The World Ends With Niblets

The World Ends With You, an RPG developed by Square-Enix’s Kingdom Hearts Team released for the Nintendo DS back in May, is a game that, while receiving a fair amount of critical praise, didn’t seem to gain the foothold in mainstream gaming it deserved. It is a game that took great strides in RPG innovation: it revolutionized typical RPG game mechanics and control schemes, simplifying them while enabling more complex results; it showed that a good story can be “epic” quality without being forced; it showed that a game can be visually irresistible without photo-realistic lighting effects and a billion pixels; but most importantly, it showed that all these things can be done at the same time, and not at the expense of one another.

The World Ends With You starts out very J-RPG (spiky-haired, amnesiac emo kid awakens to find himself beset by demons while paired up with a bubbly, pink-haired chick) but quickly differentiates itself with well calculated, effective character development and a well executed over-arching story of deception, friendship, and redemption. I know, I know, that still sounds like pure anime, but I challenge you look past this if you’re not typically into J-RPGs, and play the game anyway—it’s not Saturday morning Yu-Gi-Oh, it’s Adult Swim Ghost in the Shell; wild and out there while maintaining a serious attitude. The Short version is that Neku, the game’s protagonist, becomes an unwilling participant in “The Reaper’s Game” and must form pacts with various (pre-determined) partners at different points in the game in order to survive the Reapers’ servants, The Noise, but also the Game itself, and escape with his right to exist (yes, that’s the exact wording and it is important). Between the beginning and the end, however, Neku discovers that the “rules” are subject to interpretation and are some of The Reapers’ most powerful weapons against him. By the way, The World Ends With You earns it’s “T” rating for mild language and dark themes that gel nicely with the post-modern style. It’s a brilliantly told story.

The game even parodies its typical J-RPG counterparts. Neku’s (the protagonist) amnesia hardly figures into the plot of the game at all, and his raging cynicism cuts throws a serious wrench into stereotypical J-RPG situations, dialogue, and themes whenever they present themselves—especially when he encounters the over-enthusiastic-know-it-all-full-of-energy follower of The World Ends With You’s diversionary minigame “Tin Pin Slammer,” who serves as the stand in for Ash Ketchum, Naruto Uzumaki, and every other annoying anime protagonist. Neku is always quick to point out when the cheese scale strikes a little high, and it endears him to the player unlike the whiny, “effeminate” male leads of most J-RPGs that succeed in annoying the player more than anything. On top of that, its setting is a departure from standard J-RPG formula. The entire game takes place in a well recreated (at least from what I understand) modern Shibuya district in Japan, and the localization has taken great pains to keep the flavor of Japan alive while implementing authentic American dialogue that immerses the modern gamer (Neku remarks that other characters are “full of fail,” etc.). The soundtrack completes the picture, painting a background of catchy pop and light techno beats that cement the game’s hip style.

The setting also figures into the equipment system. Shibuya is known, at least within Japan, as a fashion hotspot where trends in Japanese style are defined, and the game takes that to heart. You buy your weapons and armor at clothing stores (in the form of “pins” that generate psychic attacks and actual clothes), each with their own set of brands. Then when you equip your purchases, you get bonuses (and in a lone extreme case, a penalty) based on whether or not the area you are in favors your style or not. The upshot of this, however, is that persisting in wearing your brand of choice in any given area (fighting battles) boosts its popularity and allows you to “force” trends for combat boosts.

Perhaps the best thing about equipment system of The World Ends With You, for non-RPG fans, is that it relieves the player of the necessity to “grind” levels—which isn’t to say you can’t if you’re into that kind of thing, you just don’t have to. See, the game has this genius little mechanic called “shutdown PP” (PP being the EXP your weapons or “pins” gain to level up) that uses the DS’s internal clock to calculate a PP bonus for pins based on how long your DS has been turned off. Let me put it a simpler way: can’t beat a particular boss? Turn off the game, do something else, wait till tomorrow—the next time you play the game you’ll have another level on your pins. Plus, the game features a “mingle mode” that allows you to set your DS to a passive communicative state and interact with any other DS communicating wirelessly with anyone regardless of what game it’s running—and you get EXP for that too (not to mention player information, the ability to buy other people’s powered-up pins from them, and make some money this way yourself). Throw in the fact that different pins grow, or “evolve,” through focusing on different types of PP (either “shutdown,” “mingle,” or good old-fashioned “battle” PP) as well as the ability to set and reset difficulty and adjust your overall level achieve different drop rates for rare items and you’ve got yourself a very unassuming equipment system that becomes addictive over time. Oh, and for any of you out there noticing any Pokemon similarities don’t worry: it’s a good thing, it doesn’t detract from any other element of the game and it is by no means the only reason to play it.

While the story is enthralling and the equipment system offers all the collecting and team building aspects RPG fans love, the combat offers yet another opportunity for the player to become immersed in an addictive activity. The game is controlled entirely by touch (well, you can use the directional button to move when not in combat but it’s not as fun) and it hits the mark that previous games (like Phantom Hourglass) have missed. It balances a great variety of actions with an intuitive, fully customizable play style. Here’s the basic setup: you select pins from your inventory and equip them, each one with a specific ability activated with the touch screen. It goes something like this: I’m always partial to swords, so I equip a few sword-like pins that require me to slash across the enemy I want to attack, moving my character over automatically to perform different moves. I also want to have a long-range solution to do some damage without exposing my character, so I equip a pin that sprays bullets at whatever point I tap on my screen. Finally, I want something to heal me, so I choose a pin that recovers some damage when I tap its icon on the battle screen. When I get into a battle, it all flows naturally in real time. I’m slashing, I’m firing, I’m recovering, and my partner is building up combo attacks for me the whole time. In fact, the partner system adds another layer on top of basic combat, offering a chance for the player to flex his or her coordination muscles and operate both players at the same time by giving commands via the directional buttons to your partner on the top screen while fending off Noise with Neku on the bottom. Not to worry though, you can simply let your partner auto-play for fair results too. It adds another level of depth to combat that provides another challenge for the elite gamer, if he or she is so inclined.

Now, as any RPG gamer knows, nothing ruins a good combat system like endless, repetitive, unavoidable random encounters, and I’m proud to say that The World Ends With You is void of them. Combat is triggered by actually selecting which individual teams of enemies you want to take on when Neku activates his signature “psyche” that allows him to see the Noise around him, as well as read peoples thoughts (which is also quite a fun way to spend a few minutes if you’re bored since, throughout the whole game, NPCs rarely repeat themselves at all the various points of the game). This gives the player a sense of freedom and consequentially leads to a much more enjoyable experience including, at least in my case, more and more battles just for the fun of it.

The best thing about The World Ends With You, when all is said and done, is that it has all the elements that make you think about the game even when you’re not playing it, and leave you feeling sad and a little empty when you’ve played it to its extremes, scraping every last drop out of its seemingly bottomless well of content. Replaying the game once finished offers endless possibilities for chapter jumping and cutscene skipping (a blessing for J-RPG veterans and skeptics alike) to find specific secrets at specific instances without impeding the player more than necessary to maintain a challenge. It’ got everything that not only makes a great RPG, but a great game. The World Ends With You is the whole package, and it’s one of the best reasons to own a DS in this modern gaming world.

Tags: DS, Invasion, Japan, JRPG, Neku, Niblet, Nintendo, RPG, Shibuya, The World Ends With You