You wake to the same music you heard yesterday, the same music you’ll hear tomorrow. The bustle of the busy street is too loud. Who are those people rushing to work, to school, back-and-forth like shadows? You don’t know, don’t care. They’re not important. Head down, ‘phones on, don’t make eye contact. You’ll get by just fine without them.
What’s the point of other people, anyway?
The World Ends With You’s protagonist Neku initially seems cut from the same antisocial amnesiac cloth as Final Fantasy’s Cloud and Squall. Yet where those archetypal teenagers often felt teenage by design only - young men emotionally stunted for the purposes of plot and marketing - Neku is utterly defined by his adolescence. The epitome of teenage isolation, he’s tried to understand other people, but his total lack of adult empathy makes them intrinsically unknowable, an unsolvable enigma. Faced with this failure, he cuts himself off from the rest of humanity with his iconic headphones; everyone else is just noise, unnecessary complication.
When Neku wakes up lost in the crush of Shibuya’s iconic Scramble Crossing - his memories taken as entry fee for the Reapers’ Game, an otherworldly contest for the recently-deceased to fight for a second chance at life - he’s forced to reassess these preconceptions. Under attack by physical manifestations of the hated Noise, it isn’t until he teams up with another Player, budding fashion designer Shiki, that he’s able to fight back. If he can’t learn to cooperate with his new ally, to make friends and forge alliances with the other teenagers trapped in the Reapers’ Game, he faces erasure. Only by surviving seven days of increasingly challenging trials can Neku win his promised resurrection, and to do that he’s going to have to trust his partner, leave behind self-centred introversion and take his first steps towards emotional maturity.
While adolescent protagonists are an overused default in JRPGs, adolescence is rarely anything but lazy shorthand. The stereotypical teenager is driven by a desire to shrug off parental influence, leaves home to forge a place in society, and in the process needs the workings of the adult world explained to them by those they meet along the way. Plot elements can be easily concealed by a teenager’s lack of self-awareness and reticence to share secrets or show weakness, and any meagre character arc feels dramatic when it begins with a blank slate. Rarely does a narrative attempt to explore the realities of passing through adolescence, the confusion and conflicting expectations of growing up and being expected to navigate the complex rules and systems of adult life with little explanation.
By comparison, Neku’s journey is a teen odyssey. Shibuya is presented as an adolescent playground, its disorienting web of streets and alleyways lined with all manner of music and clothes stores, ramen restaurants and fast food joints, concert venues and a hipster cafe run by an enigmatic graffiti artist who may or may not be ultimately responsible for the existence of the Game. Bands gather to argue in the street, while hyper-popular fashionista bloggers descend upon their chosen delicatessen du jour, driving their fans into a fury of consumerism. Collectible pin-badges are released by noted local designers, change hands for extortionate prices, then are smashed into each other in a playground game somewhere between marbles and conkers. Friends shop together, break up, make up, break up, make up, promise never to argue again. The latest tunes blare from mobile phone speakers while faceless businessmen scurry past like shadows on their way to whatever soul-crushing tedium consumes their days. If it wasn’t for the threat of casual annihilation by passing Reapers - and the demonic-red countdown timer seared into the back of his hand - perhaps Neku could’ve eventually found some semblance of maturity wandering these streets within the protective aegis of his headphones.
Plunged into the Reapers’ Game, however, Neku is forced to rise to a challenge he doesn’t understand, bound by arbitrary rules and restrictions, utterly reliant on other people with their own conflicting agendas. His natural inclination to withdraw is denied by the necessity of cooperation - it’s made clear from the outset that a Player with no partner is defenseless against the Noise - and it’s only through Shiki’s quick thinking when she first encounters Neku that his aversion to teamwork doesn’t immediately get them both erased. Depriving him of his childish escape from the real world is a vital step towards emotional adulthood, of learning to trust people’s intentions rather than dismissing them as unknowable.
Easing his passage into this enlightened state is a distinctive skull graffito pinbadge that all Players receive upon entering the Game, granting them telepathic powers over the living world. As Neku hurries through the streets of Shibuya on his Reaper-assigned tasks, he can peer through the veil and listen in on the thoughts and aspirations of the bustling masses he’s tried so hard to ignore. Sometimes the missions require him to interfere with the real world, incepting concepts to nudge someone onto a different path, but more often than not Neku is merely a voyeur, the pin giving him the opportunity to look past someone’s public façade and see the person beneath. It’s another pillar of revelation on which his maturity is built, a symbolic awakening of empathy for other human beings.
But the Player pin’s powers are limited to the living. Other Players are immune to its effects, so Neku must somehow trust them without the crutch of knowing their innermost thoughts. If he can accept Shiki for who she is, accept help from Beat and Rhyme and the other Players not yet eliminated, perhaps they can all reach the end of the Game unscathed.
Just as in the real world, nothing in The World Ends With You is quite that simple. The black-winged Reapers controlling the Game are far from neutral arbiters; in the manner of Greek gods, they pick favourites, set impossible tasks and incite moral dilemmas, toying with their prey before snuffing them out with all the empathy of a magnifying glass-wielding toddler. Beyond the petty machinations of low-ranking Reapers, the Game itself reflects the power struggles at the top of Reaper hierarchy, and Neku soon discovers he’s little more than a pawn in a much larger game with the fate of all humankind at stake.
Despite the illusion of structure and clearly defined conditions for victory, the adults in charge of the Game have absolute power over the ever-shifting rules. The Reaper grunts in red hoodies loitering on Shibuya’s street corners block Neku’s path on a whim, demanding petty appeasement akin to schoolyard hazing before they’ll deign to let you pass, while their immediate superiors vie amongst themselves to erase Players to both boost their own lifespan and advance their careers. Invisible, impassable walls spring up to herd Players like running bulls through their designated missions, truly little more than busy-work: an arbitrary gauntlet to weed out the weak and uncooperative. Without understanding the true motives of the triumvirate of Reapers vying for power over the Game, Neku has no chance of winning his freedom; a truth only fully brought home when his triumph on the seventh day is annulled, propelling him into a second week of the Game - and then a third - without Shiki at his side.
The recurring seven-day structure is key; it implies not only that there are set rules to the Game, but that it’s possible to become good enough to win within the boundaries of those rules. It’s the same uncomfortable fallacy society promises all teenagers as they approach adulthood: join the System, play the Game by the Rules, and if you work hard and don’t make a fuss you too can Win. The seven-day structure aligns our expectations to Neku’s, and we share his confusion and betrayal each time his well-earned victory is snatched away on a technicality. He’s once more plunged into the crucible to be tempered by other partners, the infuriating and secretive Joshua, and Beat, a Player-turned-Reaper.
Despite widespread acclaim, The World Ends With You was criticised on release for being unnecessarily obtuse, its systems interlocking in often counter-intuitive fashion. The combat is strikingly unorthodox, your party fighting simultaneous fast paced real-time battles on the Nintendo DS’s two screens, torn apart but forced to work in sync. Neku and his partner share a health bar, as do their opponents - who exist in both fights simultaneously - yet the two screens play nothing alike. Neku’s is an isometric touch-oriented brawl of sweeping stylus strokes, frantic tapping and split-second evasion as the suite of pinbadges which power your abilities recharge. Meanwhile, your partner combos through strings of D-pad mapped attacks, each chain matching cards to fuel screen-wiping superpowers. It’s initially baffling, and beyond a static tutorial screen little effort is made to help you understand the intricacies of the combat.
It helps that you’re given responsibility for the degree of challenge you wish to face, neatly sidestepping concerns of whether you’ll grok the game’s systems. If you’re unable to cope with the rub-your-stomach-pat-your-head synchronicity of the combat, you can delegate your partner’s actions to a mildly inefficient AI, while a generous difficulty slider is freely available to be tweaked at whim. Characters and pinbadges level up in typical RPG fashion - even when you’re not playing the game - making grinding an option if you get stuck, but this is neatly balanced by a strong risk-reward incentive: by choosing to temporarily sacrifice character levels you boost the drop rate of ultra-rare pinbadges only available on harder difficulties, which can be further enhanced by stacking multiple fights together into a single overwhelming encounter.
Viewed as part of this confusion, the combat is thematically apt. It’s a wake-up call, a declaration to the player that things aren’t going to be comfortable and familiar, and just like Neku, you’re going to have to try to keep up. Just like the transition to adulthood, the key is gaining enough competence to survive, and after that you can choose to either strive for mastery or settle for doing the absolute minimum.
Critically, The World Ends With You’s opening hour is very clearly intended to be baffling, to unsettle the player and characters in equal measure. Neku is torn from his oblivious teenage existence and wakes up already fighting for his life, while the arbitrary nature of the Game’s objectives, the opaque motivations of the Reapers and Neku’s own struggles to remember who he is and how he died all contribute to the sense of being carried along by unfathomable tides, desperate to stay afloat. Outside the cocoon of childhood it’s impossible to know everything; adults often have to figure things out as they go, and for the first time Neku is forced to engage with the adult world - abstracted into Reapers and Games – and discovers it to be more complex than he could possibly imagine. Like the rest of us, he can only push forward and hope he learns enough about how things work before his ignorance of everything else destroys him.
For the player, the chaos of battle accentuates this desperate sense of displacement: two screens full of tribal-tattooed kangaroos and missile-launching porcupines, demonic rhinos and concrete-dwelling landsharks, two different sets of evasions and attacks competing for your fine motor control as you dash between foes and unleash devastation with a fury of taps and flicks. Alternating combos between your characters boosts your damage further, synchronising their disparate actions into a single stream of discordant aggression. In mastering this unconventional combat, you’re bringing Neku and his partners to a new understanding: teamwork isn’t easy, but if you trust in your friends, learn their rhythms and support their weaknesses, you’ll achieve things you never would have been capable of on your own.
Empathy isn’t just an unintended side-effect of the Reapers’ Game, but a prerequisite for the emotional maturity Neku must attain before he - and his newfound friends - can bring the Game to its necessary conclusion. The Game acts as both a literal and symbolic purgatory through which he must pass to enter adulthood, but as the Game begins to unravel around him he discovers its true purpose: to judge whether humankind deserves its continued existence. If the kid who wanted nothing to do with other people is now unable to prove their inherent worth to the godlike figures passing judgement upon them, there may be no adulthood for him to return to.
He can’t save the world alone, but when the credits roll, it’s not Shibuya that’s changed. It’s Neku, a child no longer, his eyes finally open to the world he’s abjured for so long.