I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: The World Ends With You

I went on a crusade this week to find my Nintendo DS, because I desperately am trying to avoid buying a PS Vita and a copy of Persona 4: Golden, because come on that’s a hefty chunk of change for a shitty version of Borderlands 2 and what will mostly be a Persona playing machine. Luckily, I have a secret stash of esoteric JRPGs, and once I remembered where I had hidden the thing from my 3 year old son, I was able to boot up the oft overlooked Shibuya Fashion Simulator, The World Ends With You. Great job on a ridiculously convoluted name, by the way. I’m impressed by a game that can have such a clunky title while not using any extraneous punctuation.

Anyway, TWEWY (a more-or-less unpronounceable acronym, too! This title’s got legs) is all about your grumpy teenage fashonista who wears too many belts, but is also dead, and his self-hating partner, who is also dead. Did I mention you’re playing a weird game with Reapers to try and not have died? I’m not sure how it all works out, because I obviously haven’t beaten the game yet, but man it sounds fascinating. Or super dumb. Probably a little bit of both.

Speaking of sounds, this soundtrack is fanstastic. The little DS speakers don’t really do it justice, so I plugged a pair of nice headphones in and was rewarded by some startlingly clear music. Sometimes I forget how much data can be packed onto one of those little SD cards. The songs themselves are squarely in the JPop/JRap (is JRap a thing? If it isn’t I’m making it one) spectrum, and the overall sound reminds me of the Persona 4 soundtrack in a lot of ways.

Gameplay-wise, TWEWY makes heavy use of the touchpad, which is neat because, I mean, that’s what it’s there for in the first place. Combat takes place on both screens, and challenges you to operate both protagonists at the same time, using the stylus to move the fellow on the bottom screen and the D-Pad or face buttons to move the fellow on the top screen. If you time your attacks correctly, you’ll pass a green energy puck back and forth, which builds your attack power the more you pass it. It’s really hard to master, but also really innovative. I like it, even though a lot of the time I let the AI handle the top screen.

The standard RPG equipment is replaced by Pins, which allow you to cast spells and attack the Noise or whatever. The Noise are the moment-to-moment enemy in the game, and you fight ‘em by scanning an area and dragging them to you with the stylus. This means that you can chain together fights, which makes things more difficult but also gives you bonuses and such for doing so. The more you chain, the better the bonus.

Your armor is instead clothing, and different brands of clothing give different bonuses. Also, depending on what area of Shibuya you’re in, different brands are popular. Popular brands give you bonuses, while unpopular brands penalize you. It’s a pretty deep system, as it turns out, and I don’t know that I ever really got that far into the whole brand synergy game. I did, however, get far enough into the story for a couple of twists and turns to happen, and I was surprised at how much of it I remembered when I booted it up again this week.

If you have a DS, (or a 3DS, I guess… are those backwards-compatible? I’ve no idea) then it is probably worth your time to track down a used copy of this game and just go to town. It’s a real fun game, and it takes advantage of the DS hardware in a way that I wish more games had done (and, I think, are doing with the 3DS). I doubt we’ll ever see a TWEWY2, but if we did, I would probably have to get whatever system it was on. Shame that Square-Enix seems to be a pretty risk-averse company these days, though.