Inspired by this post describing good battle systems I was inspired to write a similar post about leveling systems. Just like that post I'll be listing 4 of my favorite unique ways games had you build your characters up.
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Kingdom Hearts Re:coded has the Stat Matrix which is legitimately one of the most interesting leveling systems I've seen. Basically you have "CPU" spaces with nodes in between. As you level up and explore you'll get various chips and such and once you place them you can't remove them. You can swap them out but you can't replace them. What makes it interesting is if you fill in every space between two CPU spaces, which are unlocked via story progress, every chip in the intervening spaces will have its effect doubled. Have 5 level up chips in between? Now you get 10 levels. Attack boosted by 4 points? Now it's 8. It's a fun way to strategically place your stat boosts in a way that benefits you.
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NEO The World Ends With You has the Social Network, which is a character relationship chart between all the player and non-player characters as some games have, but it's also your skill tree. As you progress through the game and meet more people around Shibuya you'll unlock new connections and new nodes in the tree, and the various nodes have useful rewards to advance. It's a fun way that reflects the nature of the series showing that your world expands the more people you know while applying it to tangible gameplay benefits as well.
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Rogue Galaxy has two unique systems to mention here. First is the Revelation Flow which is a grid you place the right items and such on to improve your characters traits and abilities, which is a fun way to reward exploration and such. The other is the Weapon Synthesis system, where you level your weapons up by merging them together in the right ways to constantly improve them. Definitely a hidden gem with plenty of great ideas, as expected from Level-5.
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Tales of Xillia introduced the Lilium Orb system. This is effectively a spider web grid, and you use Growth Points to get nodes, and connect paths as you unlock more nodes. These nodes grant stat boosts and new artes, and the more nodes you connect the more the grid expands. There are also sometimes skills inside the boxes of the grid, which require all four corners of the box to be connected to unlock them.
Honorable mention goes to Final Fantasy X and its Sphere Grid, which if you put in the work lets any character learn any skill and lets you customize it a bit yourself by putting certain spheres in the empty nodes. Very fun idea, but also didn't want to make the list TOO Square Enix-centric.
So what are some of y'all's favorite unique leveling systems in RPGs? Let me know, I'd love to get some suggestions of what to play!
