RPGs and Their Elements

[psychospacecow]

Personally, I've always been a big fan of both Chrono series games. They have unique combat systems for their time, Trigger taking into account the player's surroundings, and Cross being a manaless pseudo-real time variant of turn based play. The main detractor of Cross was its affiliation with Trigger and its overemphasis on multiple characters without developing all of them and applying their trades to the game as a whole. You can only have 3 characters in battle at one time and switching between characters in restricted to certain points. Couple that with the fact that only combatants gain experience and the 45 characters in game suddenly become much less significant. There's also games like Bravely Default which utilizes a lot of stylistic choices of older rpgs like 2.5 maps and such which I just love. Overall, the story is going to be the biggest detail here, but having a cohesive combat system where all characters matter is a big sale on my end.