Role playing games without borders

Nightmare Mode's Tom Auxier plays Xenoblade Chronicles and finds a Western RPG hiding beneath Japanese trappings. Here's what he writes:

"A funny thing happened in Japan: the year’s biggest and brightest Japanese RPG turned into a Western RPG. The moment this crystallized for me came towards the beginning of Monolith’s Xenoblade Chroncles. The main character and his love interest Fiora stand on a hillside, talking about the past. A question comes up, with two choices. I picked the positive one, because I thought Xenoblade was a Japanese RPG, and Fiora got mad at me. A relationship meter straight out of Dragon Age declined. That’s when I realized something truly strange had happened here: I was playing an RPG without a modifier."