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TWEWY is a bold game that has a lot of things to say about the JRPG, and I for one hope that the industry listens. In one fell swoop, it has changed the possible topography of the genre by giving the player an unprecedented amount of choice. However, this isn’t the Morrowind-style sense of freedom that includes a large world and nonlinear storyline.

In TWEWY you’re still doomed to follow one predetermined (and mostly unremarkable) storyline, and the overworld is actually pretty tiny and limited. The exciting options here all have to do with catering to your own personal play style. At the same time, you’re able to push yourself to your limits while going through the game relatively stress-free. For one thing you can tweak the difficulty level to a very fine degree, and the scope of possible difficulties increases as you level up. You’re rewarded with higher drop rates based on how high you set the difficulty level. And what about this “stress-free” business? Well, almost every battle is optional and self-contained, and after each one you and your partner regain full HP. It’s just about the polar opposite of the item-management and save-point-questing emphases of dungeon crawlers like Persona 3.

As for the core gameplay, it feels fresh and challenges your perception in new ways. It’s the only DS game I can think of that makes you actively pay attention to both screens so intensely. To succeed in battles, you’ll have to tap and scratch the touch-screen furiously while also completing simple patterns on the dpad. You’re on the bottom screen while your partner is on top, and you share the same health bar and fight against the same enemies on both screens simultaneously. While you could set your partner to “auto” or just mash the dpad left or right, you’d be missing out on the full experience (and unleashing far fewer of the devastating “fusion” attacks). Unfortunately there are some issues where one touchscreen based “skill” will be mistaken for another, or will activate instead of making your character run around the screen as intended, which make some of the “pins” (equippable skills) nearly worthless. This is probably the biggest hiccup in an otherwise frantically enjoyable battle engine. Most rewarding is finding pins that suit your play-style best and combining them in ingenious ways.

So between the wealth of choices regarding gameplay and the fun skill-based battle system, much of the typical JRPG tedium has been erased in the TWEWY model. If you don’t want to grind, you can just make the difficulty level easier. If you do want to grind, it’s actually fun. If you want to reduce the grind while still reaping the benefits, you can fight a handful of super-hard battles rather than slogging through a bunch of stupidly simple encounters. It sounds like a gamer’s paradise, right? Well it almost is, but TWEWY still suffers from some age-old JRPG bugaboos.

As stated before, there are some inaccuracies in touchscreen use, and setting your partner to “auto”, while boring, will get you through most battles. Another annoyance is the “brand” system which makes you constantly change your equipment to guarantee stat bonuses in particular regions of the map. Its purpose is to make sure you buy from a wide variety of venders, but it ultimately becomes a tedious matching game. As for the story, it delivers some surprisingly insightful messages (”expand your mind to different viewpoints and learn from rather than use people”) but presents them in a hackneyed way. Not only that, but it becomes convoluted for convolutions’ sake in the grand tradition of Final Fantasy VII. Neku becomes a likeable character, but the game failed to make me care about his fate. Also tiresome are the fetch-quests and embarrassingly simple puzzles that must be cleared to advance the story. Finally, there is the issue of the music. I enjoy some tunes, but many are short loops. The soundtrack is all shimmer and surface, a mix of randomly hybridized rock, pop, and electronica numbers slightly reminiscent of Persona 3’s. I mostly enjoyed the music, and I give the developers credit for avoiding dedicated themes for battles, menus, etc, but it could have been much more.

As with many revolutionary games, TWEWY manages to innovate and improve, but can only do so much. If it had a powerful storyline, greater non-linearity, tighter controls and smart puzzles it could have been a real masterpiece. As it stands though, TWEWY is an incredibly fun but occasionally sluggish experience. That said, it’s still one of the best games on the DS, and is worth playing if not only to open your eyes to the sometimes-unsung problems that plague JRPGs.

Verdict: 85%