what if, combat rhythm game where the incentives for effective combat also incentivise interesting music, but in a more free-form manner than just "this move is a primer", "this move is a finisher", "this move is a parry",
spitballing mechanics:

• if you're on the beat consistently you get a damage bonus, but if you go for too long then the enemy will just be able to block/parry
• doing something on a half-beat counters an attempted parry, maybe also gives you a damage multiplier
  • or maybe some chaining counter-riposte thing - they parry you and attempt a riposte, but you hit on the off-beat to parry the riposte. Maybe both strategies work?
• idk, bonuses for chaining rapid hits / pauses at interesting times, different instruments?
• and each enemy type could have different strengths, that would lead to overall different-sounding combat (e.g. this one learns your rhythm quickly so you'll get parried quicker, that one isn't staggered easily and hits hard so you need to follow their music and attack infrequently)

Every single character has their own unique super power, similar to what superheros do. Even better, every single individual in the universe develop this super power in puberty, and then spend most of their life honing this skill.

It's also colourful and all the characters have completely oversized eyes, especially on characters where they want to emphasis the cuteness. Everyone's got technicolour hair and over the top hairstyles.

You can also measure the power level of certain characters by their hair.

There's also just anime as fuck fight scenes at times:

I mean, it's mostly a slice of life show, so don't get the wrong impression. But I find it sad people are so dismissive of a setting where basically every single character has a super power. Like, episode one of the show establishes that one character can move the sun, while another the moon. Things go bad when they fight, for obvious reasons.

Honestly, not even the show itself does as much as it should with this stuff, tbh. Most characters are pretty complacent and only use their power to make their everyday better. But there are characters who use theirs for more at times.

It's kinda telling that the spin-off with humans is basically a magic girl/super hero show.

Starting a new playthrough of Pokemon Black 2 and I was faced with what seemed like a throw away line... it's not a point that the game delves on, and I'm not sure if it's ever brought up again in the entire series.

But in that line is a realization: Field Research.

Bianca mentions that it's good that you're out there with the pokedex in order to update the habitat information.

Like, I know on the face of it the line exists to hand-wave why pokemons that previously didn't exist in the region, or lived in different parts of the region, now are where they are. But on a practical level, the more I thought about it the more sense it made.

Like, if pokemon living habitats are as volatile as implied, then it makes perfect sense why you'd constantly need to have people out in the field to update the information. Which in turn leads to why it makes perfect sense why the professors are exploiting cheap child/teen labor to get it done.