games: The World Ends With You

Nowadays, pretty much every release is touted as must-buy, must-have, genre-defining, console-defining, but every now and then something special comes along that surprises you by actually living up to these near-impossible descriptions. The World Ends With You for DS is just 1 such title.

Set in the trendy Shibuya district of modern day Japan, you follow moody lone-wolf teenager Neko as he finds himself bereft of his memory, and trapped in an unusual psychic game in some sort of parallel Shibuya.

Shibuya overlays the real world and which only players and the game’s controllers, the reapers, and a few other mysterious characters are aware of. Neko must team up with a partner, a very difficult first step for him in his emotional journey through the game, and together they must complete various missions by working out the reapers’ cryptic clues and using the psychic powers available to players to battle a host of monsters known as the noise, or face erasure.

The plot may or may not grab you as particularly inspired, and the trendy, urban, Japanese style artwork, and teenaged emotional tones may or may not be to your taste. But even if they aren’t please do not dismiss this game on these grounds as there is a hell of a lot going on here underneath its fashionably slick exterior.

The world is really dense and recognizable to those who know the real Shibuya, and more than that, interesting gameplay elements have been fused with this sense of world coherence. Exemplified when Neko can use his psychic abilities to scan the minds of Sibuya’s inhabitants which will sometimes provide you with information needed for completing tasks. But this will sometimes only add a feeling of depth and reality to the world as you glimpse into their lives and concerns. Early on you also learn how to implant ideas into their heads to influence their actions.

Things like fashion and shopping are more complex than standard customization features for looks or stats, for example you need to pay attention to what clothes are cool in which areas as outfits will work differently accordingly. Now, I’m not entirely happy about buying into this kind of mindset, but as a game mechanic, it is pretty damn interesting.

There are also realistic elements, like needing to increase your bravery stats to be able to wear particularly daring outfits, and developing relationships with shopkeepers if you buy from them regularly, which results in tips and better items becoming available.

The combat system is also really dense. Your characters fight using psychic powers granted by the possession of special pins. There are over 300 in the game and each has a different attack. Neko can wear a limited number of pins which you can choose and rotate, and the pins level up with use.

This, combined with all the items available and various other character sheet options, gives you a huge amount of customization potential and control, and there are also cool metagame features such as being able to level up your pins by opening wireless connections or when the DS is off.

In a battle you and your partner fight the same noise in 2 different realms. You fully control Neko on the bottom screen, activating his powers using various touch screen commands. You also control Neko’s partner on the top screen, by matching button combos on the d-pad. This simultaneous fighting sounds bloody difficult, and that’s because it is. But you can choose to let your partner run on auto-pilot or to share control while you get the hang of it, and once you do it’s really quite exciting. You are also rewarded for synchronising with your partner, and taking hold of the battle on both screens, for example, with special fusion attacks.

On the downside though, even leaving your partner on autopilot and just coordinating both move and attack for Neko with the stylus is tricky enough at first. And when you start to control your partner it can seem impossible. I got stuck on 1 battle for ages really early on, and as you can’t skip dialogue screens in this text heavy game any faster than one speech bubble at a time, runnning through this 1 pre-battle exchange over and over again only to wash out in the fight became pretty trying.

In fact, I was getting so frustrated that I nearly just stopped playing altogether. But perseverence really pays off and combat does start to click after a bit of practice. After the first few missions the gameworld opens up gloriously in a more than worthy reward for that hard work, and it really does become a joy to play. The World Ends With You earns a full 5 stars from me, being one of the deepest and most coherent games on the DS to date.

For the best of the rest:

IGN:
It’s not often that Square Enix comes out with some genuinely new IP. Which is hardly a criticism, since the vast majority of all those Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games and spin-offs are nothing short of utterly brilliant. It’s just that, after playing The World Ends With You, you’ll wish the company would do more of this sort of thing, because it’s really, really good. And in many ways it’s a bit of a departure for the company. Having built its reputation as one of the world’s leading publishers by building exotic new worlds, this game sees Square Enix cement it by entering the real world: Tokyo’s fashionable Shibuya district, to be precise. 


Game Spot:
It’s pleasing to see that Square Enix–despite having the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Kingdom Hearts megafranchises in its lineup–is still willing to go boldly into new frontiers with the release of original games like The World Ends With You. This role-playing game eschews the company’s tried-and-true swords-and-sorcery settings and instead transports the action to modern-day Tokyo. Although there’s nary a chocobo or keyblade to be found here, The World Ends With You still incorporates some of the company’s best-known trademarks and wraps plenty of innovative new gameplay around them, particularly an initially mind-bending dual-screen combat system. The result is a game that manages to feel familiar and yet strikingly new at the same time, and one that deserves to be ranked alongside Square Enix’s best works.

Euro Gamer:
I’ll be the first to admit that games reviewers can easily become jaded, brave martyrs that we are. Playing so many games does mean that the uninspired offerings need to work harder to make an impression, while games that innovate become glittering gems to be treasured. And, sometimes, the elements that jump out of the mire aren’t always the first priority of the everyday gamer. The end result is that any game that arrives on the crest of a hyperbolic wave, festooned with praise for its fancy new ideas, can make you - the common peasants who have to pay for your games - suspicious of anything heralded for its fresh thinking.