In Paladin's Quest, also known as Lennus: Kodai Kikai no Kioku (レナス 古代機械の記憶, "Lennus: Memories of an Ancient Machine") in Japan, our young hero Chezni, on a bet, enters and explores a forbidden tower and manages to activate an ancient machine deactivated 10,000 years ago. Naturally, he spends the next two and a half hours trying to figure out how to turn it off again.
This RPG is unusual because the player's health is used to cast magic spells, so there is no separate "MP" stat in this game. Rather than having a list of spells you learn, you instead gain the skills of several spirits; each spirit has its own spell, or you can combine two spirits to make a different spell. (In this run, you'll mostly see Chezni use the Fire Spirit, especially since repeated use of a spirit makes its magic stronger.) You can also recruit mercenaries to join your party at different points in the game, similar to The 7th Saga.
The author, janus completes this game an amazing 24 minutes faster than the previous run, largely due to massive use of AtkBack which makes enemies take a fraction of the damage that they inflict on the player. With this spell, the end bosses basically beat themselves up! There is also much more manipulation to minimize the number of random encounters. See the submission comments for more details.