Best RPG Battle Systems

[Flaming Ice]

Tales of Xillia has perhaps the most refined battle system in the Tales series and it's great. Resonance of Fate is smurfing fabulous, surprised nobody else has mentioned it yet.

Played that game a bit but wasn't fully sure what was going on

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I forgot about Resonance of Fate! That game's battle system was a lot of fun. I need to sit down and continue playing it again. Or start over since I haven't played it at all in like 2 years.

[Polnareff]

Breath of Fire III, for the master system and the dragon genes. Any character in the game could be a powerhouse, even Nina.

Grandia, for having real-time elements in it.

Namco X Capcom/SRW Endless Frontier/Project X Zone because of the fast-paced combos.

[Jiro]

I forgot about Resonance of Fate! That game's battle system was a lot of fun. I need to sit down and continue playing it again. Or start over since I haven't played it at all in like 2 years.

The plot makes no sense regardless, so don't worry about starting again.

[krissy]

ff13 and 13-2

[Hollycat]

ff13 and 13-2

[Polnareff]

Thought of 2 more. Legaia and its sequel, and Tales of Rebirth. Tales of Rebirth, to me, still has the best battle system in Tales' history.

[black orb]

>>> Star Ocean games have the best RPG battle system..

[Vyk]

Thought of 2 more. Legaia and its sequel

Called it ^_^

[Loony BoB]

ff13 and 13-2

Actually, XIII-2 is a good shout. I didn't think of it when going through this thread until Mirage mentioned it, and it was certainly a notable enough difference to XIII with the pet system it added. I really enjoyed it. FFX is a good shout, too. I also quite enjoyed the battle systems in Grandia and Grandia II. Of the old school systems, probably FFV or FFVII, and FFXI was a great system, too.

[DMKA]

Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy XIII-2 has pure sex for battle systems.

[Pike]

I enjoyed the FFX battle system quite a lot. Just sitting there switching guys in and out without losing a turn was great.

[Skyblade]

I enjoyed the FFX battle system quite a lot. Just sitting there switching guys in and out without losing a turn was great.

The character switching was great. It was such a blast to edit your team on the fly, switching them out to handle threats. It was nice to finally be able to use your entire team, even if you could only handle a few of them at once.

[Edge7]

I'm a huge fan of the battle systems for (in no particular order):

Grandia: It felt like a more tactical look at the ATB system FF introduced.

Personas 3 and 4: Exploiting enemy weaknesses while defending your own is goven even more priority.

Valkyria Chronicles: More Strategy RPGs should adopt this format; it feels really smurfing good to have this sort of control over my units.

Vagrant Story: Chaining moves, and using defensive counter moves with RISK penalties, having individual body parts suffer from damage, all really clever.

Parasite Eve: I'm a huge fan of the first game's battle system, it has the same fun that action games poses when you have to analyze a boss's attack patterns to succeed.

Final Fantasy XII: I love the real-time model.

Valkyrie Profile: I love having to max the combo meter to chain together special attacks with different characters. The more ways I learn how to utilize character attacks, the more addicting it gets.

Tales Series: Used to be Abyss, my current favorite is Xillia. Xillia's AD skills are just so expansive and do so much for each character, I love it.

Chrono Cross: As much as I can't get into the game's story, I really like the complexity of its battle system. Although I'd probably pull my hair out when trying to get the game's good ending.