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

Or Something Like It

There are a couple of video game related sites that I visit, some on a regular basis and others that I'll visit when I suddenly remember that I haven't been there in a few weeks.  Then there're the handful that I remember existing that I visited for a while, but that was on a different computer that contains years worth of bookmarks that I no longer have access to.  Like the current trends with cellphones, I no longer remember phone numbers or actual website address, I just have them either bookmarked or I just have to type in the first three letters and auto fill in does the rest.

When I do visit aforementioned sites, the large ones like Penny-Arcade, Kotaku, Red vs. Blue, these are professional sites that have some sort of connection to the side of the gaming industry that actually make the games.  I really try to stay away from these places when I know that I have an article to write.  It would be like wanting to do a drawing or sketch and right before you pick up that box of colored pencils, you go for a walk through the Louvre.

I don't visit Penny-Arcade to look for inspiration when it comes to writing articles and god knows I have a closet full of ideas up in that attic I call a brain, but if I find inspiration while reading, that's perfectly valid and not at all guilt ridden.  I might be listening to the Rooster Teeth Podcast and they'll be talking about something to do with early SNES games and I'll think, "Yeah, that was pretty cool.  I'm going to write about that!"  I won't though, listen to them looking for inspiration.  Yes, I just used "looking" to describe the act of listening.

Given the somewhat short history of this blog, you may have found that Dr. Potts and I do not do a lot of reviews of current games.  Neither the good Dr. or I have any of the current generation of consoles although I do have a 3DS and we both play a fair amount of games via Steam, the majority of the games that I tend to purchase are not "new."  

However, with that in mind, I don't think that we are any less relevant.  Pretty much everyday I'll look at the statics and information about our site and how people came here and I'm always excited when I see that there were multiple searches for Amnesia ~ Justine ~ or Dr. Potts' post about Hiroo Isono's artwork.  

And as far as video game related posts go, here are a few that may be showing up in the next couple of weeks:

• Two part Full Review for The World Ends With You
• First Impressions for :
• Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together
• The Art of Balance - Touch
• Dead Space
• Shatter
• Music Reviews for:
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Actraiser
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest
• Bit.Trip.Runner: Game vs. Soundtrack
• Hitoshi Sakimoto: Final Fantasy Tactics vs Final Fantasy XII
• Emulator Hours for:
• Metroid II: Return of Samus (Separate from Dr. Potts' post)
• One Year Later: 3DS

So as you can see, I've got some ideas for topics to discuss.  Are they the same topics that other video game related sites are talking about and discussing?  Probably not, but it's what we do.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Taking Yoda's Words To Heart

Don't Let CPS Happen To You!

First off, I'm sad about the 49ers losing Super Bowl 47.  Yes, I am a San Francisco 49er fan.  I always have been, at least as long as I've been a fan of football, which has been most of my life.  I remember wearing a Dwight Clark jersey a lot during kindergarten, although I seem to recall being a little sad when I found out/realized it wasn't a Joe Montana jersey.  Whatever.  I also wore a shirt that depicted a gold prospector carrying a dolphin in a net (which probably wouldn't fly with PETA today for advocating the capturing of dolphins in tuna nets).  The point is, I didn't just jump on the recent 49er bandwagon and I am legitimately sad that they lost the Super Bowl.  And yes, I will still wear the 49er Super Bowl XLVII shirt my mother sent me.

Now that that's out of the way, I just received Scribblenauts Unlimited in the mail on Saturday and I've played about 30 minutes of the game.  This isn't a "First Impressions," so I'm not going to review it just yet.  The point is, is that I took The World Ends With You out of my 3DS and I need to tell myself that I did that only just to give Scribblenauts a quick go and then I'm going to get back to TWEWY,  It's not gone for good.

That's kind of the point and something that I have had a problem with in the past.  Christmas Present Syndrome?  Is that a thing?  Apparently not, but what I mean is that growing up, every Christmas Day, our family would drive to Oakland for Christmas with my Mom's side of the family and I would usually pick out a gift that I'd received so that I could not only keep playing with it, but show it off to all my other cousins who would frequently do the same thing.  What I mean by Christmas Present Syndrome, is that feeling that you absolutely have to play with that new thing and for a while, only play with that one thing.  I do that with video games and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

The problem with CPS and video games for me, is that I will sometimes not finish a game that I started, regardless of how far I am in the game.  If I'm not careful, I feel like this could happen to TWEWY, and I really don't want it to because it's the kind of game that you build up memory and skills and I feel you can lose them if you don't keep practicing.

Two games that this has happened to me with were Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, both on the DS.  With FFXII:RW, I was only a couple of hours into the game before I picked up a newly purchased game, it might've even been the first Scribblenauts game, but I may be making false connections here.  I don't know what game it was that got me to put down SMT:ST, but I was very close to finishing that game.  As in I think I was in the second to last area and I was raising levels of the demons in my party to fight the area boss to progress to the final stage.  SMT:ST is a game that deals very heavily with mazes (even though there are in-game maps) and knowledge of demons and their abilities), oddly named abilities and skills and when I tried to quickly pick it up a few months game to re-orient myself, I felt lost and confused, not sure where I was or what I was doing when I last played.  Most recently this has happened with Legendary, the FPS about mythological creatures and having to kill them all with a shotgun or SMG.  I had stopped playing because of increasing FPS and because I started playing the Left 4 Dead series.

The threat of restarting from the beginning is present in both SMT:ST and FFXII:RW, but I would rather not.  I would rather have not let Christmas Present Syndrome happen and finished the games while my brain was in them.  I do not think that I will have to restart SMT:ST, but I think FFXII:RW may be a lost cause.  I was only a couple of hours in anyway. . . I think.  The point is, The World Ends With You, you need not worry, I will not let you fall into unfinished obscurity.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Now I Will Stay With You, Until I Have Saved Yours.  That Is My Vow.

Weird Post at a Weird Hour

It's weird.  This blog, I mean.  But "weird" in the best sense of the word.  And on a quick side note, I can remember the instance when I learned how to spell the word "weird."  I was making a drawing that contained the planet Mars and I was painting it green (because we all know Martians are green), and I wanted to write "weird" next to the planet, although I don't remember why.  I was then told by my teacher that the planet Mars is really red and that weird wasn't spelled "W-I-E-R-D."

I mean it's weird in that it's taken on this entity form that I've told myself, needs to be fed every Monday and Friday.  There've been times when I've been late with my feedings, but this is a purely self imposed feeding schedule.  There's no one behind the curtain pulling strings or threatening to fail me in life if I don't write up a post on time.  This is the real world.

Yet, all the same, every Sunday and Thursday or Monday and Friday, I'll think, "Hey, I need to put up a post!"  Please don't miss-understand me, I don't feel like this blog has become a chore or something that I have to do.  I love doing it.  I love checking the stats and seeing who and how many people (or bots) have checked out something that either Dave or I have written.  It's a bit of a rush when I see that a person/bot from South Korea or Ireland has found our little corner or the internet; or that someone googled "Amnesia Logo" or "Nintendo Power Cover" and found us.

But the other day at work, I picked up a copy of the Oregonian and began reading an article about the recent happenings in Newtown, CT.  By the second paragraph, the writer was suggesting that violet video games were one of many catalysts for the recent wave of shootings.  I was enraged that this suggestion so easily came up.  While at work today, I decided that I was not going to write an article about how this made me feel followed by me being annoyed.  This isn't the time for that.

With that self declaration, I couldn't think of what to post about for Monday's article.  My video game playing has been pretty one sided recently.  That one side being The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and a bit of The World Ends With You.  I also logged onto Penny-Arcade because I know they post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and realized that I hadn't read anything from them in over a week.  I also have six and-a-half Rooster Teeth podcasts that I haven't listened to yet.  Also, I have a couple of friends, along with Conklederp, who've shown some legit interest in D&D, not just DD&D (Drunk Dungeons & Dragons), but I don't want to reveal anything there yet either, although I probably just did.

So the weird thing is, is that I don't have a legit gaming topic to cover today/tonight except to talk about how I don't have a topic, which I just did, so I decided to take the time to write about it, and assuming that you've made it this far, thank you for reading along with what Dr. Potts and I have to say.  And yes, I'm going to post this without proofing it (which I will normally do), because Jargaritas are awesome.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconain

A Fresh Aire Christmas: Best_Christmas_Album_Ever!

First Impressions: The World Ends With You (DS)

I've been playing this game for a couple of weeks, which was shortly after I earned the Vivi character in Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy.  I'd been trying to unlock Vivi for sometime and after I was able to, I felt like I accomplished something and I played for a bit after that, but I haven't picked the game up since I put The World Ends With You in my DS, which again, was a couple of weeks ago.  Now that the background context is out of the way, on with the initial critique.

The World Ends With You is an odd game from Square Enix.  I mention Square Enix first off because the first thing I think of when I see those two juggernauts of RPG's next to each other are two things, Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior/Quest.  I obviously know there are plenty of other properties associated with that one massive company, but that's what comes to my mind.  Oh, and I guess the Kingdom Hearts franchise too, but I've never gotten into those games as the idea of Disney characters in a Final Fantasyesque type story/setting/whatever it is has never appealed to me.  Anyway!, Square Enix = Overworld Exploring RPG's.  This isn't the case with TWEWY.

Initially, TWEWY feels a lot like an RPG that Atlus would have come up with.  From the character designs to the way the game is played, even the music is somewhat reminiscent of the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series.  Does this mean that the game doesn't work well, coming from Square Enix?  Of course not!  Just because a game company puts something out that breaks a mold that works very well for them doesn't mean that the game is going to be horrible.  It's a very non-traditional game that works on a lot of levels, even if I know I'm playing part of the game inaccurately.

The battles in the game are what makes this game very different than a standard RPG.  The battles are in real time, similar to how the Tales... games are run: wandering around an over world and entering real time battles.  The actions in the battles are determined by which "pins" the main character, Neku, has equipped.  Different pins do different types of damage and the actions are executed in any number of different ways.  From "slashing" an enemy with the stylus, to "tapping" empty space to shoot a projectile towards and enemy, or "scratching" an open area to cause area damage.  There are a lot more types of damage and actions as I've made it through, maybe 1/3 of the game and I haven't collected all of the pins yet.  And this is only half of the battle system.  The other half takes place on the top screen with your partner.  That half is controlled with either the control pad or the ABXY buttons (depending if you're right or left handed).  For that you're supposed to pick out the "correct" card in the proper order in order to execute a combo.  I don't play it that way.  For the top person, I just button mash, pressing the control pad in whichever direction my opponent is facing.  It's not great, but it's working out somewhat well so far.

Coordination here is the key.  Left hand playing top screen with directional pad and right hand using the stylus on the bottom screen.  It's like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach.  All while being attacked.

As far as the storyline goes, it's a lot deeper and somewhat darker than I had originally anticipated and that's very much welcome.  That's all I want to say about the story as to not give it away for anyone (like me) who plays games four years after they've been released.  Even the fact that the game takes place in the Shibuya district of Tokyo and that I don't really know anything about that specific culture, I don't feel like I'm missing anything that's important to the game.  Sure, I'm sure there are things in the game that I'd be giddy about if I knew about Shibuya culture and the district itself, but it's something that I'm not too worried about.

I think it's safe to say though, that with 15 hours logged in so far, I would easily recommend this game to just about anyone.  Pokemon fans?  There's collecting.  RPG fans?  There's leveling of characters and items/weapons.  Action fans?  Battles in real time.  Rhythm Music game fans?  There's pretty awesome music.  See, a little something for everyone.  Except if you're only a fan of FPS', then you probably won't like this game, and you probably wouldn't own a DS anyway.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

More For The Rest Of Us.