The World Ends With You (or WEWY, which is an awesome acronym), piqued my interest as soon as I heard of it, mainly due to the fact that Square Enix games are generally considered awesome until proven otherwise. Also, I loved the box art because it reminded me of Kingdom Hearts. I’m a girl like that.  Oh, and I needed a DS game to distract me from my guilt over abandoning Final Fantasy III.

I’m not sure where to start this rant, so I’ll start with the game’s protagonist, though I use the term very loosely. You are Neku, and you are emo. Super extra emo. When not starring in Square Enix games, you wear a lot of eyeliner, which you smear all over your face while crying and writing in your LiveJournal about how shitty your life is. You want to start a band called The Black Parade, after the My Chemical Romance song, but you’re too busy shopping at Hot Topic, updating your MySpace page, and cutting yourself. That’s how emo you are. In WEWY, Neku finds himself pulled into a “game” against his will. He must complete tasks that are texted to his cell phone by the end of the day or he will be “erased”. You must survive like this for a week, and then you’ll be released.

The plot of the game is mildly confusing, which is okay.  You won’t even notice because the battle system is even more confusing. I like to consider myself of at least average intelligence, so I feel that if I can’t understand a game after playing it for several hours, something is wrong. While I’m all for complex gameplay in place of repetitive button tapping, if you’re going to make something this convoluted, at least try to explain it to me a little better.

When I was a kid, you basically couldn’t play a game unless you had the instructions. Nowadays, I seldom to never even crack the things open because modern games explain themselves to you as you go. WEWY attempts this, but not quite well enough. I actually had to look at the game manual, something I’m not a fan of. Even then, I would read the battle instructions, get an E rank (each battle is graded), then read it again, and not understand what I wasn’t understanding. I was progressing through the game, I wasn’t dying, but I still didn’t feel I was really experiencing all the game had to offer.

Just thinking about trying to explain how the battle/pin system works is daunting. You collect pins, which I guess Neku pins on his black messenger bag next to the anarchy sign he drew in white-out. Each pin is a different attack, and you can only take so many into each battle with you, so you try them out and pick your favourites, and both you and the pins you chose gain experience and eventually levels after every conflict. Unlike Final Fantasy games, combat is real-time, not turn based. Performing an attack works differently depending on the pin you have equipped. Some pins require stylus slashing, or tapping, or dragging, or what have you. That part of the combat I have no problem with, and I actually think it’s pretty innovative. The issues arise when you factor in your partner, who battles on the top screen while you duke it out on the touch screen. You can control both, and they both fight totally differently. Your partner uses cards instead of pins, and the d-pad controls them instead of the stylus. I don’t know how most people do it, but I personally have a hard time using the d-pad and the stylus at the same time while still holding onto the DS properly. I run out of hands. The characters on each screen pass a ball of green light back and forth which builds up points with each successful pass, and then the character holding it when it’s at its maximum can execute a combo worth more points. Or something like that. The game takes over for you and plays as the top character if you aren’t doing it, which is 95% of the time with me so far. It kind of makes me feel dumb, but the other way just makes me feel angry when I can’t figure out what’s going on.

Back to the plot. There are other people trapped in the “game” as well, who somehow tolerate Neku’s presence for the sake of survival, though everyone gets pretty annoyed at his sad, angsty behaviour. During conversations, all of Neku’s responses appear in thought bubbles, so he basically never talks to anyone, he just thinks about how much he hates everything and how lonely he is. He’s a fun guy. Oh, and speaking of thoughts, you can go into super emo mode and read the thoughts of all the NPCs in the game. This almost never proves interesting unless you like to read what kind of noodles someone is going to have for dinner or what time someone has to have a report turned in by. I’m assuming Neku uses this useless information to write poems about dead roses and frozen tears and how his mom doesn’t love him. When in thought reading mode, in addition to regular healthy thoughts floating around, you encounter “noise”, which look like creepy demons floating around people’s thoughts. Your job is to erase the noise, via the battle system previously mentioned. So not only are you emo, you’re apparently also a Scientologist.

Contrasting Neku’s raging emo-ness, the soundtrack to WEWY, which seems to consist of only one song (or several songs that all sound the same), is a howling j-pop travesty that gets so annoying I end up turning the sound off half the time. I thought Neku would be more of a Bullet For My Valentine guy, but I’m glad he’s not, as that would be even worse.

Despite the fact that I like making fun of Neku, his barely suppressed depression doesn’t really affect the game in a negative way. It gets to be kind of funny after awhile, at least to me. If you stick it out with the battle system, you will feel smart for eventually getting the hang of it, but until then you’re going to feel like a bit of a moron.  I can’t say that I don’t enjoy the game, I just wish it didn’t leave me with the feeling that I’m not really getting out of it everything it was intended to offer.