There's this PSX game called Legend of Legaia that's a guilty pleasure of mine and I can't help but replay every couple of years. While it has its moments, for the most part it's just your standard jRPG story and art wise and I'd say it's just mediocre as a whole. That said, it's the fights what makes me come back to it since its combat system is something I haven't really seen in other jRPGs.
Instead of a standard attack command, each character had an action bar that was longer or shorter depending on their agility that you filled with each individual movement the character would use in his attack. You could use high kicks, low kicks, weapon arm or Ra-Seru (something related to the story) arm. I remember the game took into account things like low kicks usually missing when trying to hit flying enemies, high ones sucking against short enemies, etc. And then when you gave the orders to every character a combat round would be executed by all characters in the battle.
But what mattered most was that different chains of movements could end up in a combo/special attack. So for example, with the main character high k., low k., high k. would have the character execute a low kicks, a high kick and the third one would be the sommersault special attack. And you could chain those combos as long as your action bar was long enough or you used combos that required short enough input chains. You also needed energy called AP to be able to use the combos, each one requiring a specific amount of AP. And the only normal ways of restoring it were either receiving damage or using an action called Spirit that restored a decent amount of AP, halved the damage the character would take that round, increased the chances of the character blocking (frontal) attacks that round and increased the action bar over its normal maximum for the next character's next attack.
The combos and special attacks you discovered were fortunately stored in a list you could easily access during battles as can be seen in the second screenshot above. You found them either discovering them in battle using them, talking with NPCs or in the case of some special attacks using books. Oh, and there is an "Auto" command in battles that makes the character just attack the selected enemy using whatever inputs it wanted (very useful to make trash mob fights more bearable) that could also discover the combos, but that last one was obviously completely random.
Overall the system could feel cumbersome in random battles, though they could be made more bearable with the Auto command since then you could just focus on watching the flashy fights, yet when you were presented with even moderately decent challenging ones and especially some boss battles it could get very rewarding since you had to plan pretty well your moves. Deciding when to not waste too many APs, have one character use items or magic instead of using the physical attacks, or when you used Spirit to either increase your action bar's length at the right moment or minimize the damage you could receive were sometimes critical for survival.
And of course a big part of the reward is seeing the sweet moves in action.
As a teenager I was mesmerized by how cool they looked, pulling off the animu magical kung fu Dragon Ball look pretty well, but even after so many years I still find them pretty damn satisfying to look at.
Another system that was a little bit different from usual was the magic. Magic was done exclusively through summons and the only way of getting those summons was by absorbing the monsters you could later summon. So when you fought an enemy that had an element symbol next to its name, if the character who dealt the finishing blow to the monster didn't know that summon already, there was a change that the character would absorb that monster. And then you could level up the spells by using them, which would make their damage or effect stronger and eventually start giving them special effects. For example, healing spells would not only heal more damage as they leveled up, would they would also start healing increasingly dangerous status effects.
Of course there were two big drawbacks to the magic system. The first one being that since the absorptions were random, getting all three characters to learch each "spell" could get pretty annoying. The second and most obvious one being that since these are all summons they all had an unskipable animation every time you used them, which could easily get very annoying in the case of the longer ones. At least the game didn't really require to use magic often besides maybe healing spells. And some of them were pretty cool.
That's all. As a last note, while not related to interesting mechanics, I find the game's soundtrack pretty good and I always loved how not only the weapons, but also every single armor piece looked different on the characters' models.
Instead of a standard attack command, each character had an action bar that was longer or shorter depending on their agility that you filled with each individual movement the character would use in his attack. You could use high kicks, low kicks, weapon arm or Ra-Seru (something related to the story) arm. I remember the game took into account things like low kicks usually missing when trying to hit flying enemies, high ones sucking against short enemies, etc. And then when you gave the orders to every character a combat round would be executed by all characters in the battle.
But what mattered most was that different chains of movements could end up in a combo/special attack. So for example, with the main character high k., low k., high k. would have the character execute a low kicks, a high kick and the third one would be the sommersault special attack. And you could chain those combos as long as your action bar was long enough or you used combos that required short enough input chains. You also needed energy called AP to be able to use the combos, each one requiring a specific amount of AP. And the only normal ways of restoring it were either receiving damage or using an action called Spirit that restored a decent amount of AP, halved the damage the character would take that round, increased the chances of the character blocking (frontal) attacks that round and increased the action bar over its normal maximum for the next character's next attack.
The combos and special attacks you discovered were fortunately stored in a list you could easily access during battles as can be seen in the second screenshot above. You found them either discovering them in battle using them, talking with NPCs or in the case of some special attacks using books. Oh, and there is an "Auto" command in battles that makes the character just attack the selected enemy using whatever inputs it wanted (very useful to make trash mob fights more bearable) that could also discover the combos, but that last one was obviously completely random.
Overall the system could feel cumbersome in random battles, though they could be made more bearable with the Auto command since then you could just focus on watching the flashy fights, yet when you were presented with even moderately decent challenging ones and especially some boss battles it could get very rewarding since you had to plan pretty well your moves. Deciding when to not waste too many APs, have one character use items or magic instead of using the physical attacks, or when you used Spirit to either increase your action bar's length at the right moment or minimize the damage you could receive were sometimes critical for survival.
And of course a big part of the reward is seeing the sweet moves in action.
As a teenager I was mesmerized by how cool they looked, pulling off the animu magical kung fu Dragon Ball look pretty well, but even after so many years I still find them pretty damn satisfying to look at.
Another system that was a little bit different from usual was the magic. Magic was done exclusively through summons and the only way of getting those summons was by absorbing the monsters you could later summon. So when you fought an enemy that had an element symbol next to its name, if the character who dealt the finishing blow to the monster didn't know that summon already, there was a change that the character would absorb that monster. And then you could level up the spells by using them, which would make their damage or effect stronger and eventually start giving them special effects. For example, healing spells would not only heal more damage as they leveled up, would they would also start healing increasingly dangerous status effects.
Of course there were two big drawbacks to the magic system. The first one being that since the absorptions were random, getting all three characters to learch each "spell" could get pretty annoying. The second and most obvious one being that since these are all summons they all had an unskipable animation every time you used them, which could easily get very annoying in the case of the longer ones. At least the game didn't really require to use magic often besides maybe healing spells. And some of them were pretty cool.
That's all. As a last note, while not related to interesting mechanics, I find the game's soundtrack pretty good and I always loved how not only the weapons, but also every single armor piece looked different on the characters' models.
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