I'm not really fond of people calling Expedition 33, a game which very clearly expresses the cultural heritage of its French creators, a Japanese Role Playing Game, or JRPG for short. But it certainly is influenced by JRPGs, and not just the gameplay, also the narrative ingredients. Heavy spoilers in the following sections!
Of course, the influence of Final Fantasy is felt most strongly. Gustave's death is similar to Aerith's death in both timing and effect. Aerith's death was the last escalation of an FF trope that had run through the series ever since its beginning.
Then you have Maelle, whose name means princess, as Verso informed me during the course of the game. FF has recurring character names like Cid, but also Princess Sara, or Lightning's sister Serah, which all are variations of the same name of Hebrew origin meaning princess. Chrono Trigger's Schala is also called Sara in the Japanese original.
Kid Verso's soul that keeps painting the canvas of the game world being tired reminds of FFX's Fayth being tired of dreaming Zanarkand and Tidus into existence.
Less known to Western players would be Dragon Quest X version 2, in which the villain is a painter who creates a facsimile world that serves as refuge for Princess Ann-Lucia, who after having witnessed her brother's death indulges a fantasy of being a different person called Mishua. In this world which is almost the same as the real world, characters from fairy tales are real and people already deceased are still alive.
And of course, Serge from Chrono Cross is dead in one version of reality, while alive in another. This is a metaphor of the process of engaging with fiction. As one immerses oneself in a world that comes alive in the imagination of one's mind, they become absent in the real world, being dead to it for the duration. They can only be alive in one space at a time.
When they finally return to the real world, in a way the fictional world dies as the imagination that sustained its lifeforce turns to memory. Link's Awakening also expresses this beautifully. Or World Destruction, written by Chrono series writer Masato Kato. To stop playing the game means destroying its world, a circumstance that cannot be helped.
Half Life 2, neither a Japanese game nor an RPG, has a similar metaphor to bridge the gap between player and fiction. After they left the world of Half Life by finishing the game, their avatar Gordon Freeman has remained in stasis. And only now that they start playing Half Life 2, Gordon comes to life again.

















