But it's not.
Deus ex does not have any magic but still it's THE RPG (the best game of all time).

and it's one of the best examples of a game where you choose who the player is and the game changes as a result.

Ah, but "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

An online friend of mine once shared his list of criteria to define an RPG, and although I usually don't believe in these attempts to come up with strict (often biased) definitions, I found his to be surprisingly simple, useful and convincing. He's a been a pen & paper DM for decades, a modder for Unlimited Adventures, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Online etc., knows a lot about D&D and other systems and has played through almost every popular CRPG since the 80's. And he still didn't say: I'm the expert and this is what real RPGs are. He simply said: This is the definition I use for myself. And the criteria were that it has to have:

* Character Statistics
* Combat Mechanics with Choices
* Equipment
* Quests and NPC Interaction
* Character Growth

Simple as that. And I can agree with the usefulness of this definition, because to me RPGs are neither games about playing a role, nor about rolling a dice, nor about tactical combat or whatever. Instead, they are a wild mixture of several different mechanics and ideas, and IMO you can't define them by singling out only one or two aspects, what defines them to me is precisely this mix of several different aspects combined. I'm fully aware though that not everyone would agree to such a defintion, because according to the criteria above, RPGs elitists would have to accept games like Diablo and Mass Effect as part of their favorite genre, and I know that's not going to happen, not even under the alien concept of 'subgenre'. ;)

Personally, I don't consider leveling and skill trees to affect the classification of a game into a genre. I believe Civilization IV has both, but I have never actually seen that game referred to as an RPG. Therefore, I don't see adding such elements to an action game to qualify it as an RPG.

(I actually consider Action and RPG to be disjoint categories; for a game to be both, it has to have two separate combat systems.)

That's pretty much what all these little non-discounted, themed 10-pack assortments are, as far as I can tell.

Nope, that's not the reason -- a search for "ultima complete" will return ONLY Ultima VII: The Complete Edition. =)

He says, before going on to launch himself right into that futile discussion. :P
Really, any topic even remotely related to RPGs should have as part of the title "and fruitless, pedantic arguing about what an RPG is".

Lionheart is a pretty decent game, I quit enjoy it.

My problem on the list is Shadowrun Returns, which is inferior in every way to Shadowrun: Dragonfall.

Yup, guilty as charged, and point taken. It's really hard to resist getting drawn into it, and I already knew I would regret it even while I did it, which is part of why I find this topic so annoying. :)

Although, if I'm honest, I guess it's not so much the discussion that I find annoying, but the zealotry with which is often led. If it was a reasonable discussion with the goal of finding a useful definiton that most people could agree on, I wouldn't mind, but more often than not it just seems to be about pushing the one true definition of a 'real RPG', no matter if anyone else agrees that it's actually useful or widely accepted.