Sunday, October 19, 2008

The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS)




Ok I'm sorry, this isn't music but it still is a thing to download and anyway I plan to include other things in the future, like comics and e-books etc. Also, it is really awesome.

There are some games that you just have to give up a big chunk of your life for, some games that, despite having tons and tons and tons of work to do, you say fuck it all and spend whole days trying to complete and make people dislike you and never want to talk to you again ever but you think noo it's not laziness, look I'm on the ninth fucking level of Pork City, do you know how fucking hard I worked to get to that level?!!!?!?

A lot of RPGs try to be like that but Pokemon Diamond/Pearl actually was like that. Actually all the goddamn Pokemon games were like that. You had to catch them all dammit. You had to have them ALL, even if it meant spending entire Sundays wandering around the stupid grass farming for a good catch. There's something about collecting that appeals to our inner otaku. And if you're big enough a nerd to play Pokemon at 23, you're a big enough nerd to want to CATCH THEM ALL!!

But, let's face it, when you're 23 Pokemon feels as kiddy as Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Even though the gameplay is awesome and the collecting aspect makes you feel like your life is actually worthwhile, you still feel a decade over the age limit. Also the fighting engine sort of sucks. Turn-based RPG fighting just sucks on a console like the DS, no two ways about it.

The World Ends With You addresses these two problems and provides us with solutions so elegant, they might be worthy of Bruce Einsteen. With a quick substitution of what to collect, The World Ends With You drives your in-built consumerism into a frenzy. What you collect are 'pins', which are like little badges that contain different powers or 'psychs'. These can then be exchanged for YEN which you can bring to SHOPS to buy CLOTHES in SHIBUYA. No, seriously. Clothes in Shibuya?!?! Gotta have them all! Especially when your nice Dragon Couture boots with the spazzed out name of ONE MAN, NO EQUALS, can add to your HP, Attack and Defense.

Which brings us to the amazingly beautiful, built-just-for-DS battle system. Oh yyyeeeaahhh! I really can't describe how damn fun the battle system is. Like Spiderman's fighting engine, you get to use the stylus a lot but different 'psychs' need different stylus moves to pull off and since you can pick and choose what pins to wear and the pins have their own levels, you are motivated to switch often to level up your pins, making the gameplay incredibly modular and fresh all the time. And that's not all! You get the option of controlling your in-game partner, who uses the top screen, with the control pad! Your partners don't use pyschs but there's a kind of card system in play that you can use to collect stars to pull off massive sync-ing attacks. It sounds really complicated and, well, it kind of is, but somehow, the makers of the game have managed to make the learning curve really gentle and welcoming. The potential for FUN that this crazy system has, though, is IMMENSE. There's so much room for growth!

That the story smells so much like a bad anime... who cares? The game is set in goddamn Shibuya!! That already makes up for everything bad in the story. And the crummy characters actually start to grow on you after awhile. Then again, humans are creatures of habit, right? I mean any character will grow on you after ten straight hours of playing them. But seriously, MORE THAN TEN STRAIGHT HOURS OF BEING ENTERTAINED!! You don't want that?

Anyway, you need a Nintendo DS to play this game. Also something like the Supercard or R4 to run this ROM. But if you're downloading this, I'm sure you know the hows and whats. I'm not sure if there's a PC emulator for the DS, but if you don't own a DS but own a tablet, it's surely worth googling.


The World Ends With You (drop.io)

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