Radiant Historia (DS) thoughts

My history with this game: I played it blind roughly five or six years ago and loved it then as I do now.
Took my time with it clocking around 30 hours to get to the boss as I did sidequest nodes and looking for the hidden skill pacts for characters. Fighting the actual boss had me woefully underprepared, according to the save file I used (Stocke54)+Aht53+Eruca45. Since this boss was a lot of endurance and immovable, I couldn't do the large Magic damage combos that Aht provides. At the very least, I got past the first phase with the Dark Chronicle book, but the next phase with Apocrypha owned me. Even Turn Breaking to get 9 turns, I can barely remember doing a third of that phase's health before getting smacked with an AOE. So yeah, that caused me to just drop it until now, as I seem to have a habit of picking up RPGs and not finishing through the final boss.
3DS remake likely has solutions to problems I've noticed, I'm just reflecting based on my experience.

Scrolling through today:
DS limitation issues
Quad-directional movement with bombs, despite having environment that doesn't reflect that made that rough to move around while enemies are around

Menuing is difficult when your Skills/Item list grows past 10 skills and the screen can only show 6 items at a time, going up and down a list. I'd appreciate a more compacted list, making use of horizontal and vertical space.
An afterthought of list mess is that I barely use 70% of the skills because I don't realize they're there or they're not as useful.
Eruca and Gafka are barely in your party for most of the game, making equipment shopping much harder than it needs to be for comparison sake.
Having a map menu, rather than overworld, since it'd be cool to actually look at it instead of only when moving from place to place.
Though you could "uncloud" the entire map by the entire game, you can't walk through it at your leisure, due to how the game works
Map also only marks off "exits of an Area". The town of Skalla connects to a section of Judgment Cliffs and the Itolia Wastelands though only via the map, and only if the story allows for that progression. Theoretically you could move north from Skalla to the Judgment Cliffs when you first have access to Skalla, but doesn't allow you to. The first point where the Cliffs and Skalla are connected are during a plot point in Celestia to forge an alliance with Forgia.
Game wise, there's an exit in Gran Plain and Alma Mine, and the plot tells us that these two points connect. Yet never in the game does the player have access to this, as this connecting route is blocked off to contain military forces from breaching, thereby routing enemies to the Sand Fortress.
The game is fairly small scale, as the game focuses on the war between Alistel and Granorg. There is one single route from one to the other, starting from Alistel, traversing Lazvil Hills, through the Judgment Cliffs, to the Sand Fortress (the main stronghold that holds either side from breaching to the other force), crossing Granorg Plain, and finally the kingdom of Granorg. Branching from those points is a single town on Granorg's side which is the Cornet Village. For a DS game, there's a lot of content I got doing 35 hours of play, though I hope to see another larger scale game with this type of gimmick. Much planning goes into time travel and dual-branched story so it's tough.

(unfinished)