Well, in my ongoing quest to find a JRPG I like enough to finish that doesn't have Persona or Trails in the title, I got Tokyo Xanadu eX+ and the Dragon Quest XI demo, since one was on sale and the other is free. Tokyo Xanadu eX+ is using the same engine as Trails of Cold Steel, which is very obvious when you see how all the out-of-combat stuff including social links work, but is using a real-time button mashy combat system rather than the turn-based one in the Trails games--and that, I fear, is where it lost me. I've always said that an RPG is a game where your character's in-game abilities are at least as important as your own twitch gaming skills, but they're simply not in Tokyo Xanadu--it's all about dodging at exactly the right moment to avoid the boss attack and the like, and it's just not something I enjoy. Didn't help that the buttons they assigned to things on the controller were just plain weird--oh, so right trigger is one type of super attack that uses one of the onscreen gauges, and pressing left and right bumper together is another, oh, and just to really confuse the hell out of everybody, we'll activate the THIRD type of super attack by pressing down on the D-pad. Left trigger swaps out your third "support" party member with the active one, and Y swaps the two active members (you can only ever attack with one at a time). From what I hear this combat system is essentially very similar to the one used in the Ys series from Falcom, so guess that's another one I can tick off my list as "Noway, nohow".

So, after uninstalling that game after having played for about six hours, I fired up the Dragon Quest XI demo, and *immediately* I'm having ten times as much fun. I don't like the very stylised 3D cartoons they use for all the people, but the combat is turn-based and immediately makes sense. In fact, I had so much fun playing the demo that I just bought the full game and am downloading it ready to play tomorrow.