A temporal (sort of) question
 

I have noticed that the vast majority of console RPGs use some manner of turn-based combat mechanic. At first, I thought it was because developers and programmers couldn't figure out how one player could control a party of, say, four characters in realtime combat.
Then the X-Men: Legends series came out, demonstrating that someone had overcome that particular hurdle. So now I find myself wondering: given that it has been figured out, will we see this mechanic (or something similar) in other RPG titles?

I certainly would welcome this. Combining the fun Combat System of Tales of Symphonia with the 3D romaning of X-Men Legends would WIN.

The only downside is that the AI has to be somewhat sophisticated, otherwise you'll have a Star Ocean 3 where you choose which character gets raped by lizard men.

Even though Grandia 2 and 3 are turnbased, they would sort of give the illusion of real time if the action didn't freeze for your character's turns and you had to choose your actions with no pause.

But yeah, if Tales games were in full 3d rather than one plane battles, that would probably be the closest thing we have so far.

I hope not. I enjoy the pacing turn based combat offers and it is one of the main aspects that draws me to the genre. And I've also come to realize that a lot of real-time RPG battles tend to degrade into using a few moves over and over again. Turned based combat tends to offer more variety since a time equation for abilities can be ignored.

Play Valkyrie Profile...Full control over your entire party once combat starts. The possibilities for combos are crazy. At the same time though, it retains some of the "normal" turn-based qualities (magic-users need to recover, use a turn to use a healing item). Same for Chrono Trigger, which has the ATB bars going at the same time and takes positioning/team attacks into account.

I agree with the Star Ocean thing from earlier...Better AI is needed for games where the CPU has control over the party. The AI in 'Till the End of Time was atrocious.

I personally like turn-based battles. I only dislike them when they get stale via the game, either by not having enough characters to control (3 characters in a straight-forward battle system isn't nearly enough...I would've loved to have seen Chrono Trigger with 4-5 characters) or stupidly repetitive actions with little challenge involved (I had to stop playing Wild Arms 3 because it got to be mind-numbing). Suikoden is probably my favorite example of turn-based battles: LOT's of stuff going on with six playable characters and an auto-battle option.

When I picture straight-up real time RPG combat, I just think of something like Final Fight or Gauntlet, where the combat gets stale after a couple of minutes and just resembles more of an action game. Someone mind explaining the X-Men Legend mechanics?

I liked how KOTOR's battles were setup. It was turn based, but everything was selected in real time. Though you could also pause it if you wanted. It let you play it whichever way you preferred.

Actually I never had any problems with the AI in Star Ocean. None of my characters was "Raped by the lizardmen" as you stated. of course I'm a stats whore and use much extra time to level in an area and get all that is there.

I like the battle system for Growlanser a lot. It's real-time and in GL2 with the 8-char team is really fun.

Very disappointed with the 4-char team n GL3. And disappointed that no more Growlansers here.