Last game you DIDN'T finish and your thoughts

- The early-days plots move very slowly, mostly due to the 'quality' of the NPCs.
+ That said, I instantly loved a fair few of the characters.  Therion, Primrose, Cyrus.  
+ A couple of others will grow on you.  I ended up thinking Alfyn's arc was really strong.
- And then you have Ophelia and H'aanit, who stay bobbins throughout.

+ Battle system's pretty okay for a random battle-focussed game.  The 'breaking' mechanic is new and adds a fair amount of strategy.
- Otherwise it is basically turn-based random battles.
- The game misses out quality of life improvements such as being able to alter random battle frequency from the Bravely games.
+ The job system is good, once you unlock it.  It gets even better later on.

- The frequency of random battles is set too high, so that early-game you'll be running into enemies every few steps (or so it felt to me).
- If you try and reduce it, using an ability you learn, you'll find yourself even more underlevelled than you will be anyway.  Make no mistake, the game wants you to take on some of the 'optional content'.  In other words, yes you'll have to grind.

+ The enemy designs are excellent.  Even the pallette-swaps have some nice stuff going on.
+ This counts double for the grotesque bosses, which use some tremendous spritework.
+ In general, it's an absolutely beautiful game.  Call it 'HD2D' or whatever you like, it's just beautiful.  Especially the lighting.  

+ The music is chuffing amazing too.  
? The voice acting is more variable (Cyrus yes Ophelia no), but you do have the option to switch on Japanese voices.

- The dungeon designs are dull as fuck.  Like Final Fantasies of yore, they're mostly just featureless corridors with enemies and treasure in.
- What's worse, they have about five dungeon tilesets.  When you're going through your fifth spooooooky manse, the lighting changes can only compensate for so much.

+ The game lasted me I think 90 hours, and I didn't even reach the endgame.  There's a lot of bang for your buck in here.

+ The stories in general get better as you go through the game.  There are some absolute belters by the time you hit the Chapter 4s, including some awful starts that get redeemed.
- There are lots of side-stories, none of which I cared about.
- The stories seem really quite disparate from each other.
+ They do link up, and when they do it's bloody excellent.
- HOWEVER.  The endgame is chuffing ridiculous.

Story-spoiler-free rant about the endgame:

This game isn't for me, and I struggle to see how the first half (at least) is for anyone.  Part of it's the graphics, sure, and that's for me alone - my dislike of pixel art is well-documented (although I've also picked up Hyper Light Drifter again, and that is a looker ).  But it's also the gameplay, the enemy design, the level design, the humour that isn't, the way enemies respawn pretty much instantly when you let them out of your sight...  The bosses are good stuff, and the music is hummable, although 'excellent' seems to be the current baseline for 2D indie platformer/Metroidvania soundtracks.

I've given this three hours or so, which for an indie platformer ought to feel like I've played enough to make a decision on it.  With Messenger, I know that I haven't played enough to let it play its trump card.  But it plays that card too late, and isn't good enough until then, for me to get there.

I know that Jas really likes this game, and I reckon the likes of Jimbob and Cappa would probably get something out of its retro platform stylee.  Whether they'd forgive the game's other shortcomings is another matter entirely.

The problem with the Switch/eShop's frenetic release schedule (the best kind of problem) is that I don't have time to play as many games as I'd like.  As such, I'd like most of the games that I play to be new ones.  If I'm playing a port or remaster of a game I've played before, I want that game to be an absolute belter.

The World Ends With You was good, perhaps even a belter back in the day; but it also struggles more than most being remade.  It was a posterchild for the DS' bunch of innovative mid-budget games: it used the touchscreen and two screens to create a battle system no other game had before, threw out RPG staples like random battles, and threw in a quirky plot for good measure.  Now, we know the plot twists, we know the battle system.  They're both still good, but they've not got that spark of freshness that elevated the original TWEWY above its competition.

If you're into JRPGs and for some reason didn't play the original (or the iPhone port), and haven't had the story spoiled, I would still recommend picking it up.  It's still unique, apart from earlier versions of itself.  And if I had less games to get through, I'd probably play it; so unlike The Messenger, I'm keeping it around.  I can't see myself being in that position for the foreseeable future, though.

Plus, the stylus I bought to play it has scratched up my screen protector something rotten.

Aces isn't not good, like The Messenger (my opinion #donotsteal); or a remake, like TWEWY.  It's just... eh.

I wanted to give it another go to see if the updates had made it into the world-beater it could have been, and yes, Adventure Mode has gone from annoyance to reasonably fun with the addition of a 'retry' option.  But that's all it is: reasonably fun.  Once I've stopped playing, I have no desire to start again.  The updates haven't done enough for local multiplayer, either: why can't I pick the number of sets?  Why not?  That's ridiculous!

Of the three, I suppose I'm likeliest to pick this up again.  It is new and reasonably fun, and in the Wii U era that would probably have been enough to keep me playing.  This isn't the Wii U era, thank goodness.