There was a time in my life in which I loved JRPGs. From roughly the age of 8 to my late teens, they always seemed like such a blast. Despite the grinding gameplay and limited to no interaction with the story(which was often nonsensical), none of that mattered. They were FUN. However, as I got older, I began to find them so utterly shitty that now I can only stomach the cream of the crop. I'll start playing, but at the first sign of a cutscene that spews forth nonsense about the lifeline of the Earth or the second I reach the first in the series of a dozen fetch quests, I'm shutting the damn thing off. I'm going straight for my computer and hammering away at my keyboard, listing it up for sale on Craigslist (with a break thrown in in there to laugh at missed connections).

That said, TWEWY promised to be a twist from the regular Square Enix formula. It wasn't a sequel, it had real-time combat, a unique aesthetic - it had potential. In those particular ways, it definitely delivers. The game has a unique style, at times a little similar to the Jet Set Radio franchise from years past. The characters look far less absurd than anything from the Final Fantasy franchise in the past decade. The music is catchy and there's a wide selection of tracks, which you can also purchase in stores.



The combat system was a mixed bag. On one hand, real-time combat with a huge variety of options. On the other hand, you're supposed to be able to control both screens at once, which results in mashing buttons like a little monkey. There's a huge variety of pins, each with their own style of combat. Some require you to tap the screen in certain areas, some require you to press the screen, some require you to draw shapes. One of my pins inexplicably stopped throwing cars, the game hated my circles, and the buttons that required pressing the screen took far too long. Even with those problems, you should be able to find a combat style that suits you.

The mention of the dual screen combat above is because you have a partner in the game. The partner fights on the top screen and you use your directional pad to control them. However, you're so busy controlling the bottom screen that it's almost pointless. You can set your partner to auto-combat, which really confirms that Square Enix at some time during development realized the top screen was damn near pointless.



The levelling system has a few nice touches. While you gain levels constantly, you can lower your level and change your difficulty setting at any point in the game, once you acquire the different settings. If you lower your level and/or raise the difficulty, you receive more item drops. It gives you an incentive to play the game at a harder level instead of powerlevelling and being a little cheeseball nerdlinger throughout the entire experience.

But after all those great changes, Square Enix still has to bring back the bullshit with the story and the mission structure. The story starts with such awesome potential. You start off in Shibuya, but no one can see you. You're given a mission and have a limited time to complete it before you - and all the other players of the game - are wiped out of existence.

However, the cast of characters is very typical of JRPGs: the emo guy, the overly bubbly girl, the jock type of guy...Ugh. And of course they won't shut up, either. To give them their due, there were two or three moments in the game where I thought the backstory was touching and well crafted, but these few moments were so bogged down in the ocean of text that it was painful to wade through it all.

I felt like I finished reading a novel's worth of text in the last act of the game, with less than a dozen interesting lines buried in it all. There's no way to speed up the text or skip a cutscene. And in the earlier parts of the game, if you die during a boss battle, there's no way to restart it without listening to all the monotonous text over again.

Other minor complaints are with the game's emphasis on fashion, including requiring you to convert areas to believe what you're wearing is fashionable to proceed and start bonuses depending on how fashionable you are, problem being, it has no effect on your physical appearance. You always look the same and it's a downer. When a game offers up some ridiculous clothing accessories, I want to make my character look like a massive fruity tool. If a game offers me text options, I'd like them to have some sort of meaning, even if it's a minor effect on the storyline. The world feels static and lifeless, which hurts a game where the storyline has the people changing around you, based partially on your actions.

For fans of JRPGs that enjoy that type of storyline, it'll be a great game. Lots of variety and the newgame+ options are excellent. For myself, it gets a 3/5.

If you want to talk about the game, here's a link to the Nintendo DS thread on our forums.