Written on 30/08/26

The World Ends With You (DS)

Decided to give this game another playthrough on a whim a 2 weeks ago and enjoyed the hell out of it.
I played this twewy as a kid but I found it really hard and never got past any after the one with the bat boss fight. Despite that though, this game stuck with me for it's style and presentaion that wasn't like anything else I'd seen on the console, as well as the gameplay which whilst a little tricky, is really fun once you get the hang of it.
I first completed this game around 2021 just before the sequel was announced. I was pretty into the fandom space at the time and that's been the only time I've been in a fandom proper too. It was nice experience though, especially those days leading up to NEO.

Anyways, I'll start by talking about the story and characters. Twewy revolves around the antisocial protagonist, Neku Sakuraba, as he is pulled into the repears game and has to survive a week and is forced to cooperate with others to do so. Throughout the game Neku gradually frees himself of his mindset as he interacts and gets to know his partners, learning that the world does indeed end with him and that life is better when you have folk you can trust and understand, thereby expanding your view of the world beyond just your own, even if you have your differences.
Playing this game as a young'un helped in the story leaving an impression on me and I still value it seeing it again now. I like how Neku's growth is protrayed throughout each week.
Within the first he's at his most abrasive but eventually comes around to opening up and understanding sHiki better. Despite their initial friction, in week 2, he relates Joshua in their shared dislike of interacting with others but does not fall back into his old habits. Finally in week 3, he pairs up with Beat with no issue and stands on business with his new view on life.

Now moving onto the presentation of twewy, I think it's really damn good even beyond it's cool artstyle. The way the game uses both screens of the DS just tickles my brain. Cutscenes make use of both the bottom and top screen which just looks really cool to me, especially when one image is spread across both screens. Some boss fights also do a similar thing where they show different perspectives of the gameplay on each screen, unlike the more abstract seperation regular enemy encounters have.
I also like how text is displayed between characters talking. NEO leans into it more with a comic bookish/manga look to how scenes of dialogue are presented but even without all that I still appreciate the way it looks in OG. Another small thing I like is the crispiness of the character sprites. In future ports of og twewy, they use cleaner artwork for in place of sprites, but something about the look of the limited relatively limited detail sprites on the DS version feels right to me.
I dig all the character designs including the npcs like the shop attendants. I'm not all too familiar with the period of japanese fashion twewy takes it's inspirations from but it compliments the games overall aesthetic. There's the pin designs too which I really like, I'd wanna own some irl if I could find them anywhere.

some favourites

The overworld is cool too with the countless sea of people in some areas and the slightly quieter ones at the ends of the map. I really like how the end of the game has the crowds frozen and standing in place, it's really jarring after being used to how it usually is. It would've been perfect if there was a chance for music to simply not play in the overworld during the last few in game days to make it feel even more off putting.

Lastly on presentation, the music of this game is top notch in my opinion and greatly influenced my fondness for some genres.. Transformation and Deja vu are my favourites tracks and I'm still disappointed that they didn't remix the latter in Neo despite it being an iconic track.
There's also the matter of the couple of tracks that they omitted ffrom the english version and replaced with new ones. I'm not sure why they did this and it sucks to miss out on stuff like satisfy, make or break and fighting for freedom buuuuut admittedly I like the songs we got way more than the ones we lost it's an overall win in my book.

Final thing I wanna talk about is the gameplay of. I like the customizability of in-game difficulty, being able to adjust your level, change how wether your partner is auto played or not and the set difficulty of the game.
I'm accustomed to and actively enjoy this games battle system but I wouldn't blame a new player for having trouble dividing attention between 2 screens. Anyways what I like most about the gameplay is the rhythm of the combat. Timing your attacks between the top and bottom screen as you pass the puck to maximize damage feels nice to pull off. The combo map system for the partner characters also feels really good to do when you're able to keep a long string of inputs in one attack.
Out of the 3 partners Joshua is definitely the best but not so much that he makes the other 2 obselete. Even if I'm lying and he does indeed do that, the other 2 are fun to play with in their own right, especially since they're not so overreliant on staying in the air like Josh is.

Anyways that's all I got on Twewy, still one of my favourite ds games for sure.