The World Ends With You, Part 1.

A new Game begins...

Oh, sure. Perfect time to start another big one.

So, Majora’s Mask has already been established on my page as an enormous part of my life, but my second-favorite game… that’s gonna be another fun ride. After all, it’s The World Ends With You! It’s the coolest name, the coolest game, everything about it is great! It’s that rare game you can remember where you were when you started it, how it grabbed you and never let go. There’s no thesis I can run with here, there’s practically no defined structure I can go with beyond taking it as we go, it’s downright ludicrous how much I want to say, compared to how much actually comes out of my hands as I type this. Seriously, this game is so good a critic called it “One of the best role-playing games ever designed for anything.”

THAT WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES.

WHEN HAS THE NEW YORK TIMES EVER SAID BASED THINGS ABOUT VIDEO GAMES EVER?

God, this game is incredible. It came at such a perfect point in my life, taught me so much through one of the most laser-focused character stories in history. For reasons we’ll get into, this game is so impactful to the right demographic that all teenagers should consider it required media the way twelve-year-olds need Inside Out. And sure, as that implies, it doesn’t hold quite the same impact to people outside that range experiencing it for the first time, but you know what? Doesn’t matter. I was fifteen when I played it first. Your argument is invalid, windmills do not work that way.

Heh, Futurama reference. This game’s really bringing out everything from me. Can’t help but pull out every last organ stop to blast my feelings off the highest hill, to the point where it’s almost hard to decide where to start…

…or at least it would be, if there weren’t two obnoxious elephants in the room: it’s not only extremely easy to hate TWEWY, but I’m willing to bet most people that have played it never actually played it the right way.

Without jumping the gun too hard, the game was originally made for the Nintendo DS and used both of its screens and all of its mechanics and gimmicks… a lot. You had to use the touchscreen to control the protagonist, Neku, while using the d-pad or face buttons to control his ally at the same time, multitasking for every combat encounter. There’s a lot of nuance to unpack, and measures I feel like people didn’t allow themselves to take in order to alleviate the system, but it’s a tall barrier for entry. That, I’ll never deny. It’s an intimidating system that the developers intentionally threw you into the deep end of for the sake of putting the player in Neku’s disoriented shoes. That, and Neku himself serving as the second point of enormous contention… but that’s better saved for speaking on the characters and story later. Suffice to say, what others can’t stand (and are wholly valid in hating) is the part that drew me in to begin with.

As for the aforementioned “right way to play it,” the original version on Nintendo DS may have only sold modestly, but that’s not the only version: two more, subtitled Solo Remix and Final Remix respectively, were released for iPad and Nintendo Switch years after each other down the line. While not a total departure (the touchscreen half of the DS game was relatively untouched, leaving Neku near-identical to play as), his partners were changed from a fully-playable half of the combat to simple assist abilities on cooldown- in essence, a few extra moves for Neku that work just the way Neku’s own already do. (These were all changes made for Solo Remix, with Final Remix making the exact same system work with the Nintendo Switch’s pointer controls as well as its touchscreen. The mechanical differences therein are negligible.) While the new system introduced in Solo Remix works well, and largely captures the same manic energy as the original’s “Stride-Cross” system (the name coined by the developers), the game mechanics fail to capture the same messages that the Stride-Cross system did- and it’s a loss that prevents me from wholly recommending Final Remix as the version to buy. Difficult as it may be to track down an original DS cartridge and dig out the extra Nintendo DS system wedged in your couch (75% of family couches in America have one extra forgotten DS inside, this is scientifically-proven science), it’s necessary to get the full thematic experience.

That’s the crux of what I want to explore with TWEWY in this series of articles: speaking to a largely literary audience, I understand that video games are beyond most of your wheelhouses- or at least, they don’t hold the same significance or thought space in your mind as a good novel. Video games have always come first in my mind in that regard, being every other form of art and storytelling with added immersion for extra points, and I want to share with you all the power this medium has. The World Ends With You is a powerful story about individuality, vulnerability, misanthropy, empathy, and so much more, and it uses every tool that a video game has available to it to construct the most effective version of that narrative possible.

Though, all in due time. In part two, we tie up the loose ends and cover the aspects of the game that don’t explicitly feed the themes, like music, art design, and development history.

Cheers,
from The CrystalPunk
(He, who’s finally realized that maybe redlining the writing engine for a month straight is a bad idea)