The World Ends With You – A Square Enix Fable - IGN (original) (raw)

It's a curious thing, watching the adoption of distinctly Japanese culture by western markets. Anime is the new Disney, while films like the remake of The Ring and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill are both responsible for acclimatising a generation of moviegoers to Japanese traditions. Gaming on the other hand – though always under the influence of many staple Japanese developers like Nintendo, Namco, Konami and Square Enix – has always had a broad appeal. Sometimes however, companies such as these could be accused of being insular, and much more often, careful and traditional, to the point of being stale as much as they are genre-defining.

The characters of The World Ends With You. Click for a closer look.

That's what makes The World Ends With You a fascinating release for Square Enix; a developer who creates and then mostly sits back and maintains the RPG genre. Released back in late July of 2007 in Japan under the title 'It's a Wonderful World', this DS action RPG takes several aspects of Japanese street culture and stitches them into a background for a fantasy game.

Tokyo Street Life

The setting for the adventure is Shibuya – the real-world fashion and street life district of inner Tokyo. Late last year, IGN AU attended a Square Enix-hosted event that helped give us a little background on the setting of the game, taking us through the neon-lit streets and bustling sidewalks of this classically quirky district.

Shibuya's famous crossing at ground level.

It's as iconic a retail zone as Time Square in New York – a dozen streets converging in a central, open plaza. A million flashing bulbs, neon tubes and LCD screens coat every surface. Everyone looks like Gwen Stefani on the cover of Rolling Stone; coated in leather and silk, hair spiked, folded, crimped, spilling over foreheads and hiding eyelids painted like an eastern-flavoured Bjork. And the numbers of fashionable brethren make traversing the fanning lanes and streets a hazard as much as an attraction. Everyone is standing around, peering in windows, trying on T-shirts with puppies holding machine guns, while pretending not to look at each other.

Why is all of this so important? Why have we painted this picture for you? Because it's this culture of being vogue that guides the action in The World Ends With You. It's surreal, but planted firmly in something that many Tokyo youth take for granted everyday.

Shibuya in TWEWY. These are actual streets and locations - though, we didn't see any giant frogs. Just giant hair.

The actual layout of the streets, junctions, stores and signs in Shibuya have been brought across to the DS world. For copyright reasons, all the stores are now rebranded, but the location is still instantly recognisable for residents. The DS also populates the digital streets with dozens and dozens of sprite-humans, emulating the bustle of the retail district.

Everyday Heroes and Villains

For an everyday world, you need an everyday hero. Neku's a 15 year old loner who loves his music and graffiti, but shies away from society. He is the central character in The World Ends With You. What makes Neku a little bit special is not his exaggerated hairdo or unique fashion sense, but his apparent psychic abilities, which are key to understanding his place in the unfolding adventure. Here is an alienated youth, the perfect representation of the angsty, faceless teenager on the streets of Tokyo today, blank-faced enough to be eaten up by like-minded gamers.

Badges and your mobile phone - these two gameplay features are two pieces of pop-culture Square Enix has picked up on.

Noise – physical versions of people's negativity – are the main enemies in the game. These are also grounded in reality; frogs and wolves are the earliest enemies we encountered in the game, as well as a bear that was in desperate need of a manicure. While obviously you're not going to find these things scurrying through the streets of Tokyo, the idea that real creatures can be as menacing as anything fantastical is profound enough to make for an original experience.

Clothing and Food

The team was involved in larger developments on the PS2 – Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts members comprise the core team of artists and programmers. For the DS version, they wanted a new concept to compliment the new hardware – something that utilized the hardware's interfaces completely. They also knew they wanted to make it a more realistic setting – so they set it in Shibuya, and the game design began to evolve from there.

'Guts' - you won't be eating guts in TWEWY. Mainly things like ramen and soft drink.

Key to the character design process was veteran designer Tetsuya Nomura, who was the mind behind the Kingdom Hearts series, as well as character designer on a host of Final Fantasy titles, including VII and its filmic spin-off. His trademark big hair and almost chibi-like exaggerated features gives the game a very distinctive look, which extends to the monsters and environments as well.

Badges are akin to skills and magic in the game. Like in real life, these badges are small, circular and presumably have a pin clipped to the back – but they are imbued with different abilities. Neku wakes up with one in his hand at the start of the adventure – and suddenly he can read minds. Square Enix have really nailed the most recent collectable craze worldwide, turning badges into a gameplay device and collectable in the game.

One of a few DJing stores in the district.

Clothing itself affects your basic stats in the game – attack, defence and HP. These are doled out in stores, much like you'd find in the actual district. Food, on the other hand, is something that gets taken for granted. But on the flipside, food in Japan is a wholly unique experience. Vending machines, for instance, sell whole meal kits, beer, spirits and more – beyond your ordinary snacks and carbonated drinks. In the game, food heals you and improves your stats, but the twist is, you can only eat one bite per 24 hours in real-time. The digestive process is gradual, meaning the effects of the food are metered out.

Mobile Phone Culture

Looking around, everyone is either on the phone, has one dangling from a lanyard or belt loop, or sometimes owns two or three. They're everywhere, having reached mass acceptance and shockingly high levels of technological sophistication. The rest of the world is still playing catch-up to many features that the Japanese take for granted – mobile TV, quality gaming, wide, high resolution screens, net access and true multimedia playback.

One of many retail side alleys featured in the game.

While the rest of the world slowly catches up, the youth of Japan have this stuff at their fingertips. The suburb of Akihabara, the gaming and electronics Mecca, is an inescapable mess of phone vendors selling handsets and plans that cater to every need or want.

In The World Ends With You, the cellphone is a critical part of the user interface. Tapping your cell indicator in the top right brings up your menu system, which basically is your character organisation menu. It's divided into tabs and buttons that allow you to assign badges, food and clothing.

Street Music

A core part of Neku's character design rests with his oversized headphones wrapped around his spiky, orange-haired head. This is an apt touch, given how prevalent the sight is on the streets of Shibuya. In a given group of people, if two of the people aren't fooling around with their DSs or PSPs, they're listening to music or yakking on their phones.

Everything is potential advertising space, but it makes for a strangely ethereal and beautiful location for a game.

Walking down the back alleys and side streets away from the open crossing areas, you'll come across a half a dozen hip-hop and electronica devoted stores, selling vinyl and CD versions of the latest releases. In the game world, the soundtrack is mostly licensed, taking versions of J-pop songs and J-hop funk and mixing in quality electro-rock. There are more than 30 tracks in the final game – not all of them stunning, but fingers crossed the soundtrack makes it across to the west intact.
Hopefully, this little feature has given you a taste of how Shibuya street culture works. The World Ends With You looks to be the most original RPG to come from the house of Square Enix in quite a while. The Japanese version holds incredible depth and promise, and we're certain that very little of the appeal of the location will be lost in the transition to the western market. Roll on, local release date!