After hours of stylus scribbling, I can put The World Ends with You to rest. I stayed up fairly late (for me) finishing up the final day, which included a hundred boss fights, no save points, a lot of cussing, and a lot of "oh, so that's how you prevent that!" Of course, the game isn't over. I can go back and replay chapters, complete my Jiminy Journal, er, Phone Menu, and uncover behind the scenes stories to fill in some gaps. I do have plenty of questions about what happened, but I'll have to save the answers for another day. Too much else in my stack glaring at me right now.

I really didn't play this game to its fullest, and I regret that a little. My stats were awful (Noise fought, pin mastery, item acquisition) as I chose to blow through the game like I really could be erased if I didn't complete the mission in a real time hour. Obviously, since I did it, you can beat the game without obtaining everything (and no, I didn't play on Easy), but it still feels like I cheated the game since that isn't how I normally play anything. I blame the developers for making the story so interesting I had to find out what happens next over erasing all of the Noise and shopping.

I highly recommend this game to all DS owners. It is quite possibly one of the best games made for the DS, and it's unfortunate that it's also the best game hardly anyone played. I've heard that this may turn into a franchise despite the sales, and if so, I shall eagerly await it.

Thank God for demos. Demos save us all from dropping sixty smackers on a game we hate. I wish all games had demos on all three of my next-gen consoles. So far, the Wii doesn't seem to offer them, and the Xbox and PS3 provide quite a few, but rarely the games I'm looking for. Today I downloaded and tried out Eternal Sonata and Valkyria Chronicles. Both got huge raves in the review circuit, and both look very pretty. I'm in for the demo.

Eternal Sonata and I had a rough start. I got mad at the type of turn-based system it implements and quit after a couple of minutes. Instead of your partymembers standing in a pretty line waiting to take their pretty turns, you actually move your members towards an enemy and fight them during that member's turn. The length of the turn is determined by the action gauge, which starts to run as soon as you make your member move. If you accidentally touch the analog stick, better keep moving, because the action gauge is running. After I calmed down, thought about how useful this system could be, how pretty the graphics are (albeit a little too cutesy), and how I really like the whole classical music overlaying theme, I gave it another shot. I didn't get as frustrated this time, and I may actually think about purchasing it. I'll play through the demo one more time before committing. Not that I don't have any other RPGs ready to play or anything. >_<

I played Valkyria Chronicles for a grand total of thirty seconds. It's a FPS combined with a RPG, and I'm not a fan of firing guns, especially guns I have to aim myself. If I have to play turn-based combat, give me magic spells and big freaking swords. Yes, give me Final Fantasy. I'm not even going to rethink this one, even though I find it more beautiful than Eternal Sonata. I've already deleted it off of my drive.

I really, REALLY need some motivation to finish Kingdom Hearts 2. Last night I finished the second chapter of The World Ends with You and Neku is now playing his final Game. At this rate, I'll finish it by the end of the week. If that happens, I'll have started and finished four games since I started KH2. I really do want to finish the game. The amount of leveling I still have to do with my Final Form is keeping me from challenging the final boss. What usually motivates me to finish a game is to listen to the game's soundtrack over and over and over. That's not working. Maybe I'll need to hit YouTube and find a video of KH2 music videos and gameplay. Maybe I need to hide all of my other games and consoles until I finish it. Ha... that last one takes too much effort. Oooh, maybe I should keep the game case out on the coffee table so that it will stare at me and taunt me. That might work.

I have started Squenix's latest and greatest: The Last Remnant. Unfortunately, my writing projects have kept me so busy that I've only played the game for a few hours at a time, so I don't have a full opinion of it yet. I am confused by all the negative reviews, though. Everyone says it has beautiful graphics, fabulous music, a highly innovative and fun combat system, and a great story, but they give it low ratings because of all the technical glitches. I myself have not witnessed the poor frame rate and texture issues everyone bitches about. But really, are these enough to rate an enriching RPG so low? I guess I'll have to wait and see how horrible these technical difficulties are. Unless they totally alter gameplay, I don't see what the problem is.

Not entirely sure how I feel about the combat system. It is turn-based, but instead of each character in a party having a turn, the partymembers are grouped together in unions, and each union as a whole gets a turn. How a union fares in battle depends on who is in the union. So while you don't get to control characters' individual abilities, you have to be aware of each character's abilities and assess how they will fight along with specific characters. I haven't had to create more than two unions at a time yet, but it really takes some strategic consideration, even with just two unions of three party members each. I feel like Shawn would be better at this game than I will be, since he has real life experience in commanding troops and he likes the Tom Clancy games where you do just that. I have a feeling that I may die a lot before I hone my strategic abilities. I was somewhat decent in Warcraft 3 and Age of Mythology when it came to ordering around battalions, so maybe it won't be that horrible of a learning curve for me. So far it hasn't annoyed me nearly as much as Infinite Undiscovery did, so there's always hope.

Whether you like or hate either game, it's still nice to see Square Enix trying out different styles to implement with the party system.