Having experienced both, I always believed JRPGs and WRPGs could be better classified as "console" and "computer" minded design accordingly, with all the assumptions you can make about each being true. It's basically historical reality. The interviews with the Dragon Quest creator, Yuji Horii, proves this where he openly admits to wanting to make an easier, more accessible Ultima or whatever, and that's where JRPGs got lift off and launched into the clone wars for a decade or more.
Still, that's like 70% of the picture in general, the lines blur, especially over time, and it's true that in recent years WRPGs have essentially become JRPGs but with woke aesthetics whereas JRPGs doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled down on moe, so both lost there to some degree.
But I will say this regardless. When they apply themselves, the Japanese games are excellent. Western games tend to explore great ideas and play it fast and loose, and oftentimes the results are amazingly openminded but suffer from a lack of focus (modders will fix it after all, etc.). In comparison, the Japanese singular minded approach really narrows down what can make a game compelling while even sometimes embracing the best aesthetics of the west.
It's a trade off between experimentation and limitation. The Japanese have always stressed the latter to the effect of making everything they produce symbolic of it, whether it's video games or cars or swords or anything. I guess it's what you get from being an ancient culture based on an island with no resources. You get less, everything is compartmentalized, but it's finely tuned to excellence, or whatever. The west are drafters/engineers that move on quickly from ideas, and the east are refiners that tend to stick to improving "what works". Just listen to some Japanese Jazz fusion sometime. They still explore a lot of music and fashion the west has given up on, among other things.
Anyways, Elminage Gothic is incredible, go play it. And Vagrant Story, and SaGa, and etc..