if you are looking for an epic JRPG style story, I am afraid I can't help you there. However, if are just looking for that style of battle system, and don't mind relatively hard games, Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard is kind of amazing.

I liked TWEWY up until the third part, because while the character you get paired with is an awesome character, he is fucking difficult to attack with. The battle system was fun, though most of the pins I found kind of unusable, and because of some early pin choices, I was kind of fucked by the time I reached the end game. The top screen controls very nicely, with the exception of the third part, though the pin controls are a little loose at time, and the similar style of inputting attacks can cause the game to fuck you over at a very bad time.
I loved the music and art style, I honestly don't pay much attention to story. The main character is very unlikable in the beginning, I remember that, but he turns in a character you understand, though may not like.
Of course, I am the man who finds all numbered FF games meh at best, so my opinion is probably not valid.

Pandajuice wrote:

The game can be difficult at time, especially if you try to use pins that require complex or strange actions, but I never found it all that hard. And I hate difficult games. But it's kind of common sense to not use more than one pin that has the same attack input. The whole point is to set up a routine of attacks so that by the time you reach the last one, your first pin has recharged and you can go again. Also, I pretty much ignored the top screen and just button mashed for the most part up there, so it never mattered who my partner was. If you try to pay attention to both screens at once, I can see how it'd be easy to get burnt out. I thought it was a lot of fun to play, the story was nice and linear and flowed well, and trying to collect all the pins and evolve them was a blast (as long as you have an evolution chart by your side to refer to that is)

The game within itself isn't difficult, unless you crank the difficulty level all the way up. I just struggled a little with trying to get the pins I wanted to activate to activate. This problem was partly brought on by the lack of knowledge about how to properly evolve pins, giving me a lesser variety of good pins in the end game, thus leading me to using a couple pins with the same input.

And that was my problem with the third guy, with the others I could button mash and get up to a level two combo easily, but the guys bullshit with the playing cards, I would rarely be able to get an attack off.