The World Ends with You

I bought this game not out of the blue, but specifically after holding off for several years after its release in 2008. Any RPG from Square merits at least a strong consideration on my part, but there was always something a little bit off about this game. What finally got me to buy in was a recommendation from somewhere on the Internet, based on how much I had enjoyed both Zero Escape games on the DS. Each of those games had a pretty mind-bending mystery at its core, and if I could play an RPG with a similar set of twists, why wouldn't I?

Now, it's often been said that there are three key design elements of all Japanese role-playing games: plot, exploration, and combat. "Plot" is more or less the story the game tells as you push your way through it. Who are these characters? What are their goals? What stands in their way? That sort of stuff. "Exploration" is everything you do in the game that doesn't directly relate to advancing the plot, like walking around town talking to random people, taking on a side quest, going places you don't need to go, watching scenes that you don't need to watch, and so on. There's often some overlap between plot and exploration, but it usually isn't hard to categorize chunks of different games as one or the other when push comes to shove. Lastly, combat consists, obviously, of all the fights and battles in a game, and more broadly of the entire battle system the game has set up, from move sets to character stats.

The best RPGs excel at all three of these elements, and different types of RPGs add emphasis to different aspects. An MMORPG is, by nature, going to be light on plot but extremely heavy on exploration. A strategy RPG will make its hay in the intricacies of its combat. And then there are RPGs with epic, sprawling stories where the scope and emotional impact of the story is the selling point itself. Let me take a minute now to go over The World Ends with You and see if that's the best way to explain my own reaction to it.

• Plot: The story really was the hook this game had going for it. You play as Neku, a boy who wakes up one day to find himself an unwilling participant in a game where losing means dying. The game takes place on an alternate plane of reality, and the participants can see everything in the real world, but cannot interact with anyone; they're essentially ghosts. Neku partners up with three different people over the course of the game, trying to survive and also to figure out why he's here at all. It's not the best or deepest story in the world, but the constant twists keep it entertaining and interesting enough to grant it a solid B.
• Exploration: Here's where the game starts to suffer. The entire story takes place in a subsection of Tokyo, which means that all the environments end up looking the same. Furthermore, since there aren't a lot of people to interact with from the ghost world, there really isn't much optional dialogue. The game also employs all kinds of roadblocks that don't allow you to progress on much more than a linear track. It's about as straightforward as a rail shooter, unfortunately.
• Combat: In a nutshell, a total mess. First of all, you have to use the stylus to swipe and tap on enemies on the screen moving in real time. Complicating things, your partner battles on the top screen and is controlled by the directional pad. The partner will enter auto-battle mode by default - which is something I learned not to mess with, very quickly - but that just means I spent lots of battles tapping and swiping enemies that were already getting hit by my partner. There was also a "pin" concept that replaced the standard weapon equipment aspect of gameplay, and these pins stood in for attacks and healing spells, and I'm not sure I ever understood it or made much sense of it. The combat here was bold and innovative, but it was kind of a disaster in implementation - at least for me.

So at the end of the day, this was a game that felt broken even if it wasn't, and one that didn't allow you to do much of anything beyond pushing through the end-to-end story. That story wasn't bad, but it also wasn't amazing, and a decent story alone doesn't make any game worth spending twenty hours playing. I wanted to like The World Ends with You, and I want to give it acclaim for being so unique and unusual, but ultimately I found it to be little more than a twenty-hour slog with frustrating combat. Oh well!