My latest RPG acquisition is Rogue Galaxy, developed by Level-5, the makers of the Dark Cloud series (and co-developers of DQ VIII).  I have to admit I was taken a bit by surprise how much I'm enjoying it.  While I enjoyed their previous games I was never blown away.  But RG is a much more polished and focused game, and benefits greatly from it. 

I'm always particularly impressed when a game comes up with an elegant solution to a problem I've seen in numerous other games.  One such problem is pacing of things like special and team attacks in a real-time combat system (as is increasingly popular these days).  Normally you have to pause and select from a menu, disrupting the flow of combat.  This works, and RG supports it, but the really elegant solution is that under certain conditions your teammates will "suggest" certain kinds of moves or item use and you can approve it or not. 

It's actually an important aspect of this design that the suggestions not always be good.  Plenty of times they are just overkill for the situation, or I think I can pull out a win without consuming as much resources.  But often they flow gracefully into the pacing of the combat, keeping the pace up and reminding me to actually use some of the cool attacks...