The World Ends With You for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

this game is a great game for the ds and for good reasons. the characters are well fleshed out and the story is filled with twists and turns.the game play is perfect, and controls are spot on. and difficulty is great. this game even won best ds game of 2008. so this game is perfect.

Everything about The World Ends With You (Hereafter referred to as TWEWY) screams originality. From the setting in modern day Shibuya to the fast paced multi-screen battles, to even the way the game incorporates the flow of real time via the DS's internal clock speak to a new and different game experience that's not afraid to experiment. For the most part, the experiment is a success and the result in a RPG that's fun, original, and worth playing.

TWEWY serves up an intriguing tale of a small group of players, invisible to civilians going about their day to day lives, battling for their lives against a group known as the Reapers and monsters known as Noise. Why they're playing and the forces behind the scenes of the game unfolds over the weeks, and Neku will end up battling to save himself and the entire city.

The battle system is a radical departure from the stuffy old turn based RPG fare. Everything happens in real time. Neku fights on the touch screen, where you can use the stylus to activate a wide variety of psychic attacks based on the equipment you've purchased, while your partner fights on the top screen using the D-pad. Keeping track of both at once, not to mention controlling both simultaneously, is disorienting and difficult to manage, but luckily the game allows you to set your partner to auto pilot while you focus on the touch screen. The game also lets you adjust the difficulty level on the fly and even tweak your characters level up or down, with greater rewards for taking more risks. You can choose to cruise through the game on easy or struggle against every boss on hard.

I would definitely recommend TWEWY to either buy or rent. It's a game that fits well whether you just want to breeze through it for the story or micromanage your characters and equipment to take on the toughest of bonus bosses on the highest difficulty settings. Either way you are in for a rewarding experience.