Very deep gameplay and very deep story, but they're not meshed together well. Constant unskippable cutscenes that if you want to challenge yourself with the gameplay, you have to go through over and over again, and if you try to just stick with the story, the game forces you to delve into the gameplay with various missions so you can't just go on easy and ignore it (plus why would you want to when there's so much to bite into). Ultimately this game needs a proper remaster or really just a 3DS port with some small changes, but 3DS is dead now so it's getting ports to single screen systems where it misses the dual screen gameplay that's an integral part of the game.

In conclusion, The World Ends With You is a flawed game. There's a lot of great stuff in it, but it's unpolished and needs some more work that it sadly never got.

Fuck RPG Maker XP. Fuck fuck fuck. That is not controller support. Just remove the option entirely, please. I don't know how much of this is To The Moon and how much is RPG Maker XP, but here are a couple problems.

1. no 8-directional movement
2. movement is all in blocks
3. plenty of blocks can't be moved into but that's not immediately obvious.
4. There's no grid so you can't actually see the blocks
5. Unlike with a mouse where you can just mouse over everything, with a controller you're forced to just go in front of everything and see if it's anything important
6. Movement is SLOW. I assume it's that way with a mouse too, but at least then you're not pressing down the whole time and trying to ascertain if something is a wall or not.

But if To The Moon was a good game then none of that would be a problem. Hell, I was perfectly fine dealing with that throughout the game once I got passed the starting because I thought that it was going somewhere interesting. After all the dialogue was well-written and everyone said it's a tearjerker and I like that and the ending is supposed to be the best part of the game. This sounds like exactly my type of game, right?

Fuck that. The best part of this game is act two which is anyway essentially a worse version of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The ending is so bad. SPOILERS AHEAD

So after all the Eternal Sunshine bullshit (fantastic movie btw) we get the most annoying plot device that's in everything. "Time is running out, I don't have time to explain my plan to you." The female lead then goes rogue and apparently stops Joey from getting hit by the car thus leaving his memories and his love for the stars. She then ALSO for no apparent reason moves River so that Johnny can't ask her on a date. This for some reason leads to Johnny becoming an astronaut and having no contact with her and there's a long montage being all bittersweet and trying to impart the message that brothers are more important than lovers before psych! She became an astronaut too, what were the odds. What the FUCK. First of all, fucking tell him the plan rather than leaving him trying to stop you because it looks like you're going to be an ass and ruin his life by sending him to the moon while making her have no contact with him. Second, why couldn't they go on the same trajectory just without his brother getting hit by a car? He still meets her and looks at the stars with her and thus gains a love for the stars, maybe you encourage it a bit in other ways, they stay in love, he becomes an astronaut, done! The plot makes no sense.END SPOILERS

Oh and I forgot to mention. The gameplay sucks. I'm not sure how much better it might be with a mouse since there would be less of it thanks to more automated movement, but at least without it there's just enough gameplay to be frustrating rather than a visual novel with less choice than the ones I've played provide.

In conclusion, To The Moon is a mediocre game with good dialogue and some other good elements but it mostly fails as a game especially when playing with a controller. Could probably be made into a decent book with a lot of editing, not sure. If you're going to play this, at the very least use a mouse rather than a controller, but I wouldn't bother playing at all.

What happens when you sand down Saints Row into something more polished but lacking in identity? You get Saints Row: The Third. The problem with the first two games is that they required too much side content before you could progress the main quest. How does SR3 "fix" that? It removes the requirement entirely. What that results in is a lack of any incentive to do any of the side content and just going from mission to mission to mission. Respect now unlocks upgrades so buying clothes feels bad because there's always a gameplay upgrade you can buy that'll make the game better, you don't interact with the world because you're not going to different shops to see what's being sold where, you're just doing mission after mission after mission and the gameplay is honestly not amazing. Is this game super playable? Sure. Does it offer anything that isn't done better elsewhere? No.

Posting the same review for Saints Row and Saints Row 2 because they meld together in my mind thanks to how similar they are and how close together I played them. I do remember having pros and cons to each though and they are separate games.

Saints Row 1-2 aren't great games, but they've got something special. The primary problem with them is just how many side activities you have to do to rack up enough respect to continue the main quest. It's a great idea because it forces you to engage with all the side content and you'll find yourself doing a lot of minigames and going shopping and whatnot to earn respect, but it goes too far with it and you feel like all you're doing is side quests and they're getting samey and you eventually drop it. However, the gameplay until you drop it is awesome and I've never enjoyed shopping for clothes as much as I did in Saints Row 1-2. Might not be the best or most polished games around, but they offer something special I haven't found elsewhere and I love them for it.