Cloud rolls 20s

It seems like forever since we first played the first Final Fantasy. You just gained 67XP. Black Mage levelled up.

Then Diablo. You killed a skeleton. 120XP. Level up. New moves available.

Then even Pokemon. Pikachu gained 500XP. Pikachu levelled up. Pikachu is turning into an even larger rat thing. Congrats.

WOW. Your paladin gained 30XP. Paladin levelled up. Now you can buy those new skills.

...You get the point. Character progression in MANY games has been completely based on this original levelling up system. You are almost guaranteed of seeing this format in any modern RPG, and if you don't, then it's not worth playing (apparantely).

While tried and true, this would be an awesome spot for an innovation. Completely revolutionise character progression in RPGs. My problem is... I can't really think of how this could best be accomplished. A lot of other games have attempted something new though. Maybe I can find something by comparing all of them.

Final Fantasy X did something pretty different from the other FF games. It introduced the sphere system, where you could level up by going down a hierarchical tree. One part of the tree may be "increase HP by 50", which would then flow on to more related skillsets and rewards.

God Of War, rather than instantly giving you experience, has you trawling the environs for red orbs to power up your chains and your combos. You also get them for killing enemies.

Older shooter games such as UN Squadron on Super Nintendo and Raptor for PC had you shooting down planes and missile sites in order to get money. This money could be used to increase your power at the end of a level, buy new weapons etc.

One of the more original ideas I've seen recently was in a game called Dawn Of Mana for the PS2. Rather than the character gaining a whole level, the character has certain attributes which level up eg. HP and attack. The more of certain coloured medals are collected, the more the corresponding attribute levels up.

I guess to be completely different you'd have to push past this extremely popular mechanic. Maybe instead of levelling up, the character may need to keep doing certain things in order to prevent levelling down. This probably wouldn't be fun at all, but it would be something different. This is an area I'll keep thinking on for a while to come.