Full Review: The World Ends With You (DS) / Part II: Music

So once again, I've finally gotten off my ass and now I'm at it.  Finishing up watching The Oscars.  I've told The Kid and I'll stand by it, the 2013 Oscars have been fairly lackluster and ". . .eh. . ."  Seth McFarlane has been not that great of a host of a show that hasn't been all that great, although far be if from me to critique a job that I would never be able to do, nor want to do.  I don't even like talking on the phone, let alone to a group (more than one) of people.

On that note, finally finishing this review.  It's been an odd challenge that I can't fully explain.  But this time, I'm hear to talk about the music from The World Ends With You, primarily composed by Takeharu Ishimoto.

Madd 'shoppin' skills yo!

I'm going to try and not make this sound like the Wikipedia article or like an article on Wikipedia and will probably be more like some of the other Game Scores articles that I've written, except that this has a corresponding article about the content of the game.  So why does TWEWY deserve it's own full article for the music?  For one, there are four separate releases.  There's the The World Ends With You Original Soundtrack, the Subarashiki Konosekai + The World Ends With You EP and full length album and The World Ends With You - Crossover.  The fact that Square Enix had enough faith in both the game and the music to warrant this kind of a musical release for a stand alone original game, that wasn't part of a franchise is pretty awesome.

Granted Takeharu Ishimoto had previously worked with Square Enix before as both a synth programmer and composer since the 1999 release of The Legend of Mana.  That being said, I am only familiar with Ishimoto's compositions for Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and Dissidia: Final Fantasy, both of which I have very much enjoyed.

In my Initial Review I said that the music was somewhat remeniscent of the music that you might find in Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei Persona series and, now having listened to the TWEWY soundtrack more extensively, I feel that that initial compassion was made because I was not very familiar with contemporary music in an RPG, let alone in a game from Square Enix.  It was very much welcome and I am very glad that the music remained the same from the Japan release to the North American release as it very easily could have been inundated or ever replaced with current popular artists from North America or other English speaking countries.  I do not really care that I can't understand seven eighths of what is beings sung since the majority of the the "sung" music is played during battles which last maybe 30 seconds.  The game even makes it a point to award higher points the faster you can complete a battle, so the music you do hear is only a very brief snip-it.  It wets your pallet for more and I often found myself letting the post battle score screen play for an extra minute to listen to the songs.

So the music.  The music is a very eclectic mix of hip hop, electronica, rock, hip rock hop, and a half dozen other genres that I don't think I'm very familiar with.  J-Pop most likely.  I don't really know, but that's not the point.  The point is, is that the majority of the music is very good and even if I wouldn't normally listen to Japanese hip hop, I like to listen to this soundtrack.  And like almost any soundtrack or compilation album, I don't like every song, but I don't hate any of them.

So now let me highlight a couple of my favorite songs off of the various soundtracks.

Déjà Vu (feat. Joanna Koike) from Subarashiki Konosekai + The World Ends With You full length album & EP:

This is one of the songs that plays while you're not in a battle, although like the battle music, you'll only hear snip-its of it unless you don't progress to another area and thus, another song.  

Hybrid from The World Ends With You Original Soundtrack:

Battle music and if you're lucky (or slow), you'll get to at least the first chorus by the end of the scoring screen after a battle, if it's the song that's playing during your last battle that is.

Transformation [Feat. Andy from Sixpin] from Subarashiki Konosekai + The World Ends With You full length album & EP:

This was probably my favorite battle music and although I have no idea who Andy or Sixpin is (although after an iminint Google search, I kind of now know), it's one of the tracks that falls more in a pseudo-rock genre than some of other songs on the both the album and the in-game soundtrack.

Some other songs that I won't link to, but that I really like are: 
"Calling"
"Someday"
"No Name [Secret Track]"
"Someday (Unplugged) Feat. Sawa"
"Twister Gang-Mix [Bonus Track]"
"Three Minutes Clapping Feat. J.D. Camaro"

I'm sure it will come as no surprise that I highly recommend the original soundtrack as well as the Subarashiki Konosekai + The World Ends With You full length album, the two which I have.  You don't even have to have played the game, the music is great on it's own.  Just peruse youtube for a while if you like what I've posted here.  I would recommend purchasing from the iTunes store as buying physical copies from Amazon will put you back ~$60-70 and there aren't any MP3 albums available.  I don't often endorse iTunes, but in this case, I couldn't justify to my bank account the expense to own the physical copy rather than the MP3 downloads.  I know, to some people I'm a very bad person, but that doesn't make the music any less awesome.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Any Earlier And It'd Be Too Late

Full Review: The World Ends With You (DS) / Part I: Story & Game Mechanics

So I finally got around to it, hunkered down and finished The World Ends With You, which I've been playing for a good number of months now.  I've also been looking forward to composing this "Full Review."  However, during the last couple of days (both in-game and real life), I'd been feeling that a single post for this game would either not do the game itself justice, or it would become unwieldy and long, so I've decided to break the review up into the following parts:

I: The Story & Game Mechanics

II: The Music

I don't know what it has about writing this review, but it has taken me multiple starts over the course of a couple of weeks.  A large part is that the game did so well and that so much has already been written about the game that I didn't just want to be a rehash of the 265 million other articles out there.  At the same time, I knew that I had not discovered something brand new about this six year old game. So once I got beyond my own insecurities, I finally managed to complete the following posts.

I would also like to point out that at the very least, Part I will contain SPOILERS since I feel talking about the story in the game would be incomplete and I feel like I wouldn't be able to write it as effectively without bringing up at least a couple of SPOILERS.  This review will contain SPOILERS.  Now that that's out of the way. . .

The story. . . the story. . . {SPOILER} is a pretty dark one.  It revolves around a group of people who find themselves in a game put on by some supernatural organization calling themselves the Reapers where they take recently dead people and have them play for a second chance at life.  It may be that the people involved in the game had to have died in Shibuya, the area of Japan that the game takes place, I'm not sure.  Throughout the game, you're trying to figure out a number of things, one of those being who killed you, Neku, and how to survive the game.

Along the way, you meet up, and team up with various characters who all have varying degrees of personal issues.  There's the girl who doesn't like how she sees herself (who may have died from comitting suicide), there's the brother who didn't see his life going anywhere and along with his sister, die in a car accident, and a "boy" who turns out is the whole reason why you're there.

The game initially starts out like a typical Japanese RPG in that there's some confusion, then it's fighting monsters to "level up" and trying to "save the world," or in this case, saving your life.  As the game progresses, it becomes apparent that there's more to it than pseudo-cliche's in the form of characters.  For me, it was about the time you find out that your character, Neku is dead, along with everyone else, and that Shiki (the bubbly hyper-attractive girl) only looks the way she does is because she really liked the way she looked despite coveting another girl's appearance while she was alive.  It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the point of playing the game, or even reading a book, to find out for yourself and experience that great Keanu Reeves' "whoa" feeling.

There's a B-Story aspect too that I didn't explore too much.  In the game it's called "Tin Pin Slammer" and it's also the way that two people who own physical copies of TWEWY can "fight" each other.  The basic point is to knock the other players' Pins off a board by sliding them into each other.  Each Pin has a weight and a number of special attacks.  There was only one or two required Tin Pin Slammer battles that were required to progress the storyline, and I think that's all I really did.  Maybe I just need to play against human players.  Or not.

I talked a bit about how the battles are run in my Initial Review so I won't talk too much about how I button mash with the top character.  That tactic held true for the next two partners that join up with Neku, although with Beat, your third partner, his way of attacking was so initially difficult and confusing that I had to hand over his controls to the computer.  Only half way through Act III did I start taking control of Beat when I felt that I could do as good a job or better than the computer.  And that I wouldn't be killing myself by screwing up with Beat (both characters' life meters are connected so Beat could totally fuck things up while Neko remains untouched and you will still die).

While doing background for this article, I also discovered something new about the combat system that I did not know about while playing through the game.  With each of Neku's companions, if they complete/earn a certain number of Combo Stars, it allows them to perform a combo attack with Neku.  If you earn another combo attack before using the first earned combo, you get a level 2 combo which does a lot more damage.  This I thought was the max as I never seemed to earn anything beyond it.  Turns out you can earn a level 3 combo attack.  Huh.  Ah well, I still managed to defeat the final boss.

Let's talk about the Pins now.  The Pins are akin to Pokemon.  They're out there in the world, you want to collect them, level them up and everyone has their favorites.  They're what you use to cause damage or modify other Pins during combat.  Now the game has some pretty ingenious ways to level up your Pins and to gain experience.

1. Earn experience by defeating enemies
2. When you have the game turned off (not just closing the DS), you will earn experience for the amount of time you're away from the game.  I don't know the exact numbers, but it's something like Day 1: 144 ; Day 2: 100 ; Day 3: 70 and so on.
3. While the game is still running, but you're not playing, you can set the game to "Mingle" while enables you to "interact" with other WiFi signals, people playing other DS games, or people playing TWEWY.  You can "interact" with up to 10 signals before you have to accept those signals which are converted into exp and you have to re-select Mingle again.

Now, obviously, earning exp from enemies, in my opinion, is the best way to level up Pins.  The reason is that about half way through the game, you have 6 Pins to use during combat and they all have to have different ways to activate as the game will tell you that you can't equip two Pins that say, have you 'slash vertically on the noise.'  So you have 6 Pins, all with different effects and ways to execute their abilities.  That takes a bit of practice and memorization, especially when one Pin's abilities are recharging and you have five others to choose from.  

Options 2 and 3 for earning Pin experience are really only a good way to go if you have Pins that you have no interest in using and only want to level them up to complete your collection.  I can recall there only being a couple of Pins that I didn't like using, but felt dedicated enough to level them up to full.

At the moment, I think this about covers it.  I know, I know.  I didn't develop my thesis and my citations were a bit lacking.  And, I ended the first sentence of this paragraph with a pronoun.  I also feel that this review could go on a lot longer so I just need to nip it in the bud.  Part II: Music will be up this next Friday and while I can't promise that it will be a shorter length, I can promise that there will be music.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I Should've Just Given Her A Name