A JRPG (not SRPG!) where combat is difficult NOT due to levels and stat distribution...

A JRPG (not SRPG!) where combat is difficult NOT due to levels and stat distribution, but rather because of genuine strategy difficulty such as positioning and character placement, meter management, timing, defensive and counter-offensive balance, and unpredictable (or very difficult to predict) enemies WITHOUT relying on grid-based movement.

Does it exist? Name some.

Define SRPG

Some of the Tales of games on higher difficulty. I only same some because more often than not the higher difficulties are mostly for NG+.

There's lots of JRPGs out there with strategic combat systems, you just need to look harder and stop being such a pleb.

Why are you even playing an RPG?

I've played that series to death. I even bought Tales of Zestiria AND Tales of Berseria on release. I never finished either of those two, didn't live up to expectations.

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne on hard difficulty is genuinely hard. I took on the final boss at max level and it still took me 3 or 4 attempts of 1-2 hours each to beat him. I learned afterwards of a strategy that lets you beat him in like 10 minutes, but if you don't look up guides during your playthrough then it's a genuinely engaging challenge

Never touched Berseria but Zestria was fucking terrible. The whole series went into a death spiral after Vesperia with Graces being the only outlier.

Gotcha covered, fam. RNG gonna fuck you up.

IF a cute

...

...

I'm glad she finally got her own game, but…

well, it could've been better.

Where did I indicate any of that?

Well you're obviously a cuckchan/discord/summerfag/goon from a discord so I just assumed you also liked 3DPD

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne.

Don't be cheeky.

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NepNep

You beat me to it, that was my first thought as well.

All I can figure is that OP really cares about formations or something, a la Suikoden.

Grandia.

Does World Ends With You count?
It has a hard as shit skillcap, if you want to ged gud, though you can always cheap out on easy modo, with high ATK/DEF.
But even with a natural progression you can beat the final boss, if you evade hits and just smash. And you can just decide not to raise any stats.

give that girl a sammich.

good luck trying to find those in a regular JRPG. and SRPG is your best bet when it comes to these things m8. best i can think of is saga frontier when it comes to positioning your party members. maybe FF1?
you'll have a much easier time finding these in ARPGs (non turn based JRPGs)

final fantasy romhacks and patches?

Vagrant Story
Sometimes you'd like to put one enemy between another enemy and you, which results in the guy in the middle being attacked. Other times you want to keep away from spellcasting enemies while you deal with the melee ones first, also rushing towards the enemy to avoid breath attacks

You want to keep your risk as low as possible, and your weapon and armor attributes set on your favor.

You can kill any enemy with rightly timed combos and never let it hit you even once.

Your weapon and armor attributes against enemy attributes

Etrian Odyssey, here grinding won't help you if you don't have proper skills builds.

Touhou: Genius of Sappheiros is going to kick your ass sideway.

You need to grind as well as being strategic.

Lunar 1 & 2. While you can overcome most challenges with grinding, you can punch a good 5-8 levels above your weight by playing smart. It's also onetwo of the few JRPGs where you have to think more carefully about the random encounters than the bosses.

The main strategy comes in managing MP over the course of the dungeon, so that you have enough left over to fight the boss. In each battle, you have to carefully consider the trade-offs:
Combine this with the way your characters generally die in 3-5 hits, means you actually have to pay attention to the random encounters.

Actually, one of the best things is that enemies telegraph their attacks with distinct animations, so if you pay attention you can prioritise your targets better.

If only. The systems are there but the games are usually too easy to really exploit it, outside of endgame coliseum fights or the rare difficulty spike.

Mother 3 could be fun if you avoided grinding.

You could always play on Hard Mode with the translation patch. Each character tends to fill a specific role which really shines on a harder difficulty.

The Mother 3 translation had a hardmode? Or are you thinking of Mother 1?

Yeah, from what I remember you access it by naming yourself HARD MODE at the temple in the beginning of the game. Think the game tells you after beating it with the full enemy compendium or something, but it should work even on a new save. Far as I know it most obviously doubles enemy health and tweaks other stats/AI, but it's been a while since my last playthrough.
Mother 1 does get pretty crazy if you play without grinding though, the final dungeon got ridiculous at level 20 or so without Eve.

The core of Touhou Labyrinth's gameplay is cycling your active party and reserve party members intelligently to keep your characters as well rested as you can. Normal exploration involves some of that resource management, but against bosses you'll need to work even harder to keep your active party from collapsing before the boss does. Since there's a total lack of any revival options a character dying means they're not available until you return to town, so losing one really stings.
The second pillar is party building & party strategy, which is somewhat involved since you can bring 4+8 characters to a trip and need to adjust your party and strategy constantly to deal with bosses. Swapping out party members is pretty painless since they get nearly full XP while not exploring.
And you'll still have to grind a bit on top of that.

Whoa, I had totally forgotten about this tidbit. Thanks
Maybe I'll go back to it sometime now

You've probably already played this.

Dropped

Riviera: The Promised Land