I've brought my love of Culture Brain up before, but they did some interesting things merging RPG, adventure and action genres with some of their games. Oddly enough, you'd think that sort of combining would've caught on. I thought it was pretty cool:
Super Ninja Boy ...
... exploration was handled in traditional JRPG fashion...
... battles are random, but are handled in Beat 'Em Up bout fashion(defeat a number of said enemies to win the battle)...
... but Boss battles are handled in turn-based format...
It's predecessor, Little Ninja Brothers, was similar regarding it's JRPG exploration and turn-based boss battles, but random battles were handled more of a arena bout fashion(sticking you in a larger battle space and letting you go wild with taking out the enemies)...
Interesting thing about those games is, the battlefield space has hazards and power-ups, both of which you can use to your advantage.
^^^ Seriously, I'd LOVE to see a modern JRPG do something similar to that. Not to mention those games were quirky as hell(remind me of the type of humor you see in the Goemon games and Brave Fencer Musashi).
Magic of Scheherazade...
... exploration is very top-down LoZ-esque with room by room based maps...
... while most battles(even boss battles) are fought in real time, sometimes you'd get into a traditional random battle in turn-based fashion...
Flying Warriors...
... side-scrolling action platformer...
... with some boss battles playing out in a sort of early-QTE fighting game(you get signal cues where to hit your enemy and were he's going to hit you)...
... and some boss battles playing out in turn-based RPG fashion...
Shame Culture Brain's really strictly Japanese and are producing nothing but shovelware. They used to have some damn fine ideas.