Mixtures like that were initially fewer in the West, due to the consoles and arcade games being marked mindless quick entertainment by an elitist home computer crowd for real deal hardcore simulations and RPGs, which were the domain of computers with lots of memory (for the time) to store all those stats.
The action RPG is a genre that could thrive first and foremost in Japan, where influences of personal computer games often resulted in new interpretations on game consoles, thus benefiting a healthy melange of genre traditions.
