Well, my idea keeps growing.

I've thought of something that will be easier than combo based combat.

It's button activated attacks.

Simply put, you can hold down a certain direction that you want to attack and it begins a charging sequence, a little slider appears down the bottom and in relation to your weapon's quality rating, the area where there are no negative effects (deflection for under charging and recoil for over charging) enlarges or diminishes.

There are also manual charging attacks, where your character holds the attack, where you press the opposite direction of the attack you want to perform up to three times before pressing the direction to attack.

Pushing two buttons at the same time is a dodging slash, say you press left and right, you slash left but roll right, sort of a feint attack.

You can initiate any of these during combat at any time.

There's more but I have to go.

Why does my time run out so fast?

I'll probably expand on this later.

Mah, I threw that idea out when I remembered Oblivion.

Anyways, the attacks in the previous post are activators.

You can charge the first attack of a combo (manually or using the slider) to initiate to a more devestating effect.
Naturally, charging up attacks takes a while, so there's a charge cancel button (ctrl) which doubles as the block button when not charging attacks.
Simple, eh?

If you want to stagger your opponent to allow for combo chaining, you'll need to charge the first attack. This might lead to charge attack fights but, meh, it'll keep you on your toes. Charged weapons can hold the charge for 10 seconds before having to be recharged, there is a spark (colour based on the contained spirit inside the weapon) at the end of the weapon's surface.

Combo chaining increases your experience multiplier and damage multiplier. Player characters that are the victims of vicious beatdowns gain resilience, so if the chain the same combo twice you can deflect it at any time during the attack.

Bullets can be blocked, but blocking continuously only works if the attacks are hitting continuously. No turtling.

I thought this was a cool idea, but when you block with a magic weapon, you summon a shield.

Manually bringing back the weapon, then charging the opposite direction is a rush attack. If your next enemy is a certain distance away, you can target them and rush them, hitting them with a charge attack. Rush charge attacks activate quicker, allowing you to link them to initiate an aerial combo.
They also do less damage.

To do weapon special attacks, you need to press shift, the soul button, it causes the weapon to glow briefly (in the colour of the contained soul), then you input the code. Once the final button is pressed, the attack initiates.
Depending on the speed you enter the code, it gives you a damage bonus.

I guess that's it really.

Judging by weapon glows, you can prepare yourself for attacks, this way lag doesn't get in the way of prediction too much.

Somebody reply, I need some feedback.

Also, I'm going to have to restore my old hard drive, because it died with the story on board. So it's going to take even longer to post it.
I was hoping to post it today.

Not much time left, again.
Every other mechanic is really story dependant, posting them wouldn't make any sense if I did it.

So hang in there.

I should probably make a new thread and compound my posts.
I doubt anybody is reading these, haha.

That's a lot of words bro