I'll take a look at KynSNEED cause it does look somewhat promising. Combat looks interesting can't tell if it's turn-based or auto-battle. Also that running a store reminds me of that one game called Recettear, where you played as a girl that runs a shop and barter prices with people while also dungeon crawling for new wares to sell.
The combat is not really either. The closest comparison I've managed to find is the Megaman battle network games. From what I've managed to piece together it is like ATB FF, except you can actually react to shit and you can move somewhat. So you are more engaged without it just being a KH-esque feeling button masher.
I've played Recettear, and I get what you mean. Kynseed feels kind of like if you put every chill sim type idea into one game where you got the farming, the smithing, the people talking, the general store managing (both for smithing and general goods, you can run both stores), and the combat all melded into one game and you can do literally all of it in one singular game if you have the tism to do it all.
This is definitely a game I watch let's play footage of every now and again to gauge how much I'll like it. It feels like a proper evolution of stuff like stardew without just ripping it off and I have just enough tism to deal with stuff like this if the pay off is worth it.
I saw The Last Spell on my steam homepage the other day. I really couldn't make out what it is. It gives me mobile game vibes with the pov a little. Though it having turn based kind of interests me. Also like how the enemies look. It's a weird looking game but got me intrigued a little. Probably watch more gameplay videos to get a feel.
It is more like the FFtactics camera, it is very much not a mobile game at all. I'd say purely combat wise, it is like Disgaea with its weird attack hit boxes for spell attacks and how you can build your characters to do very broken things with the right items, just it doesn't have the Disgaea grinding to get to that point. It almost condenses Disgaea's grind in about maybe a handful of hours.
It is a classical grid turn based strategy RPG, just with a tower defense and base building-esque mechanics on top of the rogue-like shell. The most arguable problem is the difficulty is sort of inverse, unless you play on the harder difficulties beyond the normal one, because the meta progression makes the game steadily easier as you unlock stuff but I know people have managed to beat every single map in one try in a row so with enough skill and knowledge you can beat the "base" difficulty fine.
Game's fun, worth 14 bucks for sure and I don't regret playing it and I'll probably play it some more once I'm tapped out of my current roguelike deck builder binge.
I kind of dab a little into the Trails series with the Cold steel 1 on PSVita years ago. I liked what I played from it with what I recall. I really like how it isn't old school turnbased perse but like this system where you can move around in a ring and use abilities/attacks on enemies weakpoints. Story is kind of cliché but I oddly liked the characters a little. A buddy of mine telling me I need to play the original trials series or something. the one with the redhead and dude in blue shirt or something. Says that one has good story and gameplay. I'll see if it's on sale during the winter sale!
I believe your buddy is talking about Ys as the redhead guy with the main character, Ys is made by the same company but they are not even close to the same game. Ys was practically Dark Souls before Demon Souls even existed, Ys is like SNES era and is still kicking it to this day. My friend plays Ys and I play Trails and we both love our respective Falcom games, but they're very different. Ys I'd say is the more difficult game series based on how my friend has explained them to me, though the newer ones are likely easier to get into.
As for Trails. Trails' first games in every arc are pure set up, and you can sort of feel it in all of them (Though Azure is a little bit snappier, but Azure somewhat relies on context from Sky to feel complete). Cold Steel was actually my first game before I played backwards to Sky, and I kind of just fell in love with the setting actually being a setting and not just a place for actions to happen like many JRPGs. The whole "field trip" gimmick they use actually was a very nice way to introduce new locations across such a huge continent and give you a very solid feel of escalation as you learn about problems in the nation. It also helps segment the large cast so you don't have too many people trying to talk over each other considering Cold Steel 1 has a whooping 12 total playable characters and 9 of them are part of the main group for the entire game. It creates very focused arcs for all the inter party conflicts and developments to occur, like with the noble boy and the ultra aggro nerd with the shotgun.
It has it's cliches (tbh every story does imo), but I think it does them well and I find the Industrial Revolution parallels they try to invoke are interesting for this kind of series of games as most JRPG settings are just anime sword and sorcery shit and tech is just slapped on most the time without really blinking. Most the time high-tech shit in JRPGs is kind of just a thing that happens, but this actually uses it actually be impactful in the world and the story. Entire major arcs and character motivations occur because the rapid expansion and change of the times as industrialization occurred practically overnight, which is a marginally more interesting story then "So we need to defeat God and..." or "We need to stop the tyrant king/overlord/whatever" kind of stuff. It also does a classism story that isn't just purely "noble bad" either, which is quite nice.
If you ever can find time, I'd 100% recommend trying to complete Trails of Cold Steel at some point. For all its anime cliche shit, their is a very real amount of passion put into this project despite it looking like the most standard JRPG ever. I bought the sequel almost immediately after completing the first game due to just wanting to know what happens next.