I've been dreading doing a meta-review piece for this game, but since it's probably the hottest RPG on the Nintendo DS right now, I've really got no choice. It's time to talk about The World Ends With You, a game I hate more than anything else I've played in quite some time.
Now, I'm a pretty easy-going reviewer, and usually take interest in even horrifically flawed products that seemed like they had something to say at some point. I followed development on this game avidly back when it was only known as Subarashiki Kono Sekai, and had nothing but enthusiasm for the title until I actually sat down and played it.
It ended up being one of the most absolutely unpleasant experiences I've ever had playing a video game. The split-screen controls were literally headache-inducing, to the point where I had to put the game down every hour or so to let the pain clear up. I hoped playing farther into the title would give me time to adjust, but no such luck.
My discomfort seems to be singular, and I haven't even read instances of other people experiencing the same discomfort on forums. In fact, most people who play The World Ends With You end up loving it.
The World Ends With You highlights a problem I've long had with Square-Enix: that while they're able to present a story magnificently, they as a company have absolutely nothing to say in their game stories (with perhaps the exception of Chrono Trigger). For the most part, Square-Enix just takes a popular property, mines out some game-worthy ideas from it, and builds their scenario from there. They've hacked probably a dozen games from the corpse of Evangelion, FFXII was quite literally just a ciphered Star Wars plot, and in Kingdom Hearts the re-purposing of old ideas is an explicit selling point.
Now, games are far more about experience than content, so I usually don't mind this sort of thing. It has, in fact, resulted in some tremendously interesting games writing. I swear by Final Fantasy Tactics as one of the best video game stories ever, and much of its weight comes from how carefully the scenario designers drew inspiration from the historical facts of the Hundred Years' War before they threw in demons and magicite. The anime-like plots for FFIV and FFVI have made both games evergreen sellers, and Front Mission carries on the tradition of gritty sci-fi mecha stories admirably.
The World Ends With You, from the beginning, looked like it would be the game Square-Enix hacked out from Japan's obsessive consumer youth culture. In some ways, it succeeds at this, but I was disappointed from the beginning by a certain laziness in the game's composition. A noticeable amount of the story and plot content repeats material from two other works, one seminal and one merely trendy. Serial Experiments Lain is the foundation for basically every Japanese "omg internet is real" story, and The World Ends With You occasionally copies its memorable visuals wholesale. That, I have no problem with. Lain is one of those great works that is likely to confer a bit of its greatness on a work that it inspired, especially in another medium.
The merely trendy inspiration for The World Ends With You is an ongoing Shounen Jump franchise called Bleach. In particular, Bleach seems to have served to inspire much of the art design style, and certain characters can be easily identified as wholesale lifts of their Bleach counterparts. This is not incompetent theft, but stealing anything from a source as incompetent as Bleach just strikes me as artistically stupid. When you steal, lift from the greats. Bleach is itself quite the opposite of great, a blunt reiteration of the Shounen Jump formula with no real spirit behind it and not even original details to add to the proceedings. My feelings on Bleach move beyond "I do not like this" to "I hold this in contempt and am somewhat angry it was published".
I suppose it was somewhat reasonable for Square-Enix to tap Bleach as part of the creative process for The World Ends With You, since Bleach is the very epitome of that which is shallowly trendy. Yet in aping it, Square-Enix betrays that their real goal with The World Ends With You isn't to say anything of interest about consumer culture or urban isolation, but simply to profit from it by referencing it in a game. So the more trendy clothes and street food you acquire, the more potent your character becomes, and the ultimate message of the game - despite its sad attempts to tell a character-driven story otherwise - seems to be that you should just reject your negative feelings, shut up, be happy, make friends, and most of all consume.
I don't think that's a good thing to make a video game about. That's not a good thing to make any story about. It is possible that I did not play far enough into the game and it has some sort of last-minute redemptive plot twist, but seriously: this is a game that gave me blinding headaches if I played it much longer than an hour at a time. How much sense does it make to torture yourself through something like that if you aren't having fun? All told, I think I'd benefit more from giving Lain another watch.
But, anyway, most critics feel very, very differently about The World Ends With You than I did. With a metacritic average sitting at 88%, it's one of the most strongly-received of Square-Enix's DS efforts. Even critics usually very skeptical about Square-Enix's output are offering a lot of praise to this game for its unique (among video games, at least) themes and setting.
G4 TV comes in with the high score, giving The World Ends With You five stars. Reviewer Gus Mastrapa makes it quite clear that his enthusiasm for the game comes from its total departure from the overly-familiar fantasy genre trappings and D&D-derived mechanics that most RPGs rely on.
Sometimes it feels like the role-playing game is trapped in amber, forever doomed to deal in the same swords and dragons laid out by Dungeons & Dragons way back in the day. Square Enix are as guilty as any game maker of holding the RPG back. Sure they experiment, iterating on ideas here, throwing a License Board monkey wrench there. Still, for the most part they've been making the same game for twenty years: a young man living in a fantasy realm wields crystals, swords, and the power within himself to defeat the forces of evil. Every so often they swap fantasy for sci-fi just to keep things interesting. The World Ends With You changes all that. This game is concerned with the here and now. It's about teenagers and their real concerns, things like friendship, self-image and what the hell they're going to do with their lives. The setting is a bit like an alien world. Modern-day Tokyo is unlike any place you've ever been. The World Ends With You transports you to this insane megalopolis throwing everything you think you know about the role-playing game into question.
I'd point out that Atlus was making games set in modern-day Tokyo where you fought digital entitles encroaching on reality as far back on the SNES, and that their product was generally better, but I'd hate to put a damper on the man's enthusiasm. Mastrapa makes you very important point that I think needs to be respected here: if you are a mainstream gamer who only plays mainstream titles, most RPGs are going to end up looking the same to you. You certainly will feel this way if your diet of RPGs comes from the DS exclusively.
GamePro offered one of the more middling scores for the game, which is... uh, a 4.5 out of 5. That should give you some idea of how much people are raving about this one. Reviewer Amanda Ng seemed especially pleased with the game's difficulty system and trend-influenced battle mechanics, both aspects of the title I frankly found a turn-off.
In true Square Enix fashion, there are a myriad of things to collect, purchase and level up, from pins to clothing and food items. There's a quirky trend system that dictates your battle stats according to fashion. Clothes and pins are branded with logos and if you're caught wearing the wrong one, your battle stats will take a hit. This could have degenerated into a never-ending equipment swap as almost every area has a different popular brand, but you can actually affect trends by wearing certain pins and fighting battles, and can add a bit of strategy to the way you play and what you wear.
World's End is also fast, not only in combat but in plot development and game flow. Mission days are short, and any intermediary quests can be completed quickly, but for those looking to pump more time into the game, there are scores of enemies to battle, item drops to discover and badges to level up. You also have complete control over the game's difficulty setting, meaning you'll never really have to take time out to level up to advance-though there are perks if you do challenge yourself. In fact, you still gain pin exp for the time your DS is switched off.
Another example of a "middling" score is GameTap's rave 9 out of 10 score. Reviewer Giancarlo Varanini had a strong emotional response to the game, brought forth by the same "get over yourself and make friends" themes that I found so treacly and trite. This is fairly unusual material for a Japanese game to cover, so his surprise is not really an unreasonable reaction.
If youve been on the Internet for any decent amount of time, you probably know that there are a lot of blogs out there with people discussing how much they hate life, how having friends is stupid, and how everyone is ignorant to the real inner-workings of the universe. Nothing ever seems to go right and when it does, the other shoe drops and the woe is me business comes back. The World Ends With You--an action-RPG from Square Enix--echoes these same sentiments and even goes so far as to make them a major aspect of the games overall story arc, with characters that are either distrustful of each other or generally arent what they seem. Indeed, even the title itself suggests that the world is limited to what you do, and opening up to people and different experiences is the only way to expand it. And while it all seems a little hokey or emo (as the kids call it these days) at first, The World Ends With You is actually one of the most interesting and gratifying experiences Ive had with an RPG in years.
The low score comes, unsurprisingly, from the infamously stringent Eurogamer. The low score is also an 8 out of 10 accompanied by some eloquent text, so it'd be very hard to argue that The World Ends With You was a bad game based on this score in any way. That said, Eurogamer seems far less impressed with game's originality than other outlets. While they admire the game's combat system for its audacity, reviewer Dan Whitehead laments the poor tutorial system that introduces it.
There are ways to offset this rude awakening though. You can automate the top screen (though this means you'll be unable to fully explore the combo system) and later on you're able to restart the battles at an easier setting. Neither completely compensates for the harsh pace, however, and if the game has one major flaw it's that it doesn't do enough to ease you in. Much like those Magic Eye pictures, I suspect there'll be a significant number of players who will simply be unable to get the knack and walk away muttering about hype. While that attitude won't get you anywhere, young man, the game itself must take some of the blame. The punishing process of grappling with so many new elements at once teeters on the tightrope between addicting challenge and off-putting chore.
For the record, those Magic Eye pictures he mentions? Those also tended to give me raging headaches if I looked at them too long, and I don't think I ever actually saw the "hidden picture" in any of them. Perhaps The World Ends With You is simply not a game for those of us with bad eyes or any sort of over-familiarity with Japanese pop culture. That doesn't make it a bad game, and actually I think I'd take exception to anyone referring to it as such. Bad games inspire only derision and indifference, while it takes something legitimately good to inspire a strong passion like my hatred or these critics' enthusiasm. That alone makes The World Ends With You worth checking out, though you may want to test a friend's copy first if you're worried about getting combat migraines like mine.
