I always thought the alchemy system in Evermore was the coolest and simultaneously the easiest to parse system of magic available: to cast a spell, you use the most appropriate materials, and the number of materials required balanced things, in that you only ever 99 of any ingredient, so if something took 4 of a particular ingredient, you were casting it at most 24 times before the next chance to stock up came along, and other spells might share the same refresh rate if they had a shared ingredient.
It may have been a mistake to let the player command the dog to sniff for ingredients, though. For maximalists, it turned exploration into a tedious slog. Or, I guess I should say even more of a tedious slog, since the undersea caverns connecting the Romanesque desert with the gothic forests exist. For that matter, I was always underwhelmed by the areas depicting the planetary scaffolding, since there really weren’t actual NPCs in it other than Dr. Plot and your antagonist supercomputer.