The World Ends With You (DS)

My new favorite DS game of all time!
5/7/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

From Final Fantasy to Dragon Quest to Kingdom Hearts, the folks at Square Enix have given gamers some of the best RPGs to date. While a few iterations of these have wound up on the DS, the handheld really has yet to be able to showcase a quality Square Enix game. Until now. The World Ends With You is unlike just about anything else you've played on the system. If you're a fan of quirky, deep and unique gaming, don't even bother finishing this review. Just go out and get the thing.

I'm generally not a giant fan of action games on the DS. There have been a couple of decent fighters and racers for the handheld, but I'm at my happiest when I'm boosting my brain, trying legal cases, or performing surgery. Action-based games I always felt suffered because of graphics and controller issues. The World Ends With You is a complete DS anomaly. It not only uses the handheld's two screens to deliver a visually impressive performance, its combat system is unlike any other you've hacked away at.

TWEWY breaks away from traditional RPGs from the very outset. Instead of being set in a mystical ancient or futuristic fantasyland, the game set in modern-day Tokyo. Sort of. You play as Neku -- the RPG-standard mopey and disaffected 15 year-old. One day he "wakes up" to find himself in the middle of Tokyo's trendy Shibuya district. He has no idea how he got there, why most people can't see him, or why there's a strange-looking black pin in his hand. Slowly, through encounters with others he pieces together what's going on -- and it's a story that could have been ripped off the front page of today's newspapers. Just as scientists have suspected for quite some time, there's actually an alternate version of one of Japan's busiest areas. In this alternate universe, "reapers" make bets with other reapers about how various "players" will deal with an assortment of daily missions with which they are faced. The players must complete the missions or they will be erased. Neku -- and the partners alongside whom he'll end up fighting -- are players.

Okay, it's a really weird-ass premise, but within the context of the game, the story unfolds relatively logically. There are also some English 101 themes that pop up and may make you think a bit -- the concept of being invisible in one of the most populated places on Earth, the struggle between individuality and conformity, etc. It's not Shakespeare, but it adds some depth to the cart. In my opinion, last year's abysmal Cartoon Network tie-in Ed, Edd & Eddy: Scam of the Century would have been better received if the game had also dealt more with le condition humaine. Anyway, while you try to figure out just what the heck is going on in this bizarro world, you'll have to fight your way to the truth -- and that's where the real fun happens.

TWEWY will blow you away with its combat interface. You need to do your fighting on both the top screen and the bottom screen -- at the same time. At first, it's a daunting task that'll have you button-mashing to take care of top-screen enemies and flailing the stylus around wildly to take care of bottom-screen foes. Eventually, you will learn most of the finer points of combat. I say most, because even though I've played the daylights out of the thing, there remain some battle nuances that I'm still unclear on.