GregHowley.com

I've been playing The World Ends With You for a good week now, and I'm finally figuring out how to play. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, it's a Nintendo DS game in which a couple Japanese teenagers who get sucked into a supernatural "game" against their will. They have to stay alive for seven days, fulfilling a quest each day and battling monsters called "noise".

Battles take place on both screens simultaneously, and although you can set the upper screen to "auto-play", I wanted to know how to play it myself. The bottom-screen attacks are fairly self-explanatory. You equip "pins", and those are your weapons. Using these, you can slash, tap, and draw your attacks against the enemies. Moving your guy around with the stylus takes getting used to, but it's not too bad.

The things that were initially confusing to me were how to fight on the upper screen, how to use cards and fusion attacks, what that number at the bottom-right of the screen was, and how exactly scoring for battles worked. I figured out pretty quickly that there was a "light puck" that gets passed up and down between the two characters on the two screens. Whomever's got it does more damage. Weird... but okay. And I eventually figured out that the number at the bottom-right is the "drop level" - the higher it is, the better chance of enemies dropping useful items. You can do things to raise or lower it. For example, you can intentionally lower your character level from the game's phone menu. When you're lower level, you obviously do less damage and have less hit points, but the enemies drop better stuff.

One of the things that really threw me off was that you can't do everything right away. Towards the beginning of the game, you can't even access the menu! Not until the game teaches you how to access the menu. Eventually, it the game does a good job of teaching you (almost) everything. My frustration came largely from my impatience - I'd wanted to do all the cool stuff right away.

For example, one of the cool things is what the game calls "fusion attacks". At first, you can see that on the upper screen, there are different paths marked by arrows, and based on the direction you hit the D-pad, you'll follow different routes and arrive at different symbols. But you've got no idea what any of it is for, or how to use it! I just finished figuring this all out today. Ignoring the symbols, you can mash the D-pad left or right to attack enemies to the character's left or right. Once the game starts letting you use fusion attacks, you'll see three blank cards at the top of the upper screen. Each card will have a hidden symbol. When you use the D-pad to follow a path and reach a symbol, the corresponding card (if there is one) at the top of the screen will flip over. Flip all three cards, and a fusion attack symbol will appear at the top of the lower screen. Tap that symbol to use the fusion attack. Yeah - it took me a while.

I still haven't figured out how exactly pins evolve and haven't yet messed with using the shoulder buttons to toggle pins, but I'm sure I'll get there. Also, sometimes little arrows with letters appear above the enemies, and I've got no idea what those mean.

Above all, the game is weird. I definitely recommend it, but it's weird. You buy clothes, and the ones that are currently in style give you more bonuses. This one girl attacks with a stuffed animal. And you get experience points for not playing. When you turn the game on, you'll get points for each hour since you last played, up to 7 days. Yeah, it's weird. But I've had the game's main song, Calling stuck in my head all day.