Revisiting the topic of hero advancement, this time for game of shounen genre.
The biggest distinction is that in shounen you just don’t level up until you really need to. Yes, that’s right, you don’t level up until you need to. You can go through a lot, withstand horrible training conditions, overcome hordes of (smaller) enemies, punch the sandbag a million of times, but you don’t automatically gain new abilities or at least you’re not confident enough to show them in public, until you meet an opponent far above your current level, and then you decide: Ok, now I do need to grow. I won’t even give examples here: basically every main hero in every goddamn show has this knack, he grows inconsistently, intuitively, reactively, on-the-fly, on-demand.
Apparently, you should be careful about two limits: the minimum should be possible to boost when you really need to get your friends to go all ‘wow, he’s on a different level now!’; the maximum should be limited to avoid unnecessary godmoding and keep power level elevation on a leash. Let’s just pretend we’re designing a game with this element, so we use the classic pattern of awarding the hero with some growth points for training, for new inventory and for anything else suitable. When the decisive fight starts, the player can decide when to use those growth points to actually grow.
The most important outcome is that the choice of opponents has now story impact. The path that you take, counted in defeated enemies, fully determines the set of abilities you wind up with. In fantasy you grow within an archetype (i.e., an archer or a wizard) and whether you were shooting orcs of giant bees, doesn’t matter. Here it doesn’t matter what your ideal is: the events you participate in and the decisions you take during them — that’s what makes you what you are.
Posted by Radaghast Kary 
