The World Ends With You was a purchase from last summer that I've been dreading for a while. It got great reviews from all over the place, but a few attempts to get into the game, each spread out by a few months, always proved futile. Apparently I'm not alone- the one biggest complaint about the game according to Wikipedia appears to be the steep learning curve. Anyway, this was the first time I've attempted the game since the start of the backblog, and I guess that gives a man just enough reason to persevere when times are tough. What a great blog. Anyway, TWEWY is an action rpg in which you play as Neku, a misanthropic teen forced into a dangerous game where the object is to complete seven missions in seven days. Win, and he gets to go back to his normal life, and of course death if he loses. The twist here is that during battles, the touch screen is used for controlling Neku, and the top screen of the DS shows one of your partners fighting as well. The partner can be controlled with the D-pad, but if you just worry about Neku on the bottom screen then your partner will auto fight. I was a bit skeptical of this game mechanic, but it turned out to not get in the way very much. Usually I just fought as Neku on the bottom screen unless a battle specifically called for using the partner. Sometimes it did feel that I had to work pretty hard to compensate for a weak teammate (kind of goes against the game's message of trusting in your partner) but you can change the difficulty of the game whenever you want, so it wasn't a big deal. The combat in theory seemed way to simple- I mostly just slashed enemies upwards over and over again, but surprisingly this didn't really get stale until the end of the game. The plot here was pretty ridiculous and anime as fuck, but there was something like 15 different characters with some great story arcs, backed mostly by plenty of well-written dialog. I guess my big problem with the game was the huge amount of extra stuff that was all completely unnecessary. I got new abilities all the time but had no reason to switch- my current abilities were always more powerful and the game never got hard enough to make me reconsider. There were all sorts of mini-games that supposedly added depth, but none of them seemed worth more than one or two tries. The game bombarded me with info on extra things to make me more powerful, and I got through just fine ignoring most of them completely. I guess it all just seemed like forced "depth" that was more like needless padding. Anyway, I still enjoyed The World Ends With You, but not enough that I'd recommend it or pick it back up again. I guess that makes it more "tolerable" than "enjoyable", but hey, who cares. Christmas is almost here, and with that comes a flood of new things to backlog. I've got 23 days to clear out some space. Bring it on, I say.
December 2, 2009
The World Ends With You
The World Ends With You was a purchase from last summer that I've been dreading for a while. It got great reviews from all over the place, but a few attempts to get into the game, each spread out by a few months, always proved futile. Apparently I'm not alone- the one biggest complaint about the game according to Wikipedia appears to be the steep learning curve. Anyway, this was the first time I've attempted the game since the start of the backblog, and I guess that gives a man just enough reason to persevere when times are tough. What a great blog. Anyway, TWEWY is an action rpg in which you play as Neku, a misanthropic teen forced into a dangerous game where the object is to complete seven missions in seven days. Win, and he gets to go back to his normal life, and of course death if he loses. The twist here is that during battles, the touch screen is used for controlling Neku, and the top screen of the DS shows one of your partners fighting as well. The partner can be controlled with the D-pad, but if you just worry about Neku on the bottom screen then your partner will auto fight. I was a bit skeptical of this game mechanic, but it turned out to not get in the way very much. Usually I just fought as Neku on the bottom screen unless a battle specifically called for using the partner. Sometimes it did feel that I had to work pretty hard to compensate for a weak teammate (kind of goes against the game's message of trusting in your partner) but you can change the difficulty of the game whenever you want, so it wasn't a big deal. The combat in theory seemed way to simple- I mostly just slashed enemies upwards over and over again, but surprisingly this didn't really get stale until the end of the game. The plot here was pretty ridiculous and anime as fuck, but there was something like 15 different characters with some great story arcs, backed mostly by plenty of well-written dialog. I guess my big problem with the game was the huge amount of extra stuff that was all completely unnecessary. I got new abilities all the time but had no reason to switch- my current abilities were always more powerful and the game never got hard enough to make me reconsider. There were all sorts of mini-games that supposedly added depth, but none of them seemed worth more than one or two tries. The game bombarded me with info on extra things to make me more powerful, and I got through just fine ignoring most of them completely. I guess it all just seemed like forced "depth" that was more like needless padding. Anyway, I still enjoyed The World Ends With You, but not enough that I'd recommend it or pick it back up again. I guess that makes it more "tolerable" than "enjoyable", but hey, who cares. Christmas is almost here, and with that comes a flood of new things to backlog. I've got 23 days to clear out some space. Bring it on, I say.
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