Dragon Age VI: Siege Harder

[Zevox]

While it is not perhaps definitive, Metacritic and Wikipedia both classify Dragon Age II as an action RPG, Steam classifies Dungeon Siege as an action RPG, and Blizzard Entertainment's page on Diablo III claims that Diablo III is a "genre-defining action RPG." Interestingly, neither Dungeon Siege nor Diablo III feature these elements of action RPG combat that you seem to regard as essential to the genre. Dark Souls-style combat is not required for action RPGs by any definition of the genre with which I am familiar.

The defining feature of an 'action' RPG is that its combat system is focused on, well, action while tactics are more of an afterthought, whereas in a 'tactical' RPG you get a much heavier focus on tactics - typically at the expense of the pace of the action. DA:2's combat system is very much a fast-paced system where you have little need to apply tactics - arguably very little opportunity, given how the combat encounters are constructed with enemies spawning in out of thin air in the middle of the fight and that most standard enemies die almost as soon as you look at them.

Can't speak to the other games you brought up (since I've never played them), but I feel that if Metacritic and Wikipedia classify it as such, they're just confused about what an action game is. And while Dark Souls is an action game, it's hardly the one I'd be name-dropping as where they come from - more Devil May Cry or God of War. Hell, for action RPGs the grandady is probably the Tales franchise, at least as far as series I'm aware of go. Maybe Kingdom Hearts if you think of that as an RPG.

And yeah, we definitely disagree about the latter. Dragon Age 2 is in no way focused on "action." There's no action-oriented gameplay going on at all, none of the mechanics that define that style of game involved. Whatever you want to call it (I hesitate to call it a "tactical" RPG either, since in my mind that moniker goes on games like Fire Emblem or Disgaea, with grid- and turn-based systems), it's a totally different beast from action games.

Also, enemies "die almost as soon as you look at them" in DA2? Did we play the same game? One of my bigger complaints about DA2 was the ridiculous health bloat on enemies that caused even smaller encounters to drag on longer than they should have.

Much like Zevox, I have no idea how anyone could call it an "action RPG with tactical elements". The control scheme and party tactics are pretty much the same as they were in Origins,

Precisely. Mechanically, Dragon Age 2 plays exactly like Dragon Age: Origins, just with some rebalancing of abilities across the board and the addition of cross-class combos. Visually they tried to make it look smoother and more like action games, but the underlying mechanics of the two are identical. Without question, they should be categorized the same as far as genre goes. Inquisition altered slightly more, but not much, and what it did change didn't make the game more action-RPG-esque.

There have been things I really liked and disliked from each Dragon Age game. I’m hoping DA4 picks the strengths from each game and comes up with something special.

That would be great, I'd agree. I'd worry though that Bioware themselves may have a different idea than I (or others) do about what the strengths of each game actually are, though. If they decided that the strength of Inquisition was the open-world areas full of junk that's need for the crafting system, for instance... well, again, I skipped Andromeda, I can skip a Dragon Age if it doesn't sound good.