I’m currently playing Xenoblade Chronicles and I also played Final Fantasy remake and Golden Sun recently and all of them have wildly different combats. Which got me thinking what JRPG out there had the best combat? This doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily your favorite JRPG as well.
My favorite is Persona 5. I just love figuring out what the weakness of the enemy may be and making sure to arrange my party in such a way that I can handle most combats very easily.
Turn-based: Bravely Default. A stellar evolution of FF5 that gives you so many toys to play with, and the titular Brave/Default mechanic opens up a lot of cool ideas just by giving you flexibility in when to take your turn. Specifically BD1 and Second though, I felt like BD2 was a massive step back by trying to introduce a turn order system at the expense of no longer queueing everyone together at once.
Action: Tales. Hard to pick just one, and there are still a bunch I haven’t played, but I think I’ll go with Vesperia specifically for all the advanced tech it allowed for.
Honorable mention to CrossCode as well, but I know someone’s gonna debate whether it counts as J or if it’s just sparkling Secret of Mana.