The World Ends With You?
Everyone of any importance is in this image. And I mean everyone.
Everything Nomura touches seems to turn into gold and The World Ends With You is no exception. Excellent character design (although Neku looks a hell lot like Sora), intuitive gameplay, plenty of mini-games and side quests to keep yourself busy and an unpredictable plot. If I were to explain the plot, you will find it extremely confusing since the plot appears to be contradicting itself at every turn. It’s so full of twist that even a pretzel looks straight in comparison. Finish the game, think about it and get back to me. You will know I’m right.
You would think he’s yawning. I know otherwise 
Here’s an example: The game lasts for 7 days. Your partner, Shiki, stays with you for the entire 7 days duration of the game, from start to finish. But she will only be with you for less than half the game. Confusing? This is just the tip of the iceberg, and is the only example I can think of right now without spoiling any other parts of the game. Everything will make perfect sense once you’ve played the game.
While the main plot is quite linear and there’s really no way for you to get lost, there are actually a few alternatives on how you want to take the side story on. There are plenty of side stories where you can choose to help others out and help them make decisions on what they should do. These usually have less restrictions and have more open ended results based on the choices you made.
You’re controlling BOTH screens at once. Kool, eh?
The gameplay itself is fresh and something new. Like Phantom Hourglass and Ninja Gaiden, The World Ends With You relies very heavily on stylus. But the twist here is, you can actually make use of the D-Pad and buttons to take control of the battle that’s happening on the upper screen simultaneously. Talk about multitasking – it’s no easy feat for sure and most of the time you’re forced to concentrate on either one while blindly spamming buttons or sliding your stylus around like mad.
Another unique feature of this game is you can adjust the difficulty level on the fly. Some items can only be dropped from noises (enemies in TWEWY are called noise) with specific difficulty level. You can also set handicap on yourself by lowering your level and stats in order to get better drops.
Everything in the game revolves around pins. Your attacks and abilities mostly comes from the pin you are wearing. Different pin have different ways to activate, such as the Pyrokinses pin (the first attack pin you receive) which allows you to create fire along the path drawn by your stylus.
Other pins requires you to drag obstacles, tap on enemies, slashing enemies and a variety of other ways to activate the pins using just your stylus. It might sound confusing at first, but it’s very intuitive and you will be able to pick it up in no time. Fortunately, you will be given practice battles if the game requires you to learn more complicated moves or combos, so you can take your time to test and play around before you face an actual battle.
This would be the perfect image if Shiki were in it…
The light sounding BGM’s doesn’t really stand out during the game and blends in perfectly with the mood and situation that you might not even realize it’s there. It’s really not a bad thing since it just results in a better flow of the game. That’s not to say the BGM is poor and forgettable, since it’s really quite good. It’s just that the game itself seems to have the music volume down lower than the voice and special effects audio in order to allow players to absorb all the small details you would normally miss due to noise (pun intended).
The in-game graphics is nothing to shout about since all the characters are rendered with sprites and look extremely pixelated when brought up close to the front of the screen. But Shibuya itself and during character interactions where “pop-out” art is being used, they look great. I used the word “pop-out” because the characters seems to be static, cut-out images that needs to be swapped out every time they someone’s expression changed. Not to mention the use of speech bubbles that overlaps each other feels a lot like reading a comic or manga.
Before playing the game, I’ve read countless good reviews about TWEWY about it being “refreshing”. While I didn’t doubt that the game wouldn’t be anything short than awesome, I’ve played a bit of the Japanese version before and didn’t find it all that refreshing. Sure, the game play is something new, but still it wasn’t that different from the likes of Phantom Hourglass or Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. It wasn’t until I’ve finished the game the first time that I thought, “Ah, that was a very refreshing game…” I mean, where else can you cross-dress the main character into skirts and high heels for some of the BEST STATS in the game?
That said, you must definitely check out The World Ends With You! Btw, The World Begins With You 
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