These games have some rather thoughtful design, which isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words "JRPG-inspired."
The comedy, meanwhile, is pretty poor, but the text scrolls rapidly.
Played through BoD7, and pretty much this -- the jokes are pretty stale "silent protagonist"/"sewer dungeon" fare, but the battle system is actually quite clever.
You can save anywhere, and your health recharges fully at the end of battle. Your MP recharges PARTIALLY at the end of battle; the quicker you finish, the more MP you get back.
The save-anywhere/automatic full HP combo makes for random battles that tend toward the bitch-ass hard.
Other things that affect battle strategy: dead characters automatically get revived with full HP at the end of battle, and still gain XP. And enemies do progressively more damage the longer the fight goes on -- so there's no such thing as a Dragon Quest Last Boss-style "just hold out for 45 minutes while chipping away at him" battle; if you take too long you're going to get wiped out.
Your power also builds, as physical attacks chain and increase damage. A Heal spell breaks the chain, meaning there are times you need to decide whether you want to lose your momentum to heal, or risk dying to deliver a chain-ending coup de grace.
And there's only one kind of item, the Potion; it heals, revives, and cures status. They're not sold in stores.
There's also a rudimentary skill tree which I quite like. At each level you're given a choice between two upgrades -- sometimes you choose between an attack that targets one foe for heavy damage or all foes for light damage; sometimes you choose between physical and magical stat upgrades. One of the more interesting choices is between giving the Heal spell the power to revive, or making it so it doesn't break physical attack combos. It's pretty much a bare minimum of what constitutes a skill tree, but in its simplicity it still accomodates quite a variety of potential play styles.
And so does the equipment -- while the two fighter characters have pretty straightforward each-is-better-than-the-previous equipment, the other two characters have a bit more variety. Sara gets different rings that raise different stats, meaning one often won't be definitively better than another; and whassername the gunner (Liana?) gets different guns with different attacks -- do you want to do light damage to all enemies, heavy damage that ignores defense on one enemy, moderate damage to 3 random targets, ...?
Oh, and while the encounter rate's a little too high for my tastes, there's a limit on how many random encounters you can have in a given area. Run into enough monsters and you won't randomly encounter any more (though if you want to grind or whatever, you can always select Fight from the menu and force one).
On the whole it's really a very well-thought-out game, and it's interesting to see how relatively minor changes like these can vastly improve a tired formula.
Haven't played Cthulhu yet; will give it a shot one of these days.
