Enjoyed the RetroActive discussion, as always. I'm willing the give the rest of the game the benefit of the doubt, though you are absolutely right in saying that The World Ends With You does not leave a good first impression. I played a friend's copy probably for 25 minutes back when the game was new, and the controls infuriated me to no end. It was very much as you described - in battle, the game constantly confused movement and the Flame attack. If they're going to do touch-screen controls, they need to work hard to differentiate the stylus inputs. Phantom Hourglass was released around the same time, and that demonstrated how this style of controls is done properly. I also remember getting annoyed with all the text, not necessarily because of Neku's (sp?) anti-social dialogue, but rather that there was too much. I suppose a lot of Square RPGs suffer from that, to be fair.