Rather than letting you spam powerful spells and abilities every turn, it makes you act frugally by forcing you to regenerate AP before casting off anything besides a basic command.
Adventures to Go! uses a similar system, though less traditional: the combat is grid-based, and it costs AP (Action Points) to do
anything, even turn to face a different direction. And every unit regenerates AP automatically on their turn.
Kingdom Hearts: Re:Coded came out in Japan on Thursday.
-What I can understand of the story (here I'll note that playing the game in Japanese makes it at least fifty times better than it would be in English due to not being able to understand what's going on) seems to be yet another retread of the first game.
-The basic gameplay is nothing new. They did keep status effects from
358/2 Days, which is nice, and the Command Deck system from
Birth by Sleep is in this as well.
-The difficulty system allows for the same kind of customization
The World Ends With You had, but goes even farther - you can alter the difficulty from the get-go, but unlike that game, you don't have to unlock higher settings, so I've been playing on Critical Mode since the beginning. There are a few other things you can modify later on.
-The growth system is like that of
358/2 Days in that grinding would be pointless (I'm only level nine in the fourth world of the game, and doing fine).
-The biggest change I've seen is the mix of different genres into each area; one world has you fighting turn-based battles (which are similar to what Weegee described in that you can't run or target specific enemies; however, it does feature timed button presses
a la Mario RPGs), while another's boss area is a sidescrolling platformer (forced-scroll, sadly), and there's even one boss level that's an old-school
Space Harrier-style rail shooter.
-There are also some tag-mode systems that will unfortunately not see much use when the game comes out in English in January.