6. Crafting
Most games have item crafting systems. And the best ones are quite addictive. You know a crafting system is fantastic when it promotes experimentation. A good system turns into a game in and of itself, encouraging you to pour all of your resources into a given combination to make a more useful weapon, piece of armor, or maybe even a powerful ability. In Star Ocean: The Last Hope, crafting is a tremendous focus of gameplay. You can combine your characters to make new weapons and armor, come up with different recipes for health boosting foods, and synthesize magic cards for casting spells. It's an intricate system that has you spending all of your skill points in one place in hopes of possibly scoring a new weapon that will boost your strength way beyond what it should currently be. But to do that, you'll need to go out into the world and gather the necessary materials. Meaning, you'll be sitting in front of the television screen for quite a while.