Super cool battle system! I agree that there's a lot of room for tweaking it until it feels right, but I think the concept of it is definitely really interesting. I think the hallmark of that is that I had times where I hit my own teammate to get them to do an action (I don't know if it was actually the best move, but I really wanted to try it when I saw the targeting reticle appear on them for attacks). The spotlight stealing does seem to be a bit confusing - I think the boss got a string of like, 6 actions in a row (it just buffed), but there's a lot of cool stuff you could do with this. It was interesting to see your inspirations, especially not having heard of either story.