The World Ends With You

The World Ends With You : A Japanese Role-Playing Game where fashion-aficionados battle supernatural demons in a fight for their unappreciated lives.

Story : Neku is a world-loathing lonely boy who, despite presumably having rich parents based on his attire, hates the world, himself and the general idea of being alive. One day he finds the world littered with demons and himself unable to communicate to most actual people, and has seven days to accomplish a series of tasks laid out for him by some bad people or else himself and several others will DIE. The problem with this story lies in how much of a crybaby Neku is. We’ve seen emo-oriented protagonists in JRPGs in the past but none of them quite compare to this guy, who seemingly just wants to stick his head between his knees and pretend that demons aren’t trying to end him, despite him having some kind of superpowers that allow him to plow through any number of giant sasquatchs creatures. It’s one thing to create a reluctant hero, but for the first 3 chapters, this guy resists every single attempt to do anything redeemable, despite his and other people’s lives being on the line, and in fact he makes a few incredibly bone-headed decisions that the player is helplessly and frustratingly forced to watch while stabbing the touch screen hoping he’ll either snap out of it or die and let the player control someone a little less sappy and hopeless. The plot in general presumably follows most JRPG conventions, with the hero learning the value of life and friendship and trouncing the evil-doers, no doubt unlocking some kind of shocking secret about himself to his allies along the way. I wouldn’t know. Neku wanted the world to leave him alone and I decided to give the man what he wanted by returning the game.

Normally, I like it when a game tries to be different and original, and that looks to be what Square-Enix was aiming to do with The World Ends With You. At the same time, this effort looks to be an attempt to reach out to a certain audience. The specific target audience is one that cries for more games to be unique and original (someone like me), who opts to praise gameplay concepts that seem to be more trendy than they are intuitive (a bit less like me), and people who cling to Japanese culture in a vain attempt to put themselves over as hip and different, learning the language so they can purchase manga collections at anime conventions to read on the bus not because they enjoy it but because they want to show the people on the bus that they are reading a manga (not so much like me.)

For starters, the game opts for a largely unexplored setting and theme. Normally I welcome an RPG that strays away from using either a fantasy setting, a sci-fi setting, or most cliché of all, a fantasy/sci-fi hybrid setting. But TWEWY takes place entirely in Shibuya, Tokyo’s fashion district. Suddenly the previous paragraph sounds justified, doesn’t it? I guess it goes without saying that in being based in a model’s paradise, that all of the characters are appropriately dressed in a manner designed to inspire as many anime convention cosplayers as possible…except odds are vastly against said cosplayers being as skinny as the characters in this game. Seriously, I don’t think there’s ever been a game with less body fat in history. Even in other games where all the men are muscular to a point where they’d need a horse’s growth hormone and 48 hours of weightlifting a week to maintain their trapezoids alone and all the women are supermodels with cleavage that their clavicles wouldn’t be able to support without metal implants, I’ve never been as bothered as I was by how anorexic the character designs are in this game. The first person to join your party is some kind of teenage girl whose waistline can only be described as “spine-tight.”

In taking place in said fashion district, the rest of the game takes an appropriately shallow approach to other concepts, in particular equipment. The player equips his party with clothes, based on the idea that depending how trendy clothes are in certain parts of town, your stats will change. Besides sending a rather vain message to kids playing, unless you talk…or rather, read and document the thoughts of every citizen, you’ll need some kind of faq or strategy guide to keep track of what’s trendy in the game’s bizarre fantasy fashion land. (Yes, you don’t talk to civilians, you read their thoughts, not that there’s any sort of dialogue difference between reading their thoughts here and randomly approaching them in any other game of this kind.)

Speaking of following trends like a tool, TWEWY (what a bad acronym) follows the trend of touch screen-based gameplay. In particular the trend that Legend of Zelda : Phantom Hourglass and Ninja Gaiden : Dragon Sword is attempting to make hip. When engaged in combat, all of Neku’s attacks and motions are based on motions you make with the stylus. Point at something to cast fire, slash something to use a slicing attack, draw lines to summon icicles, it all depends on what pins Neku equips. (You know, like the people who wear pins on their backpack saying “Lower Tuition Fees”, only these pins actually do what they say they do.) Likewise, point at an area and Neku walks there, slash in a direction and Neku dashes, and so forth. Maybe you can see the problem arising. The touch-screen doesn’t always do a great job of telling different actions apart from other actions. Imagine Super Mario World and the same button that jumps is the same button that causes the item in your box to fall down. How confident would you feel running towards a cliff knowing that the game will randomly decide that you’ll either jump or bid this cruel world goodbye? Like the aforementioned Zelda and Ninja Gaiden, The World Ends With You has to make up for this by granting the player large room for error, making most of your encounters simple affairs where you’ll get by without dodging so long as your chipping away nonstop at your enemies, and in turn making the experience less engrossing than it could’ve been. And keep in mind that in being an RPG, that you’re essentially repeating these attack motions over and over every time you need to engage an enemy.

As an aside, Nintendo has made a note of mentioning how touch-screen controls and Wii motion controls are a way to drift away from abstract button pressing and complex controller schemes that would scare away new players from getting served in a Halo online deathmatch against any number of 12 year old racists. Normally I’d try to dispute that, but in this case I don’t have to because TWEWY is already too confusing for new players anyways. The combat that happens in the previous paragraph occurs on the bottom screen, while on the top screen, your partner can fight enemies by pressing button combinations on the d-pad. Keeping up with all the action on both screens is as confusing as it sounds, and once again the game makes up for it by dumbing down the action just enough so that players can keep up. I’ll go on a limb and say there were more people playing the near 10 year old Starcraft and its keyboard-laden button scheme than there were people playing this game, along with Zelda and Ninja Gaiden, in their respective first months of release and I think that’s a statement enough.

Feel free to say that perhaps I didn’t did TWEWY a fair chance, that I didn’t play it enough. Maybe the later parts of the game are more challenging and reward skill over patience. Maybe the characters learn the value of friendship and that there’s more to life than swiping their parents’ credit cards on hats big enough to fit their cat, and the characters develop and become deeper than how far down their throats they stick the spoon. But the game failed to engage me, on any level. I can deal with repulsive themes and stories if the gameplay is entertaining, just look at the affront that is the Dead or Alive fighting games. This game was made for a specific target audience, and unless you’re currently stitching your Neku shorts and plastic headphones as part of your plans to travel to a convention in an attempt to befriend people who get who you’re supposed to be dressed as, odds are you’re not in that audience.


Pros : I have to at least give any JRPG a couple stars for not having random battles. It’s the first Square-Enix game in ages that’s not cashing in on a prior license.

Cons : Conversations that, no matter how quickly you try to skim through the text, are usually longer than your bus ride, making this not particularly intuitive as a handheld game.

2 1/2 stars

Think I didn’t give this game a fair enough chance? Just wait for the Iron Man review.