alienhominid's Profile

The World Ends With You

Published: Wed 12 Nov, 2008 | On:

The world ends with you is a RPG made by the same team at Square Enix that gave us Kingdom hearts. TWEWY is set in the Shibuya shopping district of Tokyo. Shibuya is actually based upon the real Shibuya in Japan and many of the areas can actually be found in RL (apparently).

You play as Neku Sakuraba a recently deceased teenager who finds himself forced into a game that will decide whether he is worthy to come back to life or will be erased. "The game" is set over a week and you must complete one mission each day to earn your right to come back to life. You soon find that it's not as easy as it seems and has a few twists in the story. The Story is very deep and will have you replaying chapters once you’ve finished.

Neku is a bit of a loner and doesn't trust other people very much. This plays a crucial part in the development of his character throughout the story as you must team up with other players in "the game" to survive. Neku changes a lot by the end of the game and is hardly the same as he started. One of the characters that Neku teams up with is Shiki which I became very attached to and found myself almost crying at certain parts of the game.

The battle system is very unique and is one of the main highlights of the game. The battles are split between the two screens with your team mate on the top screen and Neku on the touch screen. You actually control both Neku and your team mate at the same time. You use the Dpad to control the top screen. You use the touch screen to activate "Psycs"(attacks) by using certain motions or shouting into the microphone.

If you find it to hard to do both at the same time you can always just activate auto mode and the comp will just play your team mate for you. Auto mode also lets you control it manually whenever you feel like it just by playing as you normally would.

Graphics wise this is one of the prettier DS games with a great and unique art style. There was a bit of a drop of frame rate at some times when you are battling large amounts of enemies but nothing very noticeable.

In terms of music the sound quality was surprisingly good for the DS but could get a bit repetitive at times. But luckily in the game you can buy more tracks that will be played in between battles and this can help with the repetitiveness a wee bit.

There are also many cool features like the ability to scale your health down to increase your item pick up rate and if you turn the DS off your character will earn EXP to level up your attacks for the time that it's turned off for up to 7 days.

With around 25hours in the story and many more to be lost in just mucking round and replay. This game is great value even though I think you may have to import it now as I'm pretty sure they don't make it any more.