QTES sounds interesting! Actually, right now I'm thinking of creating Telltale Games-like "choose your own adventure" sections at the start of encounters where the player's narrative choices affect certain factors in a battle, or whether there'll be a battle at all. For example, before a fight, you could order an archer to shoot an arrow at a boss' arm, which results in that boss not being be able to use a certain ability in combat. Something like that anyway :p.
The goal is to have every single encounter in the game be memorable and meaningful, instead of having hundreds of throwaway encounters with monsters roaming the world. This means that there'll be fewer of them than in most games, but I've never liked the repetitiveness of combat in most rpgs anyway.