After finishing Fallout 2 and completing that trilogy, I'm noticing a trend in all the wrpgs I've played: They create interesting worlds where every town/city has story depth and interesting inhabitants; yet the main plot is like 30 mins total and totally undermined by the fact that it's usually no more indepth than a subquest at some town/city. There is almost no character development given to the antagonist or main story NPC characters (if there are any besides the antagonist), and the entire main plot consists of a paper-thin single concept or two (find dad! Stop bad guys!; Rescue people!).
Meanwhile jrpgs are setup like novels and films and spend most of the entire plot developing the story NPC characters, the antagonists, and the plot itself with many twists and turns as it progresses. Yet the towns/cities are paper-thin and just there for NPCs to shout out their 1 or 2 pre-programmed lines. The towns look awesome with great art direction and can be sprawling. Yet all the doors are often locked, or if they aren't there's nothing to do in them besides find a chest or two and shop.
Now I haven't played a lot of wrpgs, so maybe they aren't all like that. Though it does seem a bit weird that every single one I've played has the same exact setup of "go to a town/city, talk to everyone and get quests. Go do them for xp/items/money. Go to next town and repeat; repeat at every town until you reach the final location and finish the story", but maybe they aren't all like that. It's true most jrpgs are just "Go to town, watch cutscene, shop, go to dungeon, watch cutscene, go to next town; repeat", so maybe both genre are just kind of stuck in a setup.
As for the future, it would make sense for the two extremes to merge to a better middle. Out of the handful of wrpgs I've played, Mass Effect is by leaps and bounds the most accompished in its storytelling because for the most part it does exactly this. Mass Effect has cities/towns with sidequests like a wrpg, ones where you can complete things by talking, ones where you go and shoot some stuff; but at the same time it has a bunch of main plot scenarios so you are constantly following the main plotline and learning more about the antagonists, the other main story NPCs, and that way when it comes down to the epic finale it's satisfying because instead of all this main story plot OUT OF NOWHERE, it's all been built up the entire game and finally pays off in the end. I'd like to see jrpgs start opening their towns up more for story development through quests and interesting people, and I'd like to see wrpgs focus more heavily on the main plot with more character development, and a longer more in-depth main plotline that has depth and is interesting/exciting.
It just seems the two old-school structures still in place are at such opposite extremes that they lose sight of how to tell a story.
