I almost turned this game off the first time I talked to a group of NPCs (Lucky and the other One-Town kids) because the dialogue was so bad, but I had a cold and needed to kill time with something low-key so I pressed on. And you know what? It's not terrible.
Yes, there is quite a lot of mediocre dialogue that had me swear off talking to most NPCs outside of questgivers, but some of it isn't bad, and it can be charming at times. The lore is interesting, the environments get the vibe across (even if there aren't that many memorable set pieces), some of the character designs (that aren't just the dozen copy-pasted standard NPCs you see in every town) are really fun, the voice-acting is good (was surprised to learn this is the only thing the lead's done, she was really good other than the fact that she did not in the least bit sound like a child), and while the Nightmare Before Christmas influence is obvious it doesn't feel all that derivative, most of the time (though it did just this second occur to me that Two-Town is basically "What if the mayor from Halloween Town were every character?") It all mostly comes together into a legitimately compelling world.
Traversing that world is largely uninteresting, mechanically, and pretty much every quest is either "go there talk to someone come back" or "go there fight things come back," but the combat itself is actually pretty interesting. The deckbuilding doesn't go quite as deep as I'd like (you'll have unlocked all the cards by about halfway through the game, and while there are some interesting synergies there's nothing particularly dramatic) but it's interesting enough that I was still tinkering with it right up to the end. The drafting/dice-rolling mechanic, especially once you have golden pins to lock cards into your hand, has some interesting strategy to it, and the enemy variety provides a good combination of challenge and opportunity (e.g. figuring out enemy placement to make them hurt each other is vary fun). At standard difficulty it's not a particularly hard game (I only died once), but it'll keep you on your toes.
I had vaguely recalled there was going to be a sequel but I guess it's actually more of a spinoff and it looks pretty boring, so I guess there goes my hope they might actually address some of the flaws here and build on what works, which I think could've been an actually really good game. Oh well.
p.s. When I say the writing is inconsistent, I don't just mean in terms of quality but in terms of like, what happened and what things are called. Very long and convoluted e.g.: When you get to Four-Town the narrator calls it Fourburg but then the location ID on screen calls it Four-Town but some people call it Four-Town and others call it Fourburg (and also the despot in charge is both The Fourman and The High Roller), and then later you meet a guy from Four-Town and first he calls it Fourburg but then he calls it Four-Town but then you tell him it got destroyed and rebuilt and is now called Fourburg (which is only sometimes true but again the location ID calls it Four-Town) and the guy is like "What, Fourburg? Ewwww!" And it's like my dude you JUST called it that, like 2 seconds ago. And that kind of thing happens throughout the game, it's like the actors were working off multiple different drafts of the script.
p.p.s. The two sisters in this game are, during the main events of the game, about 12 and 13 years old, and yet multiple characters refer to them as women. Not in like a condescending "you stop that right now young woman" kind of way, but like "she won't be the woman you knew before." I'm making this its own point because it's extra weird.
p.p.p.s. They insist on referring to a single die as "a dice" (and given a main character is "a dice" it comes up quite a lot) which is incredibly frustrating...and is apparently just to set up a one-liner at the end of chapter 5. I can't tell if I respect their commitment to setting up a joke or if I want to murder them with my bare hands.
p.p.p.p.s. Oh, and one of the worst cameras I've ever had to deal with in a game, I'm talking N64 levels of bad.
