Before I go back to my work, which is going to take the rest of the day to finish, I thought I'd leave yall with a commentary on one of my favorite jrpgs, Growlanser 3.

Growlanser 3, released in the US as part of a collection with Growlanser 2, was the final localization done by Working Designs, the company that pioneered independent localization of jrpgs in the US (up until then, most had been localized by Japanese companies or the console first-party company).  It is the prequel to 1 and 2 (a battle about midway through 3 results in the world you see in 1 and 2 and remains as a legend to the people there), and often competes with IV for being considered the best game in the series.

In Growlanser 3, the sun is dying, famine is rampant, rain falls eternally at some places and hardly at all in others.  Plague has destroyed entire nations, and those that remain are fighting ferociously for the few places where the land is still fertile.  Assassination, genocide, and cold realpolitik have hardened the hearts of leaders, and the people that remain are growing increasingly desperate, further fueling the flames of war.

Into this comes Slayn, a young man with no memories and a talent for Darkness magic, accompanied by a Dark Fairy (fairies in the Growlanser universe are usually sentient concentrations of elemental spirits in a tiny female form), enters the scene about this time.  As she tries to discover the truth about himself, he gets caught up in the war and ends up seeking the causes behind the slow death of his world.

Growlanser's signature battle system is a combination of RTS and ATB systems, where your characters each have a speed that determines how fast their turn comes up.  Motion across the battlefield is in real time (based on that character's stats), and in order to engage an enemy, you have to bring them within range.

Magic in this game starts out as simple elemental spells, which increase in power as you chant them longer (based on the character's ability, you will be limited in how high the level you can reach with that character at any given time) and are one of only a few ways in which you can ignore range issues.  The reason this is important is that, in order to get the true ending (where certain characters survive where they would normally die), you must get a 'mission complete' on every single story battle.  Since doing so often requires preventing the massacre of running civilians or preventing the escape of a particular enemy, range becomes a serious issue from the beginning, so strategically utilizing magic and having some idea of how long it will take your characters to reach an enemy and move after they attack is important. 

Choices in this game have a huge potential variance, depending on how you've shaped Slayn's personality (through early on choices and a certain event which lets you shape his base personality and capabilities).  If he is cold and rational, you will find yourself unable to make enraged conversational choices, and if he is hot-blooded, you will find it impossible to make Slayn take the high road in some situations. 

Story-wise, this game manages to touch human emotion in a way I think newcomers to jrpgs will be surprised at.  Growlanser 3's world is dying, and most of the world is already dead.  As a result, you find yourself walking through the aftermath of plagues, witnessing massacres, and overall confronting both the best and worst of human nature when put into an extreme situation.  For a jrpg, this kind of display of human weakness is fairly unusual, since most tend to strike an optimistic note in that sense, but this is actually typical on some levels for the series.  In Growlanser 2, it is quite possible to side with the villains (given that you've fulfilled the proper conditions), and Growlanser IV's world isn't exactly kind to its people, even aside from the bigger issues. 

The visuals in this game were done by Urushihara Satoshi, who also handled such anime as Bubblegum Crisis, Queen's Blade, and Plastic Little.  As such, they are aesthetically pleasing, even now that the basic style has changed radically (this guy has a great aesthetic sense... though he is a bit overly ero-ero, from what I remember of Legend of Lemnear). 

Overall, if you want to start looking back into the past of jrpgs, this is a good game to start with (though at this point, you'll probably be forced to use an emulator).