The title screen of The World Ends with You

Introduction

The World Ends with You (TWEwY) is a Nintendo DS game released in the United States in April 2008, featuring an antisocial teenager reluctantly fighting alongside his partners for his right to live in the deadly “Reapers’ Game”. TWEwY is an action RPG with a unique battle system designed to use the DS’s dual screens and touchscreen to their full effect. Placed in the trendy shopping center of Japan, Shibuya, TWEwY has a catchy electronica/hip-hop/rock soundtrack well-suited to the graffiti-heavy aesthetic of the game. Featuring distinctive character designs by Tetsuya Nomura of Kingdom Hearts fame, the game was well-positioned to appeal to teenagers, in addition to being well-received in general by game critics (e.g., 88 on Metacritic).

Due to technical difficulties, the game could not be replayed for the review. However, as a playthrough had been fully completed by the author in prior years, in combination with Orange Fluffy Sheep’s Let’s Play of TWEwY, the critical analysis could be completed with little disruption. Screenshots may also be assumed to come from the Let’s Play. The article contains moderate spoilers.

General Gameplay

(left) the protagonist Neku; (right) first mission

Story

The game starts by introducing the protagonist, Neku, to the player. The player is immediately struck by his unpleasant personality and antisocial attitude, starting in the opening cutscene (“Shut up!!! Stop talking.”) and reinforced over the next few story chapters. For example, to damage the enemies, called Noise, Neku needs a partner to fight with him. They also need to cooperate to complete missions given by the Reapers (the ones running the Reapers’ Game) within a time limit, or be erased from existence.

Neku reluctantly cooperates with his partner, Shiki, until a Reaper suggests killing his partner to escape the Reapers’ Game. Neku is reluctant, but with no memories and no real ties to Shiki, he goes through with his attempted murder. He is barely stopped by a friendly NPC that he met earlier that day, who lectures him on trusting his partner. However, Neku’s behavior slowly improves after that, and he learns to form bonds with his combat partners and open up to others over the course of the game. The game’s themes center around connecting with people (and that those connections are not a weakness), and enjoying the moment. As TWEwY progresses, Neku fights through multiple increasingly-anomalous Reapers’ Games to return to life, to save his friends, and find out how he died. In particular, Neku’s death is the focus of several major plots, and is not fully explained until the post-game.

After beating the game, the player can warp between the different episodes (“Days”) to replay them, get post-game exclusive equipment, and unlock reports that explain a lot of how and why the game’s events occurred. There is also a bonus episode where everyone is alive, obsessed with Tin Pin Slammer (a mini-game), and feature completely different personalities than that of their main game counterparts. It is also canon, as one character flees to an adjacent dimension at one point.

(top screens) Shiki’s mini-game (left) vs. Joshua’s mini-game (right), with (bottom screens) Neku fighting below

Combat

Combat involves Neku and his partner fighting enemies in separate dimensions, with the partner controlled by buttons on the top screen and Neku through touch on the bottom screen. The game can be played with either dominant hand holding the stylus, allowing left-handed players a similar experience to right-handed players. Both characters are controlled simultaneously, although spamming through a partner’s combo map allows the player to focus on Neku, as his screen is more complicated.

Each partner handles differently, with different stats, attack mini-game, and Fusion skills. For example, Shiki uses a card-guessing game with a basic dodge, while Joshua uses a high/low number game and can hover in the air. Completing the mini-games successfully builds up stars, which allow the use of powerful Fusion skills that heavily damage all enemies and heal the two humans. In contrast, Neku equips different pins, which have different effects (“psychs”) and different ways of triggering them (e.g., tapping for projectiles, dragging for fire, swiping for chains). He can move around the screen too, with invincibility frames built into the initial “dash”.

Tutorials

The combat mechanics are not all introduced at once, however. TWEwY is generally good about its tutorials, spreading them out as necessary and using three different teaching methods: graphical tutorials, practice in a safe environment, and a text tutorial that can be referenced at a later date. For example, the very first battle teaches the player how to run away, with dying locked until the second episode. Furthermore, the presentation of various game mechanics is extremely newbie-friendly, as many games mock the player for further running away, for example, or even lock out achievements and story content. Instead, TWEwY signals that running away is fine; at worst, Neku’s battle partner becomes angry if the player runs too frequently, lowering Sync (an easily-regained, damage-increasing stat).

Flow and Learning Curve

TWEwY’s flow is well-done, increasing the level of challenge over time as game mechanics are introduced or become more advanced, enemies become stronger, and the story becomes more complicated. Its learning curve can be described as steep (short), due to the chunking of game mechanics over time resulting in learning a lot of game mechanics with little effort, although players themselves would describe it as “shallow” by instead comparing the level of required skill to the ease of getting into the game.

TWEwY also allows the player to customize the level of challenge through several methods, ensuring that frustration and boredom can be controlled to some extent, keeping the player in the flow zone. For example, enemies have a chance to drop specific pins. However, some pins have low drop rates, and certain pins will only drop on a specific difficulty. The player can drop their HP and fight chains of increasingly powerful enemy encounters, one after another to increase the drop rates for rare pins. TWEwY was largely designed to minimize grinding (Gamasutra 2009), and while farming is present in the game, the drop-rate manipulation at least eliminates the grinding to have any rare pins drop. Farming is therefore still tedious, but at least entertaining with the subsequent rain of rare pin drops at the end of a battle.

Pins drop, swirl around Neku in a shrinking orbit, and jingle pleasantly on pickup

Interest curve

TWEwY engages the player through a variety of ways to maintain player interest, either by covering for each other when interest lags in one area, or by building off of each other. For example, the game is broken into different levels of story arcs, with the episodic “Days” acting as both a standalone story and as part of each Reapers’ Game arc, which in turn further the meta-arc of the game. As an RPG, cutscenes are expected, with some of them more interactive than others. Sometimes the cutscenes are comprised of characters interacting with each other through chat bubbles and short voice clips, different sprites, and some basic screen effects or still images. At other times, the player may choose from various dialog boxes to learn more about topics, or play various mini-games. TWEwY also possesses videos, though they use a simple-looking animation style reminiscent of comic books. For example, the second cutscene of the game serves to spike overall player interest by foreshadowing future characters/locations and being set to a catchy song.

In addition to story arcs and cutscenes, TWEwY features a lot of shops and associated game mechanics, being set in the shopping district of Shibuya. The shopping serves multiple purposes by keeping the player engaged even as the player works in a positive feedback loop of fighting strong enemies for better drops to get stronger, to fight even stronger enemies, and so on. However, TWEwY also has a few ways to forcibly lower interest, as pins use different types of experience points to evolve into stronger pins, and characters have twenty-four “Bytes” of food that they can digest daily. “Shutdown Pin Points” are earned by not playing the game, while Bytes are reset at midnight. Players are therefore rewarded for taking a break.

Game Mechanics

(left) buying friendship and better equipment; (right) trend-setting fashion and digesting food

Decision Making

At its core, TWEwY is about fighting enemies while balancing risk and reward. While the player explores Shibuya to progress the story, fight specific enemies found in specific locations, and buy food and equipment (clothing and pins), it all comes back to fighting. Even Tin Pin Slammer, an air-hockey-like mini-game that uses separate pin stats, is combat-focused in its own way, as certain pins are better than others. The player is therefore constantly making decisions within the available solution spaces, like lowering health for higher drop rate (or not, for survival) or buying more expensive food for a better Byte-to-stat-boost (or not, to buy better clothing).

Core Mechanics

There are thirteen fashion brands that offer branded pins and clothing, based on the tale of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac and the cat. While many brands have dedicated stores, other stores carry a mixture of goods or are dedicated to non-branded goods, such as character upgrades (including larger wallets), stat-increasing food, crafting materials, or music. Players can “craft” new items by trading specific items at specific stores to earn cheaper or more powerful items than could be bought normally. Each store also possesses its own unique inventory and clerk, and by spending a lot of money at a specific store, players befriend the clerk and unlock new items, discounts, and clothing abilities.

Combat itself features a lot of different mechanics. New enemies have different stats and abilities, pins can evolve into better pins with the right type of experience points, and fighting lets the characters digest food to increase their stats. One of the stats is Bravery, or “how willing a teenager is to wear a ninja suit, pirate hat, headphones, and a potted plant in public” for stat boosts and special abilities (e.g., knockdown resistance). However, Bravery foods that are affordable and effective are difficult to come by until late-game, when the player can grind for money, forcing the player to either use inefficient food and wait in real time for Bytes to reset, or perhaps focus on other stats that boost character effectiveness directly.

Play Balancing

TWEwY’s mechanics feature play balancing, albeit some more than others. For example, the daily Byte limit prevents the player from grinding to max stats over several hours of nonstop playing. In other areas, play balance is more skewed, with clothing being separated into clear tiers of effectiveness, such as the expensive watches from the Pegaso brand being much more effective than cheap hats from Natural Puppy. While it offers a clear sense of progression, there are some equips that are clearly better or worse than others, such as an extra-damaging pin with a low cooldown or a pin with good damage but extremely low number of hits. There are many under-utilized pins as a result, being effectively worthless to the player.

Unlike his partners, Neku can equip different pins, which are activated in a variety of ways. Most of them are activated through touch, such as horizontally (or vertically) slashing an enemy to “sword” slash it or hit it with an icicle, tapping empty space to fire bullets, or scribbling on the screen to burn the area. Unfortunately, combat can sometimes be problematic as a result of the many similarly-activated pins and Neku’s own movement, with pins placed further in the pin deck blocked by earlier pins, and Neku using a scribble-activated pin on his location instead of moving. While the L/R buttons can be used to set pins to a “sub-deck” for greater control, it makes activation clunkier, given the two-handed combat. There are also pins activated through the microphone, but they are much rarer.

 

(left) scanning for Noise; (right) fighting Taboo Noise

The player controls Neku through the touchscreen. To initiate battle, he scans the area around him for Noise symbols, which can then be chained by tapping on them in short succession. Some Noise symbols are black, which indicates to the player that they will initiate combat themselves. The black Noise are also special, being stronger than normal Noise and effectively immune to damage when a character does not have the “light puck” on their screen. The light puck serves as a damage multiplier, and is passed between screens with combos. While annoying to deal with, enemies exist in both characters’ screens and share health as a result, which means that the player can always deal damage to an enemy. The player characters also share health, being partners.

Randomness

TWEwY, being an action RPG, does not rely as much on RNG to determine whether an attack even hits a target, thus reducing randomness’s role significantly. It also exhibits decreasing randomness as the player gets stronger, and is effectively limited to combat. While a large part of the game relies on drop rate manipulation, for example, it is very easy for most pins to hit 100 percent drop rate without undue risk to the player once the player is geared for high-difficulty, long chains of battles. The most random element of the game that cannot be influenced is probably the partner mini-games for Fusion stars, and even they can be partially bypassed through equipment for instant Fusion attacks. Player skill level therefore features more prominently as TWEwY progresses.

Rules of Fun

Fighting bonus boss(es)

Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types

Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types describes four main player types, and how they act or interact with players and the world. TWEwY primarily appeals to Achievers, as multiplayer and social opportunities with other players are very limited in the game. For example, Killers only have local multiplayer Tin Pin Slammer for acting against other players, while Socializers can only boost each others’ “Mingle Pin Points” (special pin experience points) through their games detecting each other (“Mingling”). In particular, the latter feature can be accomplished without player interaction at all, making the already minor multiplayer aspect redundant. Explorers can play with different equipment setups to find what clothing and pins do, but as the game’s mechanics are relatively simple, there is not much appeal to exploring the game mechanics. In contrast, with ranked chains of battles, a wide variety of equipment, and a diverse set of enemies to fight, Achievers have a lot to test themselves against. Even Tin Pin Slammer offers a surprising amount of depth for a mini-game, giving Achievers another area to conquer.

Lazzaro’s Four Keys

Lazzaro’s Four Keys focuses on the different areas that people derive fun from. Despite being a single-player game with no real multi-player to speak of, TWEwY could be described to feature elements from all four keys. Easy fun (novelty) is achieved through fighting new enemies with new pins and new clothes as the player progresses through the story. Hard fun (challenge) is primarily created by a player increasing their risk level for higher reward, ranging from “just a little more dangerous” to “16-battle chain of enemies on the highest difficulty with low max health” as they strive to get perfect battle rating. People fun (friendship) and serious fun (meaning) can be achieved through the story to varying extents, given TWEwY’s themes of connecting with others and Neku’s own character development from an isolated, selfish teenager into someone who trusts people and engages with the world, which probably strongly resonates with many teenagers playing the game.

Koster’s Theory of Fun

Koster’s Theory of Fun states that people have fun from learning, with games serving as low-risk mediums for learning. TWEwY embodies this principle very well in that respect, as players are encouraged to go outside of their comfort zone for loot, and if they die, then they can start over with minimal punishment. Players learn new mechanics, and when they achieve sufficient mastery of fighting on Normal difficulty, for example, then they can alleviate their boredom by increasing the game’s difficulty. In turn, they learn how to manipulate HP and difficulty to boost drop rate, for example, and discover what equipment, pin decks, and combat strategies are the best as they play and find the optimal solution. TWEwY removes the “one solution” multiple times, but as the game develops into its full form, players increase their stats and create their final equipment/pin load-outs. Even with different enemies requiring different sets of pins, by the end of the game, the solution space is comprised of a very small amount of solutions, as combat is not very random.

Conclusion

The World Ends with You is a unique and stylish game that balances challenge and accessibility for an excellent gaming experience. While not without its flaws, such as the convoluted partner combat, occasionally iffy touch controls, and unbalanced pins, they are relatively minor and easily forgiven as a result. The game has aged well in the decade since its release, as there was an enhanced remake of the game released on iOS/Android in 2012, in addition to a later re-release on the Nintendo Switch in 2018. Despite its age, a new player would not find the game lacking if they were to pick it up today.