The World Ends With You... Finally!

A couple of weeks ago I finished The World Ends With You, the nonpareil DS role-playing game that I started playing in (wait for it) July 2008.

Yep, it took me 19 months to finish a 20 or 30 hour videogame. But, man, was it fun.

I'm not going to go plunging into the depths of videogame criticism here. I don't have the toolset. But in brief, this game is unprecedented (IMHO, as they say), because it tells a good story with interesting, sympathetic characters while being a very fun, deep, interesting, challenging game. Most games sacrifice story for gameplay; a handful do the opposite. TWEWY is the only game I've played where the story and the gameplay were a beautifully integrated whole. A shining, backlit oneness. And, yes, I've played Bioshock. Awesome game. No comparison.

The game aspect is very challenging indeed. For the first two or three months, I had really no idea how to play the game. But the fact that I could make progress, of a sort, while really not knowing what I was doing, is a testament to the monumental achievement of this game as an object of design. Someone (or, really, some number of people numbering maybe in the dozens or higher) went through an elaborate process to design a game with a ruleset that could do this: be very complex, very challenging, yet fun and forgiving.

It's really hard to communicate to non-gamers why and how games can be sublime. Frankly, most of the time they're not. But this game is so good that it makes me wish that everyone could experience it. Unfortunately, unlike movies, video games are a very active experience that require a certain level of skill and ability. Mom is never going to be able to play TWEWY. That's not really her loss -- books and movies and music already offer more than one human can intake in even a very long life -- it's the medium's loss.