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    The World Ends with You

    Game » consists of 9 releases. Released Jul 27, 2007

    How does Japanese fashion collide with a pin that grants psychic powers? Square and Jupiter find out in The World Ends With You.

    vasta_narada's The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS) review

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    The World May End With You, but Damn, is it Sweet!

    The World Ends With You is an action-RPG of sorts developed by Jupiter (the team who developed Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories) and published by world-renowned RPG developer, Square Enix. In this game, players will run around the streets of Shibuya, a fashion and teen hotspot, as antisocial teenager Neku Sakuraba to the beat of great, original music.

    Food can be bought from a number of stores in the game, and then eaten for stat bonuses ranging from increased HP, attack, defense, or brave (more on that shortly). However, these stat bonuses only take effect after the food is digested. This is done by fighting battles. Each kind of food has a number of “bytes” that it takes from you when you eat it. Think of bytes as your stomach capacity. Neku (and his partners) is allowed to use 24 bytes per 24 real-time hours. And each byte, when digested, takes one byte off the remaining bytes. Also, one battle is equivalent to digesting one byte. So, if a milkshake was 3 bytes big, it would take 3 battles to digest, and whoever drank the milkshake would have 21 bytes left (assuming it was the first piece of food that day).

    Armor, in The World Ends With You, doesn’t mean medieval steel armor, or flak jackets. This taking place is fashion-conscious Shibuya, armor refers to clothes. There are t-shirts, hats, accessories, shoes, pants, shorts and more, each bearing the name of 1 of 13 of Shibuya’s hottest brands. These brands have an impact in battle, as the top 3 hottest brands grant the wearer an attack bonus, and the worst brand halves your attack (the other 9 brands don’t influence your stats). Each region of Shibuya has its own hottest brands. Luckily, you can affect which brands are hot by wearing clothes and pins of that brand in battle.

    Speaking of battles, in The World Ends With You, there are no random encounters. In fact, Neku is almost never forced to fight. The only exceptions to this are story-related battles. However, unlike other RPG’s, where it’s frustrating to increase your level due to having to cause random battles, the player can tap the Player Pin icon at the bottom-right corner of the touch screen to initiate a scan. You can do this anytime you want, and when you do, the world is wrapped in a blue aura, and everyone’s tightly protected secrets that lay peacefully in their heads are revealed to Neku. That’s not all, either. The Noise are visible, and ready for a fight. All you have to do is tap the Noise symbols to start a fight. You can even chain multiple fights together to increase your drop rate further and make it more challenging.

    In battle, Neku fights on the bottom screen, and his partner fights on the top screen…simultaneously. Neku fights with a group of four to six pins he wears that can be activated by different gestures on the touch screen. They’re pretty varied too; there’s a pin that grants pyrokinesis if you drag the stylus around the screen, a melee attack pin that lets Neku get up close and personal by slashing enemies, and a pin that shoots lighting by rapidly tapping the screen. Over all, the system works well, despite the mind-bending concept, and the large number of pins with different attacks and associated gestures keeps the battles fresh and entertaining. Just in case you equip multiple pins with the same general gesture (such as touching empty space and rapidly tapping the screen), you can set certain pins to sub-slots, meaning that they will only activate if you hold down L or R.

    On the top screen, Neku’s partner stands dead centre of the screen. Their enemies stand on either side, and you use the directional pad to open a combo tree that you go through by pressing directions. Mashing either left or right is a good fallback plan if things get really heated on the bottom screen, however, you can press up to jump, down to dodge or block, or press the direction opposite the way you’re attacking to deliver a special technique. The feature here is fusion stars. Once enough are accumulated, Neku gets a special pin to use by tapping the symbol that occurs. The result is a devastating attack that hits every enemy.

    The method of getting fusion stars is different for each of Neku’s partners. For his first partner, Shiki, has 3 playing cards face-down on the top of the screen. What you have to do is guess what symbol the card furthest right holds, either a circle, square, three-parallel wavy lines, or a star. To input your answer, finish a combo that holds a picture of that symbol beside the last attack on the combo tree. You can press up or down while attacking to navigate the different combos. One of Neku’s other partners has them playing a game of high or low, and another making pairs of cards by adding cards to a pool before a timer goes and burns the cards, damaging you.

    Also, there are four difficulties that range from Easy to Ultimate. Ultimate adds a layer of hate to a game that’s so much fun to play, seeing as how the game gets unbearably hard during the later chapters. Luckily, the developers realized how hard the game could be, and how a little over-confidence could make the player get decimated. Thus, early on, you gain the ability to “reset” battles. Basically, if you die, you have the option of either retrying the battle(s), retrying on easy, escaping the battle (this can’t be chosen for story-related fights), or quitting to the title screen. With a little luck, and some good co-operation between Neku and his partner, you won’t need to see that menu.

    There are some interesting notes about battles as well. The most obvious is that Neku and his partner share a health bar. This means that if you focus too much on one screen, the other could get annihilated and cost you the match. The developers noticed this. To counter, they added a number of AI settings for your partner. You can set them to be fully manual, let the computer take over after 3 seconds, 6 seconds, or right away. You can change this setting whenever not in battle to your own tastes. However, not only Neku and his partner share a life bar. The same enemies show up on both screens at once, and they share life bars. For example, if on Neku’s screen, spawn two wolf-noise, three bird-noise and a shark-noise, the same enemies (and same amounts) will spawn on the other screen. In addition, each individual enemy shares a life bar with its counterpart, so if you “erase” it on one screen,  it will be erased on the other. Useful, and fair; that’s how The World Ends With You is. Finally, it’s notable to say that Neku’s pins each have “boot” and “reboot” times. The boot time indicates the time before a pin can be used at the start of a battle (and only in the first battle if there are more than one chained). The reboot time tells you how long it takes for a pin to recharge its uses, as each pin can only be used a certain amount of times per charge. Some pins have no boot time, and some pins can’t be rebooted. Again, it’s all part of balancing.

    Another thing The World Ends With You does that most other RPG’s don’t do, is level weapons (or pins in this case). Here, pins gain experience with each battle and gain levels just like Neku. Leveling up for pins could mean better a attack stat, more uses before recharging, or a shorter boot/reboot time or evolving. Also, pins can get experience in a few other ways, and certain pins evolve only by gaining certain kinds of experience. The first is called “Mingle PP”.

    In The World Ends With You, you can access a mode called “Mingle”. This sets up a wi-fi signal that can trade items with any DS it can find also in Mingle mode with The World Ends With You inserted. However, Mingle mode also picks up the signal of any wi-fi device. Every “encounter” grants some experience for your pins.

    The other way of gaining experience is called “Shutdown PP”. Basically, you get a set amount of experience depending on how long the DS is shut off, though it only records up to seven days worth of experience. Naturally, this all runs off the DS’ clock and can be easily manipulated. Still, it’s neat to see the developers reward you for not playing their product.

    On the overworld, gameplay is pretty much limited navigating Neku through the twisted streets of Shibuya, triggering Cutscenes, and reading minds. Sometimes a mission will have you finding things called “memes”. Memes are words integral to the mission that you can implant into certain people’s minds to influence their thinking, by way of a method called “Imprinting”. Imprinting is a straight-forward process, having you look through the target’s mind, and finding the right place to plant a meme: easy, simple, and sometimes amusing when you make a mistake.

    Also, there is a limited multiplayer mode that lets you play a game popular in the fictional Shibuya with a friend. The game is called Tin Pin Slammer, and is highly reminiscent of Beyblade. In short, you use the pins you have equipped to knock your opponents off a table. Your pins also have access to abilities called Whammys. Whammys take the form of one of four “attacks”. One lets you swing a hammer around your pin to stun the opponent, surrounding your pin in spikes to protect it is another, slamming your pin into the other’s from the air is the third, and saving your pin from going off the edge is the last. Each pin in the game also has stats associated with Tin Pin, such as how likely it is to spin when you slide it, how heavy it is, and how many times you can use each kind of Whammy.

    All in all, The World Ends With You is a fantastic entry into the action-RPG genre. Words can’t quite detail the feeling you get while playing the game, holed up with your headphones, madly tapping and swiping away. Anyone with a desire for an interesting story, great gameplay, or just pain, fun owes it to themselves to give The World Ends With You a shot. It’s not without simple faults, and it may be nothing more than a series of 0’s and 1’s, but math-obsessed Reaper, Minamimoto couldn’t have said it better than this: “Drown in the wonderful sea of numbers!”

    Other reviews for The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS)

      Stylish, Upbeat, Fun 0

      The cast.I heard a lot about The World Ends With You when it was called It's A Wonderful World. After reading several articles, my interest was piqued. While my brain could still not comprehend the insane dual screen battles by just reading articles, I knew I had to get my hands on this. Well, I finally did, and it has gone beyond and above my expectations. The World Ends With You is definitely one of the best games on the Nintendo DS; its music, style, gameplay, and story all draw you into the ...

      6 out of 7 found this review helpful.

      WEWY is a fresh, gripping, and fun RPG for the DS 0

      Imagine you've just woken up in the middle of the street of a busy city. You can't remember anything at all, and nobody can see or feel you. It's as if you don't exist. Then, out of nowhere, a girl forcefully asks you to 'form a pact' with her so you won't get 'erased' by the 'noise.' Not knowing what the heck is going on, you just kind of go along with it, because you learn that you are dead… but you have been given the opportunity to earn a second chance at life.That's the premise of The World...

      1 out of 1 found this review helpful.

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