Going with an odd pick here, but perhaps my favorite JRPG adjacent game ever is the first Front Mission game (the original SNES version, I have played a fan translation of it through multiple times), followed by Front Mission 3 on PSX. I love Frederick in Front Mission 1, easy to make into a decent melee character and just having a character that’s a random journalist sucked into the fighting changing a lot of the story is pretty cool.
Of course, in Front Mission 3, having Pham in the party is great. She has decent speed for her Wanzer, and getting a free character to follow you around (Pierre) so you can deploy 5 Wanzers instead of 4 is pretty overpowered in a lot of missions when you’re underleveled as well.