Someone needs to figure out whatever is in the water over at Square Enix and sell it to other game development houses because despite owning three of the most recognizable RPG franchises in gaming with Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Draqon Quest, Square has still found time to create one of the funkiest, most original and downright best games available on the Nintendo DS. The World Ends With You is beautifully stylish, full of endearing characters and character moments, and crackling with fun, frenetic combat.
You play as Neku a spiky haired youth who awakens in the Shibuya district of Tokyo with nary a memory in his head. If that weren’t strange enough, Neku can’t be seen or heard by any of the thousands of folks going about their shopping. In short order, Neku finds out that he has psychic powers and that he must team up with another teen and compete in a game run by the shadowy Reapers lest he and his partner be permanently erased from the world. Neku’s opponents in this game are collectively called Noise and attack Neku as tribalized versions of animals, looking as if they were taken right from the wall of the local tattoo parlor. You haven’t lived until you’ve been attacked by a vicious, spectral penguin.
Each chapter of the game takes place over the course of seven days with the Reapers assigning Neku and his partner a specific task with a specific time limit each day. Thankfully the time limit isn’t enforced in the real world, so you’re free to visit as many parts of Shibuya as you want, fighting Noise, collecting pins and buying fashionable clothing items. Neku’s psychic powers come from equipping various pins, each conferring a special attack or defensive property. As Neku and his partner move through the various parts of Shibuya, different brands take on more or less importance, which in turn either raises or lowers the effectiveness of that brand in combat. With a quick check of your phone, you can see which brands are in favor at the moment, and equip the right pins and clothing items to gain attack boosts. Neku can also bend trends to his will by equipping pins and clothing items of less popular brands and winning fights, thereby raising the status of the equipped brand.
Combat is fast paced and takes full use of both screens, pitting Neku against foes on the bottom screen while his partner takes on Noise on the top screen. When controlling Neku you’ll be slashing enemies on the touch screen or tapping empty spaces to fire bullets or scribbling powerful earthquake tremors, all depending on which pins are equipped. Controlling your top screen partner is as simple as pressing combinations of the d-pad arrows, or face buttons to match the prompts on screen. By completing the right combos with the top screen character, you’ll earn fusion stars. Earn enough fusion stars and Team Neku can unleash a torrent of psychic destruction, raining damage down on all of the enemies on both screens.
On top of all of this, completing successful combos with either character passes the light puck, a glowing green orb, to the other character who then gets an attack boost if they successfully complete a combo while holding on to the puck, thereby sending the puck to the other screen and so on. It sounds complicated, and really has to be played to be fully appreciated, however you’ll quickly get the hang of it and be passing the light puck, pulling off massive combos and earning fusion stars in no time.
If the game consisted of nothing but the combat and the story, it would be worth a purchase, however the act of managing pins becomes a game in and of itself and is more than enough to satisfy even the most stat hungry equipment junkie.
Leveling up Neku does nothing more than give him and his partner a larger shared health bar. The way to get more, better powers is by leveling up the pins themselves. Equipping pins in battles allows the pins to gain more levels, however pins can also gain levels by having the pins equipped and shutting the game off for some time, as well as having the pins equipped and putting the game in Mingle Mode, where any interaction with another wireless DS signal, even PictoChat, will allow the pins to grow in power.
In addition, some pins can evolve into stronger, better versions of themselves with the evolution based on getting the most experience points from either battle points, shutdown points or mingle points. Between the need to change out pins based on the dominant brand, the need to manage which pins are being used to level them up and managing how to get pins to evolve, there is a lot of work involved in obtaining all 300+ pins, but it never feels like a chore.
Pins can also be obtained from enemies defeated in battle, and even the most commonplace aspect of the RPG, the loot drop, can be tinkered with to suit your needs. At any point before a battle, you can not only change the difficulty level of the fight, but change Neku’s character level. Lowering his character level means he’ll have fewer hit points to work with, however it increases the number and quality of pin drops. To engage the Noise, Neku scans the area he’s in, which pinpoints groups of enemies, as well as allows Neku to read the thoughts of others. Tapping on an enemy icon will bring Neku into battle, but for those looking to score the biggest pin drops, you can chain up to four battles together, all off of one health bar and clean up. As you progress through the game, chaining battles and lowering your combat level can bring in dozens of pins at a time. Granted, they may all be copies of one you already have, however you can always trade in your pins for cash so that you can buy that mock turtleneck you’ve had your eye on.
The combat and pins system sounds complicated, and that’s without getting into the ability to eat and digest food for both temporary and permanent stat boosts, however one of the most elegant aspects of the game is how it allows the player to customize the game experience. If all you want is to get through the story and see why Neku is playing the Reapers’ game, you can set the game on easy, tell the CPU to control your top screen partner, raise your combat level and have a blast. If you want to squeeze every ounce of pin-collecting, item managing, fusion star grabbing moment out of the game, you can take do that as well. The world truly does end with you, and how you play in it is up to you.
