Role Playing Game

A Role Playing Game, often abbreviated RPG, is a type of game, just like how there is "Sport Games", "Adventure Games" and "Racing Games". Mario has appeared in a handful of RPGs, as he has starred in Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time and, of course, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

Differences Between Action Games and RPGs
There are many differences between RPGs and Action Games such as Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine. One of the differences in that the player takes on a certain role and often involves elements such as money and items which are usually missing from action games.

Also RPGs have new kinds of features: HP, Defense, Attack, Speed and many other kinds of points. HP is the RPG kind of lives, and HP doesn't only appear in RPGs; it also rarely appears in other kinds of games. Defense is how strong the character is, meaning, if an enemy attacks, the higher defense the less HP the character will loose. Attack is how strong at attacking the character is; the more attack the character has, the more HP enemies will loose when attacked. Notice enemies like Goombas also have HP, defense, attack, speed and other kinds of points.

Also, when fighting enemies, the characters take turns attacking. The character with the highest speed goes first. If it's the player's turn to attack, then the player can choose to attack (using one of many moves), use items, or do many other things, such as defend (which, despite temporarily raising defense, will make a player lose his turn) or run away (which often results in the loss of Coins, the typical money used in Mario RPGs). Enemies usually have only one thing to do: attack. However, a few enemies, such as Popple (who, depending on the battle, has the ability to steal items from players), can have items and heal themselves.

All RPGs have sidequests, meaning quests that can be done in the game, but are not necessary to beat the game. Also, most (and possibly about 95%) of the RPG games have the final bosses of the game in their "fake forms"; for example, in Super Mario RPG, after Smithy is defeated the first time, he will reveal his true form and reveal that the form he had for the whole game (not counting the end) was a fake form.

Speaking In RPGs
Typically, RPGs have much deeper plotlines then games of other genres, resulting in the fact that RPGs often include much character interaction, which is almost always done in speech bubbles (or at least in Mario RPGs). However, even Mario series role playing games have limited voice acting, although this is typically only given to previously-known characters and even then only for actions such as attacking or nodding their head while listening to another character. Interestingly, though, Mario (and Luigi, in the case of the Mario & Luigi RPG series) himself never speaks, as do several RPG protagonists. Instead, Mario often gestures events out to other characters or takes other measures to explain things, such as even turning into separate characters and playing out events to tell others what had happened. However, the silent protagonist rule played out so well in Mario RPGs has, at very rare times, been broken. The first-ever instance of this happened in Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, when, if Mario chose to go through an alternate route out of Marrymore after beating that world (the route chosen happened to be in the opposite direction of the Mushroom Kingdom, where Mario and his party were supposed to be taking Princess Toadstool), his group would start arguing over the fate of Toadstool, Mario would show signs of annoyance, and the words "ENOUGH, ALREADY!" would pop up on the screen as if he were talking. (However, "Mario:" was not placed in the speech bubble of these words, making it possible that it was not actually him speaking them.) Another (and much clearer) exception to the silent protagonist rule also occurred in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, where, at the very top of Joke's End, Luigi (though here in a foolproof disguise as Princess Peach) laughed, gave a rather long speech, and eventually screamed for help, all in speech bubbles. (However, as stated above, Luigi was disguised and looked identical to Princess Peach at the time, making this surprising event rather overlookable to most gamers.) Although these are the only major times a main protagonist spoke in a Mario RPG, it may be worth noting that many words of the characters' aforementioned voice acting are indeed understandable and, shockingly, one of the Mario & Luigi series's famous gibberish lines (which are that series's main way of allowing Mario and Luigi to interact) in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time was actually an understandable sentence in Italian.

Trivia

 * A SecuriMeow from Super Paper Mario mentions that RPGs shouldn't take less than 180 hours to beat not counting sidequests. Whether this is true or not is unknown; it would appear to simply be one of Francis's geeky judgments on life.
 * Super Paper Mario has RPG elements, but is actually more of a platformer.