MODERN GAMING
The World Ends With You
Developer - Square-Enix/Jupiter
Publisher - Square-Enix
Genre - RPG
Year - 2008
System - Nintendo DS

You ever heard of a film or book whose premise sounds so utterly awesome that no matter how much it sucks, you still love it just for the idea alone?  That is why I love The Giant Behemoth (or as I like to call it, Nuclear Nessie, which also would make an awesome Scottish punk band name) and this is also why I purely love the title of this slightly swept away RPG, The World Ends With You.
What does it mean exactly?  When the world dies, so do you?  You cause the end of the world?  Is it perhaps cut off at the end and should have a name so it says "The world ends with you, Galactus" or "The world ends with you, Corey Feldman"?  Whatever the case, it was originally entitled It's A Wonderful World in Japan and due to licensing issues with similar sounding things (like some Christmas thing I hear about called It's A Wonderful Life, which has like no colour in it, but then half of it is just snow so you see why they didn't bother), we got this more awesome-sounding title.
But does the game live up to said awesomeness?  Let's have a look.

Story - The World Ends With You starts with Neku, a 15 year old antisocial kid who suddenly finds himself in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, holding a strange black pin.  His phone rings to read "Reach 104.  You have 60 minutes.  Fail and face erasure - The Reapers."  The message is the worst kind of chain mail spam, the kind that not only can't be deleted but also is actually true, as signified by the appearance of a creepy timer on Neku's hand.  Soon encountering some freakish monsters, Neku is soon forced into a pact with Shiki, a girl also trapped in the same predicament and one of several "players" part of "the Reaper's Game".
Basically some people get sucked into another plane of existence in our world to fight monsters or else lose their right to exist.  Kinda like Battle Royale but without killing each other, and it's not a creepy reality TV show.  And the prize being a part of you that was lost in the event that lead you to this middle-ground place inhabited by urban demons.


Gameplay - Let's start with the most biggest part of the game, the battles.  See you have these Pins which grant you various attacks against Noise, animal-like demons that like to erase players.  The Pins are activated in various ways such as slashing your stylus across an enemy, pressing at one point of the game, making a vertical line, and even in later cases, blowing or shouting into the DS.  You start off with being able to use two Pins and later develop more to make some pretty awesome combos, like my favourite kind.  Slash, Throw Car, Burninate.  Sounds like an X-Men battle scene doesn't it?
Well it gets trickier, because you also have your ally Shiki fighting on the other side of the battlefield on the top DS screen, and she attacks by inputting DDR-like button commands of left/right, up or down by using the d-pad or the ABYX buttons if you're left-handed (yeah they REALLY thought of everything for this game).  So basically you're using two characters AT THE SAME TIME.

Now at first this might be really complex unless you're someone who's the kind of freak that played two NES games at once as a kid (if I saw anyone do this with different Megaman games, I would weep like when people saw zombie Jesus), but once you get the hang of it, it actually gets pretty easy switching between characters, though I personally left Shiki on auto-fast for the first 2 acts and when I got strong enough to handle the enemies I got brave enough to control both of them and within 10 minutes I was dishing out combos like Mike Tyson, the ear-biting being when you get the White Pin and unite the two in a holy-fuck-you're-dead attack that pretty much did double my strongest attack (throwing a motorbike at enemies).
And well if you can't handle it, you can always put your ally on automatic and the CPU does a decent job of it.


Now while the battles may sound rather samey, it's the very fact you have to focus on both allies at the same time that makes it feel original and frantic, this is a game that enjoys battling with a fast-paced mixture of d-pad and stylus, so both of your hands will be very busy working with each of your eyes at least, and all to the beat of Japanese pop (which honestly isn't that annoying when you have a range of pieces to hear from, plus you're gonna be too busy slashing the hell out of demon frogs, bats and wolves), and it gets better.
If you're one of those scaredy-dicks who run away from every battle (oh sure that shit you wanted in Star Ocean 2 sometimes just to avoid hearing the godawful voice acting but it makes me want to spit on those like you), you can actually choose not to fight most battles.

Lemme explain, the Black Pin that Neku got at the very start allows him to scan the world around him for not only people's thoughts but also for any Noise hiding around.  You can choose to beat the shit out of them one by one, avoid them all or even fight as many as possible if you really wanna go mad.  The field is a range of street scenes to talk with people, most particularly the Reapers themselves who set objectives for you in order to pass through their invisible walls (and I was hoping that they'd be dressed like punkish mime artists to make this concept hilarious but I digress).  Another thing in the game to help progress storyline is, get ready for this, Imprinting people with memes.
Yes, halfway through act 3 you sometimes have to implement a certain thought or idea into other people to help them along, and they're called memes.
Sadly there are no memes that involve longcats, but I'm holding out the chance for when someone needs a number and I can make them think "over nine thousand".  We'll see.


There are also a few other cool things to note of in the game is the fashion.  There are stores all around Shibuya that you can buy clothes from to up your attack, defence or health, as well as having abilities with them.  The clothes however require you to have an amount of Bravery to wear them.
Imagine a much more simplified and much more understandable form of the License Points from Final Fantaxy XII (which were really fucking stupid because how retarded do you have to be to not understand how to wear a hat?  I've seen plenty of retards in my time and most of them have mastered hat-wearing quite well without license points).  Basically the more ballsy the clothes are, the more brave you have to be to wear them.  An obstacle at first in restricting you allowing to wear them but Bravery like everything else increases with your levels.
There is also your PP, whic his basically experience for the Pins you wear and only gain PP when in battle.  What's real cool is that they even gain PP when you turn off the game, you get some from not playing for a day even!
And lastly you can even battle against anyone else playing this game over the wireless with the Tin Pin Slammer mini-game in a game of what really is just aggressive Extreme Frisbee, only with your Pins, and slashing across with the stylus, and earning PP.

Graphics - Some of you might recognise the graphics from this game as being of another similar handheld RPG.  Well you're right, the makers of this game also did Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, the midquel of that unholy yet awesome RPG series that was ruined by a fucking horrible card system (hey I'm never reviewing it so I might as well say it now, I fucking HATE cards in RPGs and Chain of Memories was the worst for me because I want to play a game involving skill, not blind random luck, if I wanted to play a game involving luck I'd play Solitaire).
Don't worry though because there is no such system in this game and the graphics are just as good as Chain of Memories with slick-looking characters and scenes in that strange urban clothing Square could practically create an entire brand of clothing with (and I'd buy because I'm a fag like that and zippers everywhere are good for opening ANY part of the clothes I need...for any encounter).

Music/Sound - There is little voice acting in this game other than in battle and the odd exclamation so even if you hate the voices, it will be covered up by the eclectic mixture of J-pop, hip-hop and electronic.  Basically if you loved the kind of music in Jet Set Radio, then this is the stuff Jet Set Radio would be making remixes of.  If you hate that kind of music A LOT, then don't buy this game, it's going to be fucking EVERYWHERE in the game, and frankly the only piece that really irks me is Japanese rap.  Because my single working ear just can't expect that.  But it's still better than French rap (if anyone saw the movie of The Da Vinci Code, they know very well that even Morris Dancing is better than French rap).

This is a game that even though is passing itself off as "hip" still does so quite well with a mixture of modern music, cool character design and a story of urban culture and spiritual myth.  At least Square have tried to go away from the Final Fantasy prerogative and let's be honest, most of the time they have done this they created excellent games that deserve more respect, such as Chrono Trigger and Secret of Evermore.
Let's keep The World Ends With You in that group of respected non-Final Fantasy games.  If anything, it has one of the greatest titles of any videogame ever made.  Come on, if somebody said that at any moment in time, could you counter it?
Not unless you're GK Chesterton.

Fun and Innovation - 3
Replayability - 2
Gameplay - 4
Presentation - 4