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The World Ends With You
Platform: DS
A unique and satisfying JRPG experience.
Review by Sirus
The World Ends With You (TWEWY) is an action RPG from Square Enix and a little company called Jupiter. The game starts out with the protagonist named Neku who wakes up in the middle of the street without any memories. He has no idea where he is or what led him to that point. The first thing he notices is a message on his phone telling him to head to 104. The message tells him that if he doesn’t reach his destination within the time limit, he will be erased. Unsure about what all this means, he wanders around the city until he encounters some mysterious creatures he later finds out are called noise. Neku is unable to defeat the noise alone but a girl named Shiki shows up and tells Neku that if he joins with her in a pact, he will be able to defeat them.
Neku doesn’t want to trust anyone but it appears as if he has no choice but to join Shiki and follow along with the rules of the little game he has found himself in. Later it is revealed that Neku and Shiki aren’t the only players in the game. The participants are each playing along so that they can escape erasure and go back to their old lives. Neku starts out completely closed off from the outside world, unwilling to trust anyone or let anyone get close to him. His transformation over the course of the game as he meets various characters is deep and meaningful. The obstacles Neku, Shiki, and everyone he meets face are things many young people go through on the road to maturity. Their down-to-earth nature makes the obstacles that much more interesting. The overarching storyline slowly builds towards a conclusion that is unexpected and somewhat predictable at the same time. The game’s ending is satisfying and well-executed.
The game progresses a little differently from most RPGs. Rather than starting off in a small town and embarking on an epic journey spanning continents, the entire game takes place in the small town of Shibuya. Your character is told at the beginning that you have seven days to beat the game. Each day you have a specific mission to complete and doing so will advance it to the next day. Regular enemies are for the most part optional. To get into a battle, you have to tap your player pin in the corner of the screen. Doing so opens up scanning mode where you can scan Shibuya’s various denizens to see what they are thinking and can fight the noise. To fight noise you simply tap on them with your stylus and you will be brought into the battle screen. You can tap more than one noise at once to chain battles together and increase the rewards you gain from winning.
In battle you control two characters at the same time. Neku is controlled on the bottom screen with the stylus only while Shiki, or any of the other partners you get later, is controlled with the d-pad or face buttons depending on your handedness [for the purposes of this review I will assume that players are right handed and using the d-pad for their partner]. Neku’s attacks are executed with the help of pins. He can equip various pins and each has a different way of attacking. For example, one pin allows you to slash down on enemies to make Neku run over and slash. Another pin allows you to slash up on enemies and do an uppercut. All pins can be used a limited number of times before you have to wait for them to recharge. Some have to recharge after every use while others can be used five or six times before they have to recharge. If you use up all your pins’ usage, you can drag Neku around with the stylus to move out of harms way until they recharge. Neku’s pins can improve their stats by gaining PP in battle. Some pins can evolve into improved versions of the same thing after numerous levels are gained. The game also mysteriously gives you massive PP bonuses in proportion to the length of time you spend away from the game after your last save. The amount of PP you gain through this method is so much more than battles that it can be tempting to simply save the game and wait five days before coming back to reap the benefits of large amounts of PP. There is a wide variety of different pins you can collect and use in battle so that you can customize your attacks. While Neku is attacking with pins, your partner is controlled with the d-pad. You can press the button in the direction of the enemies once to initiate a combo. Doing so brings up a combo chart that you can follow with three different variations. I found it much easier to simply mash the buttons in the direction of the enemy rather than trying to time it and get the other paths. People who don’t even want to bother with their partners can set them on auto, although they tend to die much faster that way, even on easy. Combat is extremely hectic on the normal difficulty setting so I found myself dying quite a bit. I found that for one part, I was getting frustrated by the frequent deaths and had to save after every battle to avoid re-doing sections.
Thankfully, after progressing the story enough, you get the ability to retry any battle as many times as you want. This makes skill building much easier and less frustrating. When given the option to retry, you are also allowed to change the difficulty to easy so players who are finding themselves overly frustrated by a certain boss can change the difficulty when they finally just want to progress. All the equipments in the game have brands associated with them. Based on the popularity of each brand in the brand chart, if you equip clothes of the right brand, you can get bonus attack in battle. Each time you zone into a new area, the brand chart changes. Players wanting to get every bonus possible could theoretically buy a full set of clothes from every brand and switch them out depending on the chart in each area. Thankfully it is pretty easy to advance through the game ignoring this aspect completely if it doesn’t interest you. You can also have your characters eat various foods purchased from shops. Each food item takes a certain amount of time to digest so that once they are completely digested you gain increases in stats. You can only digest so much in a 24 hour period (real time not game time). I would assume this is an attempt to keep players from maxing out their stats by frequent grinding of sorts. By the later portions of the game, I found myself completely ignoring the food system as well. Still it is an interesting idea. TWEWY has a small amount of voice acting in it but what is used is solid enough. The music is a drastic change from the usual RPG fare and might turn a number of players away from enjoying the game. It is a mixture of hip hop and dance tunes, likely used to fit the urban setting. I didn’t find any of the music to be extremely unbearable but I tried to ignore most of it. Anyone who is scared that they might not like the music can find the soundtrack on the US iTunes store and listen to samples on there. The game’s graphics are all 2D with sprites on 2D backgrounds. It is nice to see Square Enix make a 2D game on DS after so many 3D games on the system. The 2D look obviously fits the graphical style the game was shooting for much better than any 3D could. The graphics aren’t really technically impressive but most of the game has a stylized and colorful look that helps it stand out.
TWEWY is about 20 hours long although that is simply an estimate because the game doesn’t have a clock to tell you exactly how long you played. Going through the various missions as part of the game can get tedious and slowly degrade into simply going through the motions. Once you get the hang of the combat, it becomes refreshing and fun. If you get bored with your pin setup you can always switch into a completely different one that drastically changes battles. The story is amazingly deep and character centric with characters you will remember for a very long time after you finish the game. The DS is filled with RPGs that aren’t exactly portable but TWEWY’s save anywhere feature and short missions make it ideal for portable play. I was extremely unsure if I would find TWEWY to be a worthwhile gaming experience and was pleasantly surprised. If you want something different from the usual JRPG or just something new to play on your DS, you should play TWEWY. It is a unique and satisfying JRPG experience.
Platform: DS
A unique and satisfying JRPG experience.
Review by Sirus
The World Ends With You (TWEWY) is an action RPG from Square Enix and a little company called Jupiter. The game starts out with the protagonist named Neku who wakes up in the middle of the street without any memories. He has no idea where he is or what led him to that point. The first thing he notices is a message on his phone telling him to head to 104. The message tells him that if he doesn’t reach his destination within the time limit, he will be erased. Unsure about what all this means, he wanders around the city until he encounters some mysterious creatures he later finds out are called noise. Neku is unable to defeat the noise alone but a girl named Shiki shows up and tells Neku that if he joins with her in a pact, he will be able to defeat them.
Neku doesn’t want to trust anyone but it appears as if he has no choice but to join Shiki and follow along with the rules of the little game he has found himself in. Later it is revealed that Neku and Shiki aren’t the only players in the game. The participants are each playing along so that they can escape erasure and go back to their old lives. Neku starts out completely closed off from the outside world, unwilling to trust anyone or let anyone get close to him. His transformation over the course of the game as he meets various characters is deep and meaningful. The obstacles Neku, Shiki, and everyone he meets face are things many young people go through on the road to maturity. Their down-to-earth nature makes the obstacles that much more interesting. The overarching storyline slowly builds towards a conclusion that is unexpected and somewhat predictable at the same time. The game’s ending is satisfying and well-executed.
The game progresses a little differently from most RPGs. Rather than starting off in a small town and embarking on an epic journey spanning continents, the entire game takes place in the small town of Shibuya. Your character is told at the beginning that you have seven days to beat the game. Each day you have a specific mission to complete and doing so will advance it to the next day. Regular enemies are for the most part optional. To get into a battle, you have to tap your player pin in the corner of the screen. Doing so opens up scanning mode where you can scan Shibuya’s various denizens to see what they are thinking and can fight the noise. To fight noise you simply tap on them with your stylus and you will be brought into the battle screen. You can tap more than one noise at once to chain battles together and increase the rewards you gain from winning.
In battle you control two characters at the same time. Neku is controlled on the bottom screen with the stylus only while Shiki, or any of the other partners you get later, is controlled with the d-pad or face buttons depending on your handedness [for the purposes of this review I will assume that players are right handed and using the d-pad for their partner]. Neku’s attacks are executed with the help of pins. He can equip various pins and each has a different way of attacking. For example, one pin allows you to slash down on enemies to make Neku run over and slash. Another pin allows you to slash up on enemies and do an uppercut. All pins can be used a limited number of times before you have to wait for them to recharge. Some have to recharge after every use while others can be used five or six times before they have to recharge. If you use up all your pins’ usage, you can drag Neku around with the stylus to move out of harms way until they recharge. Neku’s pins can improve their stats by gaining PP in battle. Some pins can evolve into improved versions of the same thing after numerous levels are gained. The game also mysteriously gives you massive PP bonuses in proportion to the length of time you spend away from the game after your last save. The amount of PP you gain through this method is so much more than battles that it can be tempting to simply save the game and wait five days before coming back to reap the benefits of large amounts of PP. There is a wide variety of different pins you can collect and use in battle so that you can customize your attacks. While Neku is attacking with pins, your partner is controlled with the d-pad. You can press the button in the direction of the enemies once to initiate a combo. Doing so brings up a combo chart that you can follow with three different variations. I found it much easier to simply mash the buttons in the direction of the enemy rather than trying to time it and get the other paths. People who don’t even want to bother with their partners can set them on auto, although they tend to die much faster that way, even on easy. Combat is extremely hectic on the normal difficulty setting so I found myself dying quite a bit. I found that for one part, I was getting frustrated by the frequent deaths and had to save after every battle to avoid re-doing sections.
Thankfully, after progressing the story enough, you get the ability to retry any battle as many times as you want. This makes skill building much easier and less frustrating. When given the option to retry, you are also allowed to change the difficulty to easy so players who are finding themselves overly frustrated by a certain boss can change the difficulty when they finally just want to progress. All the equipments in the game have brands associated with them. Based on the popularity of each brand in the brand chart, if you equip clothes of the right brand, you can get bonus attack in battle. Each time you zone into a new area, the brand chart changes. Players wanting to get every bonus possible could theoretically buy a full set of clothes from every brand and switch them out depending on the chart in each area. Thankfully it is pretty easy to advance through the game ignoring this aspect completely if it doesn’t interest you. You can also have your characters eat various foods purchased from shops. Each food item takes a certain amount of time to digest so that once they are completely digested you gain increases in stats. You can only digest so much in a 24 hour period (real time not game time). I would assume this is an attempt to keep players from maxing out their stats by frequent grinding of sorts. By the later portions of the game, I found myself completely ignoring the food system as well. Still it is an interesting idea. TWEWY has a small amount of voice acting in it but what is used is solid enough. The music is a drastic change from the usual RPG fare and might turn a number of players away from enjoying the game. It is a mixture of hip hop and dance tunes, likely used to fit the urban setting. I didn’t find any of the music to be extremely unbearable but I tried to ignore most of it. Anyone who is scared that they might not like the music can find the soundtrack on the US iTunes store and listen to samples on there. The game’s graphics are all 2D with sprites on 2D backgrounds. It is nice to see Square Enix make a 2D game on DS after so many 3D games on the system. The 2D look obviously fits the graphical style the game was shooting for much better than any 3D could. The graphics aren’t really technically impressive but most of the game has a stylized and colorful look that helps it stand out.
TWEWY is about 20 hours long although that is simply an estimate because the game doesn’t have a clock to tell you exactly how long you played. Going through the various missions as part of the game can get tedious and slowly degrade into simply going through the motions. Once you get the hang of the combat, it becomes refreshing and fun. If you get bored with your pin setup you can always switch into a completely different one that drastically changes battles. The story is amazingly deep and character centric with characters you will remember for a very long time after you finish the game. The DS is filled with RPGs that aren’t exactly portable but TWEWY’s save anywhere feature and short missions make it ideal for portable play. I was extremely unsure if I would find TWEWY to be a worthwhile gaming experience and was pleasantly surprised. If you want something different from the usual JRPG or just something new to play on your DS, you should play TWEWY. It is a unique and satisfying JRPG experience.
| 9/10 - Fast moving stylus controlled combat that is never dull. | ||||||
| 9/10 - Stylized 2D graphics that look great and move smoothly. | ||||||
| 8/10 - Hip-hop soundtrack that isn’t for everyone with solid voice acting. | ||||||
| 9/10 - Character driven storyline that is deep and meaningful. | ||||||
| 8/10 -20 hour main storyline. | ||||||
| 8.6/10 (Great) | ||||||
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