SMT DDS is a bit of a grindfest. It and Nocturne are deeper than most RPGs because they push really hard to create situationality in each fight. They push you to make interesting decisions by having the situation change and force you to use all your options. This is accomplished through having strong buffs/debuffs that are temporary and the press turn system.
Buffs in SMT games typically double your damage or whatever other stat for 3 turns. The most powerful ability in SMT3 Nocturne is fog breath, which can reduce the opponent's accuracy to almost nothing. This means keeping yourself buffed, the enemy debuffed, and avoiding the enemy's debuffs eat up up a lot of turns, which you could be doing damage or healing on, and you're perpetually losing your buffs.
Then there's the Press Turn system. Basically, you have a turn token for every party member, you spend them when you do normal actions, but you keep them if you hit an enemy's weakness, or if you pass your turn. Your party acts in a set order, with excess turns rolling over to the first party member. You can't keep a turn token more than once, so at most every member of your party can take 2 turns. Getting extra turns can help your party do a lot more damage, heal more, and get more done in general.
Making it even more complicated, when one member of the party does an action that keeps a turn token, the next one will always spend that turn token, so it falls on the party member after that to do another action to keep a turn token, making it more complicated to get all of your bonus turns.
This means, trying to line up extra turns with party members who need them can be complicated, and since different enemies will have different weaknesses, and your party members have different mixes of elemental spells, the optimal way to retain turns will be changing every battle. Plus your party members need to accomplish other jobs, like healing and buffing/debuffing, and that may fall on the extra turn earner for a particular battle.
Digital Devil Saga has 3 party members, each with a different elemental weakness and resistance. It lets you earn skills from a skill tree and once a character has learned a skill, they can equip it to a smaller list that they're limited to during battles. This is super forgiving, but you still can't have all the skills on everyone, so you need to make tradeoffs, which creates that interesting dynamic with the press turn system.
The standard pattern RPGs tend to fall into is, use your strongest attack, exploit the enemy's weakness, heal when you're low. DDS and SMT3 Nocturne give you convincing reasons to choose differently and it's usually necessary to win.
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