kazrikna

You should look into a couple of games that I've found to have a really good battle system that does utilize defense. The battles aren't always meaningful, but the unimportant ones are usually very quick.

Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis
Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy

Both are PS2 games, the PSP versions are sub-optimal.

You have 3 characters up front and 3 characters backing them up. The backing characters have to charge for a certain amount of time being in the back before they can be brought forward. The interesting thing is in how they're brought forward. To get the really high damage attacks, you attack with one of your front characters, then chain to a back character to deal extra damage. If you use all 3 backing characters, it can do tremendous damage with the Variable Strike attacks. If you use them for attacking though, you lose the ability to use them for defense. Any time one of your front characters is attacked, you can swap a backing character in to take the damage. As your characters get stronger, they have added abilities that can shield the entire party from damage, or strengthen them in another way when swapped in defensively. It becomes very strategic on if you have weak characters that might need protecting in the front vs. saving them to do damage to the enemy, and some enemies require you to go all out with combos in attacking them to even damage them, so you have to get your defenses into a position so you can last a few rounds of pounding after you do a large attack.

The other ones to try would be the Grandia series, which lets you utilize your attacks to cancel the enemy's attacks if you time it just right.