If you can keep your characters evenly leveled, Phantom Brave delivers a unique spin on the SRPG.
Marona and Ash are the main characters of Phantom Brave. The story begins with Ash getting killed by a giant monster and turning into a phantom. Some time later, a young girl named Marona wakes up and starts summoning phantoms including Ash. I forget the details of the plot, but you can find out that when you play the game.
When you start a battle, the only character on the field is Marona. To get other characters on the field, you must summon them into different objects on the field, such as a rock, flower, or weapon. What's cool about this is that summoning someone into a rock, for instance, will heighten their defense, attack, and hp, but will kill their speed and magic stats(only for that certain battle). You must decide who and to what object should you "confine" a character to to get the best advantage. This is the first thing you will do when you start a battle. Well what's stopping you from confining everyone at the beginning? summoned characters(everyone except Marona) disappear after a certain amount of turns and cannot be summoned back until the next battle. So this obviously adds another layer of strategy. Another bonus to confining is that you will gain some object specific attacks when you are confined to an object.
And now for the gridless battles. Each character has a radius of movement, and when he or she atttacks, a 3-D hit box will pop up before you attack to show who will be hit with the attack. This is where the game really shines, because it's awesome to see an attack hit 3 different people at once because you threw them together.
The faults start arising when you come to the ice levels. All the terrain on these levels is super-slippery, and you'll be going back just to get to one place to another. In addition to this, if you fall off the edge you lose the movement option for the turn.
Since Marona can and really must stay alive the whole battle, she is usually leveled up greater than everyone else. You can go into a random dungeon option, which has its goods and bads. On the good side, it's a lot funner than going back to previous levels, but on the bad side, it's confusing at first to get out of dungeons, and if you die before getting out, you lose all your experience. Also some of the random dungeons are strangely made where you must stack characters up to get to the enemies, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Phantom Brave is a must have for Strategy RPG fans with its refreshing battle system and long story mode. On the other hand, newcomers will have a hard time getting into the game and furthermore progressing when balancing out characters.