Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Ambitious"

Three things seem to be the core of today's RPGs. turn based battles, learn attacks through leveling up and medieval themes. "The world ends with you" from square enix tosses every last one of 'em out the window and exchanges them for a nice breath of fresh air for gamers that have been at it since the golden age of SNES and before. This is that rare game that truly innovates, not to mention that this is a RPG experience that would not have been possible on anything but the Nintendo DS hardware.

Story: 10/10

Without giving too much away, the story revolves around an antisocial red-haired shibuyan boy named Neku. One day he wakes up in the center of the scramble crossing, without knowing how he got there or got a skull pin that allows him to read minds. While he is still trying to figure things out, all of a sudden his cell phone buzzes. Telling him he has 60 minutes to reach 104 or face erasure. From there Neku is thrust into a 7 day game for his life.

The story is good enough to be a movie of its own, the characters are some of the most creative and more importantly they all have the best and believable personalities I have seen in a video game. You may start out hating a characters guts. But by the end of the week you will find yourself as attached to them; if not more than Neku.

Controls: 9.0/10
The controls are for the most part tight. On the over world you use the D-pad, face buttons or touch to move Neku and his partner from place to place. Touch the player pin in the bottom right hand corner to open the screen where you can start battles or read people's minds. And touch the phone icon in the upper right hand corner to open the menu screen where you can check all sorts of things, save, organize your pins into multiple "decks" (basically folders for the mega man battle network players) and equip cloths and food onto your team (more on that later).
It's in battles where it starts to go downhill, if only a bit. Your partner controls perfectly, no complaints from me on the upper screen combat. Its Neku on the lower screen that could have used a bit of polish. First off I need to say that all the input commands. Touch, slash, press, scratch, drag, shout (mic) and blow (mic) all work great…until you attempt to layer them up.
Let's say you find slash pin, touch pin and other slash pin as a good combo to your liking. Unless you completely use up the first slash pin, the other one will be unavailable to you unless you set it to your SUB pins in your deck by hitting L or R when you put it in your deck. And then it won't be available in battle unless you hold L or R. and even then a third slash pin will fall victim to the first "must use before" ailment that the other pin had…and you won't be able to fix it. It's an annoyance but in a way it encourages you to vary your deck as much as possible.

Graphics: 10/10
Although by no means pushing the DS to its graphical limits, TWEWY does push out some excellent 2-D graphics. The art style is highly reminiscent of sonic battle and the few real animations it does have are near perfect for a 2-D game.

Sound: 10/10
The music in this game is one of its highest points as well. Very seldom will you hear "game" music. Instead the music throughout the game is a lot of high energy pop style music with the majority of the lyrics being sung by female vocalists. The music is stuff you could get away with having on your iPod and not getting called a nerd by the less secure people out there (conveniently the soundtrack is available on ITunes if you're into the music) the minor voice acting done is as good if not better than the music. The random grunts, giggles and the occasional word or even *gasp* short sentence is of the highest quality the DS can pump out.

Game play: 10/10
The game play is what ties all of this in together nicely. The battles take place in real time across both screens…at once! (:o)
Although this sounds completely uncontrollable at first the game does a great job at bringing you in slowly. And then still keeps the battles as simple as possible. Your not rewarded as much for button mashing and slashing your touch screen like a drunk chimp. A neat little device the game calls the "light puck" bounces back and forth between your characters as they deal finishing combos. So for example start off the battle by doing a three slash combo on some noise (the games enemies) to spawn the light puck and pass it onto Neku's partner, perform a successful attack with the partner and pass it back. The faster you rally the puck without losing it the higher in power your finishers for both characters become.
But at the beginning you may still have trouble raping your head around it. Not to worry, auto-play has your back. If you don't control your character for around 3 seconds at the default setting it will start to attack on its own, letting you focus on Neku.

Final word: 10/10
While The world ends with you has a rather obscene concept to those without an open mind at first, the game has a highly flexible learning curve, excellent writing, better story, and amazing controlled chaos that makes up its game play. The world ends with you is a true diamond in the rough and a DS gem not to be missed, probably the only DS game I reviewed that truly deserved a 10 (I should edit that XD)

Darkspineslayer AWAY!!! (flies off)