War Is Hell, Fashion Is Purgatory
[I'm slacking again. Catching up on stuff I meant to post, starting with this World Ends with You two-parter.]
[June 19]
OK, OK, I hung on for a while longer in The World Ends with You. When you get enough spells powers ("psychs", sigh) to have a choice of what to use, you get a little breathing room. For me, the lightning psych (taptaptap) was much easier than the fire psych (drag? where there's nothing on the screen? Is there any spot in these frenetic battles with nothing on the screen?). In fact, I've made it through 7 "chapters" and I still can't use the fire power, the first power the game gives you. Bad choice on their part. Lightning would have been better.
Also, any of the psychs can be kind of awkward if you're left-handed, because at least with my ham hands, I can't always see the enemy's HP or the recharging dials for the psychs if I'm scribbling on the right side of the screen. So, uh... sucks to be us, I guess.
And while I found Shiki's battling to be more fun than Sora's Spiky-Haired D-bag's Neku's, early on, when I got the hang of some of his powers, I put her on auto. Fewer combo break thingies that way, but it's working out fine.
But long story short, once I dragged my way through enough crap to have a little leeway on pin choice, it got easier, and even fun most of the time. Also, here's a tip: They make a lot of noise about the levels being timed - the characters have freaking coundown clocks magically tattooed on their hands - but I have yet to see time actually run out. I'm starting to suspect that this is plot-based time, "OMG Meteor is Hurtling Toward Midgar" style. A story-based time limit on the characters, rather than a time limit on the actual player. I could be wrong about that part, though.
So overall, it's becoming fun yet frustrating. The focus on buying tons of items means that you grind for cash more than in most recent games, but - GREAT IDEA, BTW - you can weaken your characters and/or string together several battles end to end in order to trade off difficulty for more cash. This is a terrific feature, especially since some battles turn up absolutely nothing. (Argh!) You also get more loot for finishing battles faster, hitting harder, and pulling off more combo moves and such, so there's a snowball effect. Score better, get more loot, buy more items, get stronger, score better, get more loot, repeat. It's annoying to hear your characters bitch about your performance early in the game (I was wont to mutter "You survived, didn't you?"), but later on the grading system is actually beneficial.
I'm a fan of this because the usual model of grinding involves simply fighting the same monsters over and over for the same preset reward. It's less repetitive and faster to not only find stronger beasties, but also tweak your chances of getting more rewards from them.
The fashion system is just about as inane, annoying, and mildly hilarious as it needs to be. All of your standard RPG armor is translated into street fashion, shoes and leather jackets and stuff. Most of it is labeled by designer. And from one street corner to the next, designers vary in popularity. Wear something popular and you get a stat boost. So to move around efficiently, you're going to want a vast and varied closet. Hence the grinding mentioned above. In an unrealistic but sometimes entertaining quirk, you can don an unpopular brand, kick lots and lots of ass while suffering the hit to your stats, and suddenly people will start to think it's cool. One sidequest revolves around this effect, as you help a hapless marketing drone to plug a brand that nobody wants.
I don't know whether this game is meant to be sincere or satirical when it comes to Japanese teen pop culture - probably both. Your character can read the minds of passersby, and most of them have nothing on their minds but what shoes they should buy. And the fashion system bleeds fickle randomness. But the leads are given a little more depth, at least as much as any standard Square Enix character. The central character remains painfully annoying at times (I'm a lone wolf, rar rar whine whine), but I think they intend to wear off his edges over the course of the story.
It's also fairly funny at times, in a goofy, probably-grating-to-some kind of way.
[June 30]
Part II, mild spoilers:
Last night I finished TWEWY. Total time elapsed between "what the hell is this aaaarghhh" to suprisingly touching ending: about two weeks.
So. It's a short one. However, the New Game + sends you back through the game with a long list of side missions, and its shortness makes sense within the story. I'm probably going to mess with the end-game side mission stuff for a while, because (bad design alert) there is only one save slot per game cart, so if I lend it out, I have to start over from complete scratch. Boo, and hiss.
Even though it's a pain in the ass to get into, and the system is weird and awkward at times, I have to congratulate the hell out of this game for trying something different. It's not the first RPG to use stylus controls, I don't think (LoZ: Phantom Hourglass?); it's not the first game to have actiony battles (our hero scampers around the battlefield in a manner not unlike the Star Ocean games); it's not the first RPG in a weird setting (Star Ocean again, and even Chrono Trigger); but putting it all together and being willing to try multiple weird things is no small feat in a genre - and an industry, if I may be cynical - that rewards treading water.
As for the characterization, which was a warning flag early in the game: it's not as bad as it looks at first. Though I wouldn't say it's zomgdeep, they give all of the characters a shot at multiple dimensions - okay, two in some cases, but two dimensions are better than one* - and as it turns out, the story is themed around Our Hero becoming less of an asshole. Even the cryptic title is a reference to this - though different characters repeat it with seemingly different meanings; it seems to mean "you're all that matters, so don't bother expanding your horizons." It ends somewhere rather different.
The script is unusually entertaining, despite the not particularly deep "be yourself and don't be a dick" message. (Which, to be fair, beats the usual "you are the chosen one" nonsense. Our Hero is the Chosen One, but we aren't ever expected to care, and some of his sidekicks actually overshadow him or boss him around - a really refreshing detail.) The first two leads aren't particularly interesting, but the game eventually rolls out a salaryman who relies on Ouija to make every business decision, a rock-star blogger stuck in a payola deal involving duelling ramen shops, a plot arc revolving around a phone booth that's rumored to be love-magicked, cell phone cameras that can take pictures of the past, a villain who drops tortured math references into every sentence, and a sidekick who speaks in hilarious/excruciating B-boy slang (Aiight, le's do this!) despite being a bleached-blond Japanese kid. [later edit: my Beat fangirlism was sussed out at Otakon. OKAY OKAY. It's the Rhyme storyline. I'm a sucker. SUCKER.]
Which is not to sing the game's praises in every single case. I feel like shopping is punitive sometimes - to get all of the items, you sometimes have to buy multiples of the same item to schmooze the store clerk, and you can't sell most of that stuff back - and "challenge" junkies and RPG purists will hate the hell out of this game. It's about club kids in Shibuya, for crying out loud, which not only freaks out "Nerds Are The One True Path" type nerds but has the side effect of making its message about individuality unintentionally ironic. (Individuality? In a game where you dress like everyone else to get stat boosts? Are you kidding me?) And it's possible to breeze through without extensive level-grinding by lowering the difficulty, as I had to do for several of the boss battles. I appreciate that, but lots of people get kind of, shall we say, offended by that option.
I still recommend it, with reservations.
---
* Except for the Iron Maiden, uniformly evil, and the Grim Heaper, uniformly annoying-hilarious.
[June 19]
OK, OK, I hung on for a while longer in The World Ends with You. When you get enough spells powers ("psychs", sigh) to have a choice of what to use, you get a little breathing room. For me, the lightning psych (taptaptap) was much easier than the fire psych (drag? where there's nothing on the screen? Is there any spot in these frenetic battles with nothing on the screen?). In fact, I've made it through 7 "chapters" and I still can't use the fire power, the first power the game gives you. Bad choice on their part. Lightning would have been better.
Also, any of the psychs can be kind of awkward if you're left-handed, because at least with my ham hands, I can't always see the enemy's HP or the recharging dials for the psychs if I'm scribbling on the right side of the screen. So, uh... sucks to be us, I guess.
And while I found Shiki's battling to be more fun than Sora's Spiky-Haired D-bag's Neku's, early on, when I got the hang of some of his powers, I put her on auto. Fewer combo break thingies that way, but it's working out fine.
But long story short, once I dragged my way through enough crap to have a little leeway on pin choice, it got easier, and even fun most of the time. Also, here's a tip: They make a lot of noise about the levels being timed - the characters have freaking coundown clocks magically tattooed on their hands - but I have yet to see time actually run out. I'm starting to suspect that this is plot-based time, "OMG Meteor is Hurtling Toward Midgar" style. A story-based time limit on the characters, rather than a time limit on the actual player. I could be wrong about that part, though.
So overall, it's becoming fun yet frustrating. The focus on buying tons of items means that you grind for cash more than in most recent games, but - GREAT IDEA, BTW - you can weaken your characters and/or string together several battles end to end in order to trade off difficulty for more cash. This is a terrific feature, especially since some battles turn up absolutely nothing. (Argh!) You also get more loot for finishing battles faster, hitting harder, and pulling off more combo moves and such, so there's a snowball effect. Score better, get more loot, buy more items, get stronger, score better, get more loot, repeat. It's annoying to hear your characters bitch about your performance early in the game (I was wont to mutter "You survived, didn't you?"), but later on the grading system is actually beneficial.
I'm a fan of this because the usual model of grinding involves simply fighting the same monsters over and over for the same preset reward. It's less repetitive and faster to not only find stronger beasties, but also tweak your chances of getting more rewards from them.
The fashion system is just about as inane, annoying, and mildly hilarious as it needs to be. All of your standard RPG armor is translated into street fashion, shoes and leather jackets and stuff. Most of it is labeled by designer. And from one street corner to the next, designers vary in popularity. Wear something popular and you get a stat boost. So to move around efficiently, you're going to want a vast and varied closet. Hence the grinding mentioned above. In an unrealistic but sometimes entertaining quirk, you can don an unpopular brand, kick lots and lots of ass while suffering the hit to your stats, and suddenly people will start to think it's cool. One sidequest revolves around this effect, as you help a hapless marketing drone to plug a brand that nobody wants.
I don't know whether this game is meant to be sincere or satirical when it comes to Japanese teen pop culture - probably both. Your character can read the minds of passersby, and most of them have nothing on their minds but what shoes they should buy. And the fashion system bleeds fickle randomness. But the leads are given a little more depth, at least as much as any standard Square Enix character. The central character remains painfully annoying at times (I'm a lone wolf, rar rar whine whine), but I think they intend to wear off his edges over the course of the story.
It's also fairly funny at times, in a goofy, probably-grating-to-some kind of way.
[June 30]
Part II, mild spoilers:
Last night I finished TWEWY. Total time elapsed between "what the hell is this aaaarghhh" to suprisingly touching ending: about two weeks.
So. It's a short one. However, the New Game + sends you back through the game with a long list of side missions, and its shortness makes sense within the story. I'm probably going to mess with the end-game side mission stuff for a while, because (bad design alert) there is only one save slot per game cart, so if I lend it out, I have to start over from complete scratch. Boo, and hiss.
Even though it's a pain in the ass to get into, and the system is weird and awkward at times, I have to congratulate the hell out of this game for trying something different. It's not the first RPG to use stylus controls, I don't think (LoZ: Phantom Hourglass?); it's not the first game to have actiony battles (our hero scampers around the battlefield in a manner not unlike the Star Ocean games); it's not the first RPG in a weird setting (Star Ocean again, and even Chrono Trigger); but putting it all together and being willing to try multiple weird things is no small feat in a genre - and an industry, if I may be cynical - that rewards treading water.
As for the characterization, which was a warning flag early in the game: it's not as bad as it looks at first. Though I wouldn't say it's zomgdeep, they give all of the characters a shot at multiple dimensions - okay, two in some cases, but two dimensions are better than one* - and as it turns out, the story is themed around Our Hero becoming less of an asshole. Even the cryptic title is a reference to this - though different characters repeat it with seemingly different meanings; it seems to mean "you're all that matters, so don't bother expanding your horizons." It ends somewhere rather different.
The script is unusually entertaining, despite the not particularly deep "be yourself and don't be a dick" message. (Which, to be fair, beats the usual "you are the chosen one" nonsense. Our Hero is the Chosen One, but we aren't ever expected to care, and some of his sidekicks actually overshadow him or boss him around - a really refreshing detail.) The first two leads aren't particularly interesting, but the game eventually rolls out a salaryman who relies on Ouija to make every business decision, a rock-star blogger stuck in a payola deal involving duelling ramen shops, a plot arc revolving around a phone booth that's rumored to be love-magicked, cell phone cameras that can take pictures of the past, a villain who drops tortured math references into every sentence, and a sidekick who speaks in hilarious/excruciating B-boy slang (Aiight, le's do this!) despite being a bleached-blond Japanese kid. [later edit: my Beat fangirlism was sussed out at Otakon. OKAY OKAY. It's the Rhyme storyline. I'm a sucker. SUCKER.]
Which is not to sing the game's praises in every single case. I feel like shopping is punitive sometimes - to get all of the items, you sometimes have to buy multiples of the same item to schmooze the store clerk, and you can't sell most of that stuff back - and "challenge" junkies and RPG purists will hate the hell out of this game. It's about club kids in Shibuya, for crying out loud, which not only freaks out "Nerds Are The One True Path" type nerds but has the side effect of making its message about individuality unintentionally ironic. (Individuality? In a game where you dress like everyone else to get stat boosts? Are you kidding me?) And it's possible to breeze through without extensive level-grinding by lowering the difficulty, as I had to do for several of the boss battles. I appreciate that, but lots of people get kind of, shall we say, offended by that option.
I still recommend it, with reservations.
---
* Except for the Iron Maiden, uniformly evil, and the Grim Heaper, uniformly annoying-hilarious.