Gaming: The World Ends With You

06/07/08 07:01:23 pm

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Rirath and I recently signed up for GameFly, so I may be musing about random games more often. Today's entry is about the Nintendo DS JRPG, The World Ends With You (originally "Subarashii Kono Sekai" in Japanese, but since that translates to "it's a wonderful world," potential copyright issues apparently prevented it from being released under that title in English).

In the game, you play as Neku Sakuraba, a misanthropic teen who finds himself in an alternate reality Shibuya where he must complete daily objectives to stay alive amidst something called a "Reaper's Game." He meets other "players" trapped in the game, as well as enemies called Noise, and the reapers themselves.

The World Ends With You sets itself apart from so many DS games with its style and depth. Derived from their urban setting, characters and enemies sport trendy fashions or graffiti-like tattoos. The music throughout the game is lyrical, and likewise adds to the atmosphere by sticking mostly to pop and rap, as well as interchanging between English and Japanese language versions of the songs.

The battle system is refreshingly unique, as you fight enemies with a partner on both of the DS' screens at once - on the bottom screen with your stylus, and the top screen with the D-pad. This is certainly not without its flaws though, as it's somewhat difficult to divide your attention between the two. Fortunately they've accounted for this in two ways, the first of which is that your partner will always have an attack that consists of simply pressing the same button several times, and also that you can choose to ignore your partner and s/he'll be auto-controlled instead.

The abilities you wield in battles are decided by pins - you can wear between one and six pins, each one with a power that's activated by a stylus motion (or a shout into your DS' mic). There are hundreds of pins to choose from, though there's a quite smaller range of stylus actions between them; this can get annoying if you pick two or more pins with the same or similar activation methods and end up using the wrong attack.

Trends will also affect your battles - both pins and clothing are associated with brands, and the more popular the brand in a given area, the more powerful the items of that brand will be. While this adds another layer of depth, I found myself ignoring it more often than not. The areas you move between are too small to be concerned with changing all your pins and clothes every few minutes. You can also influence which brand is popular by wearing that brand's items, but locking oneself into a single brand seems more hindering than beneficial.

The game has its downsides too, of course. Gameplay is very linear, to the point where I occasionally felt rushed by the story when I would've liked to wander around a bit. Long chunks of dialog with no option skip will also bog you down sometimes. It's hard to organize your pins and it gets more cumbersome to find the one you want as your collection grows; why couldn't there have been some sorting options (by brand, by level, by effect, etc.)? Also, there's no map. Okay, technically there is, but it only shows you the fashion trends for each area, not the names of the areas... making it useless as a map.

Overall it's an entertaining and fun game though. ... Expect a skin of it.