Combat in Mana Khemia is nothing short of fantastic. Your party, at its largest, contains eight people. Two have to totally sit out. The other six are divided into a front/back row setup. The front row is your active party, which appears on the screen during battle. The back row is your "support" party. Here's the fun part: support members jump in and out of battle as you see fit, either to defend or to do a follow-up chain attack. As your characters develop, they can learn different support abilities. For example, one character is able to defend the whole party from an area attack if he is brought out to defend. Before each attack made by an enemy, and after each attack made by you, there is a brief pause in which you can select any one of the three support members to jump in on the action. Of course, there is some "refresh" down-time required for support members. But generally, this keeps the otherwise turn-based system fun and action-packed. The enemies are no pushovers either. Many battles are simply a matter of "kill or be killed," so they are short, but they are also challenging. Gust did an incredible job balancing the difficulty level this time around. And, for those of you who love burst gauges with big, ridiculous special attacks, there's plenty of that here too.
Then there's character growth, which is directly linked to item synthesis. Nobody "levels up" in Mana Khemia. There are no experience points, only "alchemy points" (AP) which you earn in battle and then use in your "Grow Book." The various slots in your license-board-esque Grow Book are filled through three steps. First, you must have unlocked one spot adjacent to the one you want to unlock (with a free center point, like Scrabble). Then, you need to have synthesized the particular item displayed in this point (what that item is varies by character, though there are some shared items). Then, you need to spend AP to "purchase" whatever is on that spot in the grow book. You increase stats, learn abilities, maximize support skills, and even increase the number of hits done per attack, by filling this grow book. Per Gust standards, items become available for synthesis either through the obtaining of a recipe, or making variations upon a recipe, so Gust is able to control just how far your character grows from chapter to chapter. This system works very, very well. It's also addictive, and I found myself frequently checking the Grow Book to see what new slots I'd unlocked.