Bolded for effect. Save being pedantic for a thread worthy of it.

Your character increases in capability. The action part of the "action RPG" genre is fairly important here, given that the player ACTS in order to complete game ACTIONS. The skill portion in that genre is displaced to some degree to the actual player, rather than the character. This is why sub-genres were created. Namely, *Action* RPG. This sort of black and white thinking you're displaying just plain mental laziness.

And, no, I don't "Mix things up", certainly not in a field I devoted 21 years to programming in. FFA is most definitely an Action RPG (see above for handy description). Why in the hell would I mix that up with a turn-based combat RPG like FFL? And, especially in a thread on similar games. Just because they're for the same system? Because they both have Final Fantasy in the title? You realize being condescending in assumption and being wrong constitutes irony, right?

I was going to say the 1st Legend of Zelda, but truth be told A link to the past was everything the first one was plus a few new wrinkles. At the time it was made Nintendo I think wanted to show off the power of the SNES and put great effort into that game. It felt better than the first in everyway possible (at least when I played it).

Stat increases are neither sufficient nor necessary for a game to be an RPG; in fact, it really isn't a genre-determining factor at all. Consider that it appears in many other genres, including sports games, of all things.

Another problem is that I feel many people's use of the term RPG is too broad, leading to it being applied to games (like the Zelda series) that play nothing like an RPG. That is why I choose my definition of RPG to only include games with RPG-like combat and exclude games with action-style combat. You should be able to determing a game's genre just by looking at a bit of the action. Having the player die in a bottomless pit followed by a screen showing the number of lives left (as happens in Zelda 2) is not the sort of thing you see in an RPG.

Also, you were applying the "Action RPG" title to Final Fantasy Legend in your other post, where (regardless on one's feelings of whether that classification is even a valid one in the first place) it clearly doesn't apply; there's nothing actiony about the game, as the outcome of combat actions is dependent solely on stats and the game's awful PRNG.

I thought the timeline split was interesting since it dealt with the theory that time travel results in different timelines as oppose to things truly getting altered one's own future. I guess they were dealing with the idea that if you went back in time and killed your own direct ancestor before he could reproduce, you would not disappear since it was another timeline you visited. In other words, they probably got the idea from Dragonball Z.

Of course that is just my take on it. I always imagined that there are no alternative timelines in real life and that this is it but that theory did create an opportunity for multiple Zelda timelines. I would definitely like to see a title in the future that unites the timelines or deals with travel between them.

Do you have Aspergers?

When lines between genres get mixed, IE - games utilize aspects from multiple genres, new genres are created. This isn't rocket science and being overly rigid and black and white in definitions, especially when a subgenre is the classification, is ridiculous. Hence, again, *action* RPG.

Let me ask you one specific question: Are Zelda 2 and Gargoyle's Quest (two very similar games) RPGs of some sort?

Also, why do you have to mention "Aspergers" when that is completely unrelated to the topic?