| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Nintendo DS | 9.30 |
| Overall | 9.30 |
|
If you frequent any gaming message board you are bound to find a "JRPGs are stale" kind of thread. While I personally don't believe that is true I cannot deny that there is a large group of people that feel JRPGs lack in innovation when compared to its western counterparts. Those people need to play The World Ends With You, a JRPG that flips many of usual cliches on its head while maintaining that off the wall Japanese game spirit. It begins with every cliche in the book. Emo kid wakes up with amnesia and meets a very lively wide eyed girl to help him on his journey. After a few hours the characters backstories begin to come to light and slowly all the normal JRPG conventions errode away, leaving major real life issues like suicide, guilt, and the entire experience of finding who you are in those wonder years. I found the story to be very engaging mainly because Square incorporated the fantastic nature of an RPG in a real world setting with some real world issues. The overall plot is completely insane, it is pure Japanese craziness dealing with alternate dimensions and a life or death game played with an entire city in the balance. There is enough of our world for the story to still feel familiar. The characters wear brand name clothing as "armor", your cell phone is your menu system, food replaces your items. The game world is modeled after a real Japanese city, I wish I lived there so that I could visit the same locations from the game, must be great for the Japanese. I loved everything about the story, setting and theme of the game. Don't expect the normal boring turn based combat here, TWEWY uses every aspect of the DS in its combat. You are in complete control on whether or not you want to fight. The enemy is called "noise" and it floats around the area when you "scan". For the most part the player chooses whether or not to fight the noise, obviously fighting will raise your exp and you may get some new pins (more on this later). At specific points in the game you are required to fight but it is nice to play a game where you don't have to grind or where navigating the game world is a pain cause of constant interruptions. The battles themselves take place on both screens at the same time and will be overwhelming at first. On the touch screen you control our main hero Neku. Using the stylus you will drag Neku around the screen to avoid attacks and do a variety of actions to damage enemies. Neku uses pins to attack. Pins are collected throughout the game much how someone would collect pogs or bottlecaps. There are a ton and they all have different attributes and attacks. Some allow you to slash at an enemy. Others have you tap on the screen to rain down boulders of death. With some you scratch the screen until an earthquake starts. A few pins even require you to yell into the microphone for a large area attack. Every possible use of the touch screen and mic is covered. Each pin has its own stats and they all level up as you battle enemies, some may even evolve into better pins. Your deck are the pins you chose to bring with you into battle, you start with only 4 slots but end the game with 6. Mixing and matching the best combination of pins becomes one of the main focal points of the game and I felt kept the combat fresh throughout. I would always make sure to include new pins into my deck to level as many of them up. After a while you will notice that in reality there are only about 20 true variations of the pins. They expand it to about 300 pins through differences in stats and brand names. Once you have seen one slash pin you have seen them all, the same goes for all the other variations. I would have liked to see a bit more true variation, not just differences in stats. So while you are slashing, scratching and blowing your way through fights on the bottom screen another battle is occurring on the top screen. One of three partners will be on the top screen, they all control the same way but each have differences. Basically you use the d-pad to attack and defend. To attack you press the d-pad in the direction of the enemy to start a combo, you will then see a sort of map of buttons to press to reach the end of the combo. If you complete the combo the character will recieve a special card that is used to create a super attack. It is hard to describe, just know that each character has a specific way of building up the special attack meter and it all has to do with choosing the right d-pad button combination. The problem is that it is very hard to pay attention to the top screen when so much is happening on the bottom screen. You may choose to put the top screen on auto pilot and the AI will take over for you but it won't play as well as an expert player would. Instead I found that the best way to play with both screens is to focus on the bottom screen and just continuously hit right or left on the d-pad (depending on where the enemy is) as that always completes a long combo. Now that may not be the right combo to use to quickly get a special attack but do it enough times and the special attack will come. This is basically where the combat feels a bit sloppy. On the hardest fights it is just impossible to manage both screens the way the game expects you to. Not only do you need to be attacking on both screens but you need to be dodging attacks on both screens. I am sorry but I don't posses the ability to watch two screens at once. Most major battles had me either mashing on random d-pad buttons as I focused on the bottom screen or widely scratching away at the bottom screen as I focused on the top screen. For some of the enemies I did find a pattern which allowed me to shift focus at the right times but most of the time I won battles out of sheer strength, I would out damage the opponent. There is this multiplier called the light puck which goes from one screen to the next which is supposed to tell you which screen to focus on; that is fine for the scrub enemies but forget that on bosses. While combat is fun, fast and exciting it is chaotic and never allows itself to turn into a major strategic battle like most JRPGs do. The game structure is very unique in that it is broken down into different days. The entire game takes place in the one city, this city has about 20 or so different screens to explore. It is not much, the area you explore is actually very small and you will see most of it by the first third of the game. At the start of each day you get a mission. Each mission has its own objective which could be something as simple as going to a certain location or convincing a person to do something. Neku has the ability to read minds, this mechanic is used throughout the game on various missions. It is all very simple and straightforward, they are not puzzles, most of the missions will have you influencing people which lead to interesting conversations and situations. Each day will have certain sections of the map closed off and key NPCs will be doing something different on each day. This is how the small city remains interesting for the full length of the game, even though there is not a lot to explore the world feels lived in and it grows throughout. As with all RPGs there are many distractions to your quest and in this game it is all about shopping. Fashion is a giant part of the game, it affects stats and sometimes which pins you should use. Each section of the city keeps stats on which brands are popular, the more popular the brand the more stat bonuses you gain if you wear those brands. The nice thing about the system is that you can get away with ignoring it completely cause switching brands after every screen would be incredibly annoying. I recommend to just play the way you want to play, the more you use a brand the more that brand becomes popular so in the end you will change the game to fit what you like to wear. The shopping system is pretty cool and will be addicting to all those completionists. Each shop sells certain items, as you shop at that location you will get more friendly with the clerk, as you get more friendly you may find new rare items show up in the shop. Each item has a special ability that only clerks know, as you become friendly with them they will share these abilities. There are tons of shops, so to become friendly to all of them will take a lot of work and dedication. It is possible to get every piece of clothing in the game, it is not needed at all, just like you don't need to collect every pin, but its there for the hardcore. One of the most unique aspects of TWEWY is that it is completely customizable. I have never seen anything like it, you are in complete control of how difficult or how easy the game is at all times. As you level up you gain more HP, the more HP you enter a battle with the less chances you have to have an enemy drop a rare. There is a bar that controls your level, you may drop down to level 1 at any time or max out your level for maximum HP. This directly influences the percentage of drops from the enemies, which you can keep track of on the enemy page. There are also four difficulty modes, each enemy has a different drop for each level of difficulty. If you want you can play the ENTIRE game on easy with max level and never have a challenge. Or you can always play on the hardest setting, with a mid level setting for the best drops and challenge. It is completely up to you. Is that boss too hard, drop down a difficulty level. Enemies getting too easy, increase the challenge. There is never a reason to get stuck, you are in complete control, I love it! Because of this system there is no need at all to grind, combat is entirely up to you not cause its necessary but because it is fun. As I played I found myself changing the difficulties to make sure I found all the drops of each enemy. I would go back to older bosses on a harder setting later on when my characters were more prepared for a tougher battle. The main story can be completed in about 20-25 hours but that is only just the beginning. After finishing the game you unlock a chapter select screen which allows you to replay every day in the game, this time with new objectives like finding all the hidden pig noise and defeating them or fighting a certain enemy on hard or higher. When you get all objectives in a given day you unlock a report which gives you an epic backstory and explains what went on behind the scenes while Neku was battling for his life. There is an extra chapter that has it's own unique story and basically serves as a challenge chapter. This extra chapter has all new enemies and bosses, the hardest in the entire game. Again it is all optional but if you are like me you will not hesitate at the chance of jumping back into the game for more content and to find more pins. By the time I felt satisfied I was past the 50 hour mark. I have somehow gone this entire review without mentioning the music. This game has one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. Each track is an original song designed to enter your brain and never leave. About five minutes into the game I found myself singing along to a song I never heard of, most catchy music ever. It is all J-pop and electronic beats, it fits the game perfectly. The only issue is that there are not enough different tracks. You will hear the same song over and over and over and over again, and you will LOVE IT. TWEWY uses an anime comic book style for its visuals. All cutscenes are done within minimal animation, most is done like a comic, complete with speech bubbles. It fits, the total package feels so different from everything else that is out there. The World End With You is a brilliant RPG. Everything about it is original and most of it is highly addicting. It is one of those games that is perfectly designed for the system it is on. It uses every single aspect of the DS, even the amount of time you leave the game off influences exp. It is perfectly designed for portable gaming. It is completely customizable so that every type of gamer can play and enjoy at their own pace. While it is not perfect I still believe it is one of those rare benchmark titles for the DS. |
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Posted by Dvader Thu, 28 Oct 2010 19:04:03
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travo (9m)
The only thing I would change about the game would be to make the environment larger. I got the sense of going back thorugh the same areas over and over again (said the Yakuza apologist).
I brute-forced many of the large battles also, but that is hwo I play JRPGs.
Again, great review.
...ONLY 9.3 ? !
I still can't quite wrap my head around this game, as it sounds awfully complicated when you start talking about the dual screen battles and pins and other stuff.
great game, very well written review