puzzles then? Usually the player has to solve them, not the character via INT check...

Age of Decadence does have a terrible combat system, and the gameplay, in general, does leave a lot to be desired, but it does excel in a meaningful consequences system in how you choose to tackle situations. I'd say that alone makes it stand out.

The combat is fantastic, imo one of the best parts of the game, I enjoyed it a lot. You just have to understand that if you don't have a character dedicated to combat many fights will be impossible to win.
I also really liked the crafting and alchemy systems.
To be sure, Age of decadence isn't without flaws, you can easily build a flawed character that at some point can't advance anymore, and the game's content decreases somewhat in quality in the later parts of the game (Ganezzar doesn't have enough sidequests, no opportunities for burglary etc.). Some skills like etiquette are also pretty useless. It's a game that can be very frustrating at times (if you don't have some idea of what you should be doing), and the developers themselves have acknowledged that it's far from perfect. But the basic concept is brilliant (the many choices and consequences and the completely different paths through the game...which other game does something like this?).
Absolutely not my experience with the game, and I played through pretty much all possible paths. There's a lot of meaningful choices and combat was great imo.
Only serious criticism imo is that content was a bit too thin at times (more sidequests would have been nice) and that indeed gameplay was somewhat restricted for combat-lite characters because there wasn't that much to do apart from talking.

You're confusing the genre and the dictionary definition of the word.

According to the wiki the genre was born in the 70s with the release of Colossal Cave Adventure, often referred to simply as Adventure. As more puzzle-based story-driven low-action games started to appear the genre was named after its most famous example at the time. Bad choice, but it is what it is.

If you were to look at the dictionary definition you could argue that Super Mario Bros (1984) is the adventure of Mario trying to save the princess from Bowser, but its genre is an action-platformer.

I would say Action-adventures like Zelda:OoT are action games but just classified that way to make a distinction between them and "pure action" games which I consider have non-stop action and almost no story. It's not like they're a mashup of the action and adventure genres.

Language evolves. Society (and hence technology) evolves.

When The Colossal Cave was written, it was literally a (virtual) adventure for the player, hence it was labelled as such. Similarly, RPG was a term used for the novel pen & paper phenomenon, where people created characters that they then took on adventures and "played", like a game of poker but with random results invoked by the use of dice.

As more games have been created, more ways to describe them were needed, if only to distinguish them from each other. :)

Another interesting point of difference for role-play is the pre-made character versus the role-your-own; a game based on a character of the former type might best be termed a visual novel (de nos jours), whereas the latter requires a different set of skills to both create and play the game. Max Payne requires role-play, and grants new & improved skills, yet I doubt many would classify it as a type of RPG.

edit: hyperlink >_<

I agree. It is more adequate to say it was an unfortunate choice, but not a bad one. It made a lot of sense at the time.

Actually, that particular Zelda does have elements that I associate with the adventure genre. For instance, in the very first dungeon there is a web or something that prevents you from going to the deeper floors right away; the solution is scripted rather than emergent the way a block puzzle's solution would be.

I prefer to use the term visual novel for games whose gameplay isn't any more involved than a "choose your own adventure" book, and where the story is the prominent feature. In particular, adding gameplay mechanics, like the stats you find in a typical RPG, means that "visual novel" is no longer an appropriate classification for the game (though it might still have VN elements).

(A related classification is "kinetic novel": The way I see it, kinetic novels are 0-player visual novels, or visual novels that have no gameplay at all.)

VNs for people who have difficulty making decisions? ;-)

For me RPG (or RPG elements) means a heavy impact of character build/progression on gameplay and how situations play out. Emergent gameplay depending on your choices, if you will.
For instance in Deus Ex you can choose to invest into heavy weapons, stealth, hacking etc... and depending on your decisions the gameplay and possible paths will wildly differ on each playthrough. So it has a pretty strong RPG part.
A game like Hexen 2, where you choose your character class at the beginning, but progression from there is pretty linear and the same every time you play that character has no real RPG elements, since except for the initial choice, there are no decisions with consequences to make.
Those stats don't have to be the classic INT/STR/DEX, and they don't have to be obvious for the player. They could also be a hidden alignment system, where the options dynamically change depending on previous actions. The important thing is, that this happens in an emergent kind of way, depending fluidly on some dynamic values, not via a strict branching story tree.

Your classification fails to classify the first two Dragon Quest games, which are pretty much universally considered RPGs, as RPGs. In DQ1, your name is the only choice you can make that affects stat growth, and in DQ2, there isn't even that.

Also, Final Fantasy 1 and 4. In FF1, the only decision you make is at the start, and in FF4, barring randomness at high levels, there's no decision; the plot dictates who is in your party.

Let's make it simple - if enough people consider game RPG, then it's RPG.

So, by your definition/s, Dragon Quest is a visual novel and FF and its third sequel are kinetic novels (for the aboulic :) ?