Civ5 has been my favorite in the series. They did a great job with the AI on that one, and it gave the game so much replay value for me.
A lot of great options named in the thread but I'll also add Slice and Dice and Crypt of the NecroDancer. Seconding FTL too, that was one of my top games of the 2010's.
I also recommend Cobalt Core, which is not quite patient as a past November release. Great for FTL fans or anyone that likes tactical card battlers.
I hadn't heard about the charm mods, thanks. Wayward Compass being permanently free by default should have been a thing. If it weren't for the awful map system, I would have felt Hollow Knight was a flawless game.
You're fully clearing Pure Fiction, Memory of Chaos, Swarn Disaster, Divergent Universe, and Apocalyptic Shadow?
HSR has an entire endgame that's nowhere near trivial. There are five different modes at the moment, three requiring two separate teams, that will stretch any player. If you got lucky on your Departure Warp pulling Bronya or Himeko and pulled a good 5* to complement them, then yeah, I could see story fights getting easy.
I didn't like Octopath at all, unfortunately. To me, being round-based puts it a tier below the systems that Final Fantasy X, Trails, and HSR have. I hate speed being a low value stat, and the "guess the weakness" game got old real fast.
I also think Persona's great, though, despite also using rounds. Press Turn, too, which is why I'm looking forward to Metaphor. Atlus is pretty good at encounter design.
I also thought it was too simple when I started. I think it was Belobog's final boss that finally sold me on the system; when a studio nails just a few things, it turns out you don't need a dozen options in your game and it frees up a lot of space for layering in thematic, bespoke mechanics in fights and playing with the encounter design. The break system is an example of one of those things. Cold Steel and Reverie couldn't let the system breathe because the intricate character kits left so much room to over-exploit break periods and make boss fights trivial. Falcom ends up chasing their tail by putting in static refill points at boss HP percentages that disrupt the battle flow and wouldn't have been necessary in the first place if they'd fixed the original problem. (And they still failed at preserving challenge, especially in Cold Steel 3.)
I'm hoping Falcom picked up some tips from HoYo for Kai, as the teams have met before. I'd love to see them take another big swing at a battle sandbox like they did in Reverie. There's so much potential there, and it's something that even a budget-limited studio can pull off.
This game has lived rent-free in my brain ever since playing it. Not always in a good way either, it's some genuine existential horror.
The ethical explorations are interesting too, such as the implications of repeatedly booting up a personality to extract information from it.
I was enthralled by almost every part of my Disco Elysium experience, but it was the main character's past trauma that sticks with me. The phone call, the nap dream--both hit me hard. I'm also gutted that we're probably never going to see another game set in that world again. The global setting concept of Elysium is a stroke of genius as far as I'm concerned.
Hades 2 is excellent so far, by the by.
Had a very similar experience last month starting Honkai Star Rail. HoYo only dropped in a few buttons in its combat too, but all of the surrounding systems and the impeccable encounter design make it insanely deep. It might be the best JRPG-style battle system I've ever played.
I could be wrong about Metaphor's action system, it's just hard to imagine when it's not their primary focus. Or maybe I'm still sour about how Starfield brought on extra gameplay systems from an outside genre and missed badly on them.
I think if there's one thing we can be sure of, it's that this will have a better soundtrack than Dragon Quest XI.
I'm playing Trails through Daybreak now, and it has a similar system at a macro level: starts with action combat and transitions into turn-based. I think between that and the expansive job class system, variety won't be an issue, but I'm hoping there aren't concessions being made on the turn-based side to make the action side work. I can't imagine any scenario in which the action element outright impresses a veteran action RPG player. It'll be simple.
Legitimate Salvage
There's definitely an argument for that, even if it can be hard to see at times because Reverie is all wrapped in the "Cold Steel" software package.
Big part of why I liked Reverie is because I'm a huge fan of Crossbell. Azure is one of my all-time favorite games. Loved Zero, too.