Final Fantasy XIII: Tube Quest

[A Black Falcon]

They do have similarities in that regard to GTA, though to varying degrees. The latest big-budget western RPG, Mass Effect 2, does push you along a bit and there aren't huge open areas to explore, but it lets you decide when you want to mess around with side quests and talking to NPCs and went you want to follow the story.

If you really want a huge, open world where you can do whatever you want, Fallout 3 is pretty much the pinnacle of that for recent games.

It's also lame and stupid compared to Fallouts 1 or 2. :p

But yes, most Western RPGs have some degree of open-endedness. How much there is varies from title to title, but there's almost always at least some, and usually more than most JRPGs have. In the last few years also action-style combat has gotten more and more popular; a few games here and there resist that, most recently Dragon Age, but action combat is in now, unfortunately for the genre in my opinion (I mean, I like action-RPGs, but not as a replacement for the traditional genre, just as a supplement!).