Game Journal: The World Ends With You (Session 3)

THIS POST CONSISTS ENTIRELY OF GAMEPLAY AND STORY SPOILERS FOR THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU

It's weird. Last session I was apprehensive about the fighting going in and was immediately getting it done (even if the quality of my wins was shaky). This time I went in thinking I was going to dominate and quickly had to start saving after every fight. And then I hit my stride again and started racking up the well graded kills.

The only real change I can see is that I had to learn a little about fighting bears and bats. Bears are priority targets as they do heavy damage. They move slowly though, so they can be avoided on the bottom screen. The character on the top screen can't move, though. During this session (which was basically playing through Day 3 in the game), she finally got the jump ability, which I assume is intended as a dodge move. I'm generally too busy to use it. And the guy on the bottom screen is usually the one in trouble.

Shiki also gained her card ability. When she attacks, there are three input patterns. Each one has a different symbol at the end. There are three cards at the top of the screen. When she completes a pattern and the card at the end of the pattern matches the next card in the sequence, it flips over. Once all three cards at the top flip over, all enemies take some damage and the players are healed a bit. It was yet another waste of attention I soon learned to ignore. Super Spam Offense still rules.

So what abilities do I have attention for? It's still pretty much the pattern I outlined two posts ago. I check the top to see which direction to attack then jam on the D-pad in that direction as I try to manage the fight on the lower screen. I couldn't help paying attention to the puck. (It's so shiny.) The damage multiplier it gives can be crucial against larger opponents (like bears). In fact, when I killed the final boss of Day 3 I got a bonus for passing the puck ten times during the fight. That's a boatload of extra damage, and I don't want to think about how hard that fight would have been without it. Also, I didn't have to increase my health at all, like I did with the Day 2 boss fight. So I'm feeling pretty good about that.

The sync mechanic has been officially introduced and doesn't work like I thought it did. It's linked to food for some reason. I can finally eat food in the game. It's a mechanic that requires a large amount of suspension of disbelief. First of all, you only get 24 slots of "hunger" you can use per day. And this isn't about game days. At midnight the DS resets your hunger. But you digest your food not by hours in the day but by fighting. For example, say I eat a hamburger. It will give me a sync bonus immediately, but if I want the other bonus it provides (+8 to my maximum health), I have to spend eight fights digesting it. Anyway, I was disappointed to see that being in sync had nothing to do with the story or relationships between the characters.

No matter how much I eat, I always reset to six hunger. This is probably a good thing. It lets me keep my sync up (although I still don't know what sync does) and lets me keep grinding my stats a little bit at a time. It also lets me get in tight with the shopkeepers. The more you buy at any shop, the more the shopkeeper likes you. In the case of food shops, that means getting access to special menu items.

The noodle shop lets me trade 100 yen pins (the most worthless pins I've got) for a six hunger noodle dish. It doesn't have any stat bonus, but it's gangbusters for keeping sync high. Of course I still prefer to shell out the 230 yen for ice cream. It's five hunger and increases my bravery stat so I can wear better clothes. Yes, you heard that correctly. Eating ice cream makes the characters brave. I didn't write the game. I'm just playing it.

The clothing mechanic finally reared its ugly head as well. First off there are clothing bonuses that are location dependent. Wearing sporty clothes in the upscale district will make you do half damage. But wearing fancy clothes there will increase your damage. And the clothes themselves have special abilities. But you can't use them or even know what they are until you're friendly with the shopkeepers. The problem is, many clothes have special abilities that make them virtually worthless, so I was actually better off not unlocking them. It's frustrating.

And finally, I am now able to "imprint". From the start of the game I could scan. Scanning let me find monsters to fight, and it also let me hear people's thoughts. Now I can acquire key words from their thoughts and put them in other people's heads. It's mostly just a puzzle technique so far. One guy forgot what he needed to get at the store, so I go find the guy who sent him, get the word out of his head and put it in the shopper's head. I've acquired a few other words from random people, so maybe this mechanic will be used to obtain bonus items in addition to solving simple puzzles.

All I know is that there are always new things to do and acquire and new ways to do and acquire them. The sheer diversity is impressive. And I still haven't unlocked most of the functionality of my magical cell phone, so I know there's plenty more to come. In terms of raw amounts of stuff to fool with and explore, the game is shaping up to be every bit the equal of BioShock or Deus Ex, or any other game in that lineage.

I'm a little confused about how TWEWY did in the marketplace. There's a much repeated rumor that the president of Square Enix threatened to axe developers who were "making games only they wanted to play". Most people point to TWEWY specifically as the type of title this applies to. But the sales numbers on Wikipedia don't seem to reflect that. Perhaps compared with Final Fantasy numbers they suck. I don't know.