ScrabbitRabbit said:
The Grandia system is great as well. Sort of similar to the ATB system in that there's a real time gauge determining turn order, except there's one gauge for everyone and how fast you progress up it depends on your stats. Unlike the ATB system, the game pauses completely to let you make choices, and this is very important as, again, unlike ATB you can interrupt attacks. Hitting somebody will cause their icon on the turn gauge to stop for a while and if you pull off a fast move whilst they're casting a slow, but powerful one? The move will be cancelled and they'll be knocked back to the start of the gauge. On top of that, your actions will change where your character is located on the battle screen, so you need to consider positioning, too. Hitting an enemy on the other side of the screen takes longer than one that's next to you, risking interruption. This makes it very important to watch the gauge as your moves might be interrupted too. If the enemy's turn is close to yours and you're fairly close to them, maybe a slow, lumbering move is a bad idea? On the other hand if their turn is slightly ahead, maybe they've been charging up, maybe this will be a good opportunity to interrupt?
I played through Grandia again 2 years ago on my PSP, while I absolutely loved it and its battle system when it first came out, my second play through... I found it kind of broken. Still loved the game, but the problem was in the skill growth system, which relied on using MP to increase your abilities which gave you new techniques and made your characters stronger. It's fine if you do typical MP conversion saving it for tough fights and boss battles... but the game is extremely liberal with it's placements of save/restore points. Made it very easy to abuse, and obsessive compulsions made me want to keep going for that next skill/combo, but it got to the point where I was annihilating every random battle on the first turn, completely nullifying the great combat system!
Adding another name to the discussion that hasn't been mentioned, it got criticized because it broke away from the series standard but I really liked Suikoden 3. Took the six party members, put them into pairs one front one back, and introduced a movement based system (like Grandia but without the interupts). More than that though it was the diversity of characters you got and the ways you could combine them. I also really, really liked the skill system. You got skill points in battle. Skills were things such as swing, heavy, critical, parry, block, dodge, etc on the physical side, and fire, wind, casting, etc on the magic side. Skills had a letter ranking, F-A, plus S and SS maybe, so characters started low and as you earned skill points you could increase them at a trainer, and each character had a max potential for every given skill. And of course they made very noticeable difference in battle depending on how you trained them.
But anyways, another obscure pick as my #1 choice... Warsong 1 and 2 for the Sega Genesis. Seriously has anyone else tried this? It's a strategy RPG, has hero characters similar to a Fire Emblem game, except at the start of each battle you spend money to hire up to 'soldier' units, such as infantry, archers, knights, mages, and a whole bunch of others, plus when you 'promote' the hero they could mix & match. Hero's heal their merc units when next to them, up to 4 at a time, and it used a strength system similar to Advance Wars where units start at unit count/strength of 10 and combat each other in a rock/paper/scissor manner. It made for some really great strategy, enough that I'm putting it ahead of Dragon Force.
