It's honestly falls somewhere between an action rpg and a turn-based rpg. Action is all real-time without any turns (except for special chain attacks), but it's not like you're actually swinging the sword yourself or anything.
I really wouldnt call it an action rpg. You can move during battle as do the enemies, but thats pretty much it.
Theres no actual collision detection, so timing and whether or not an attack actually hit isnt based off of an attack making contact with an enemy (Or the other way around)
Its based on whether or not the area of effect contains the object to be hit, at the moment of the button press. And... Thats it.
So, to provide an example, take a move with a long windup animation time, like the monado buster, shulk slowly extends the monados energy blade, then in a dramatic sweeping motion brings it smashing down.
The area of effect of this attack is a straight line in front of shulk. All enemies in that line will be hit. However, the enemies keep moving during this long animation. Often times they move clean out of the way of the attack animation.
But they still get hit, because its not a real time battle system.
Conversly, if shulk performs the buster, and a bunch of enemies wander into the animation, they wont get hit, because they werent in the area of effect when the button was pressed and what gets hit was calculated... because its not a real time battle system.
The simplest way I can explain it, is its the chrono trigger battle system (Even has the same battle planner), where enemies moved in real time during battle, but now the player party can move as well, and intead of an atb bar applied to when the character can perform an action, its applied to each individual action .
