The World Ends With You
Apr. 7th, 2009 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI know gravity ain't an excuse
I just want to make things a little more smooth
In the world of “translation vs. localization” there are a lot of ways to go, and often a balancing act between keeping the original intent of the work and making it accessible to the new audience. The team for this game did an excellent job of localizing a game about Japanese pop culture, by turning it into a game aimed directly at the American Japanophile.
In standard RPG convention, Neku wakes up and discovers that he has amnesia, and needs to fight monsters to win some sort of “game”. This, of course, leads into a battle against God and a lesson about the Power of Friendship. No surprises there.
The actual arc is much more enticing (and after you finish the game, you can find “secret reports” supplying background details on it in a second play-through) because it’s actually a Job story. God and Satan have made a wager, and Neku’s life is going to suck, suck, suck because of it. And the ending is a little non-standard, and just a little subversive.
The battle system is frenetic—you’ve got two characters, one on the top screen of the DS being controlled by the cross keys, and one on the bottom screen being controlled by the stylus. If you’re not an insane twitch gamer, the existence of an auto-battle function for the top screen is what makes the game playable. 99% of the equipment only makes a difference to Neku on the bottom screen (there are a lot of different powers you can use by equipping different pins, so it’s not just slash-slash-slash), so the game designers obviously had the “ignore the top screen” type of gamer in mind.
The experience system is the most elaborate anti-grinding setup I’ve ever seen. Your Attack and Defense stats increase by eating food, but you can only eat 24 “bytes” (battles worth) in any 24 hours of real-time, so fighting battles after that can’t raise your stats. Your pins gain experience (and possibly evolve into better pins) from battles, but they also gain “shutdown PP” from not playing the game, and “mingle PP” by interacting with other people’s DS systems over wireless. Some pins only evolve from the latter two. What this creates is a system where you play for an hour or so every day, enough to fight the requisite battles to digest the limited food and rearrange the pins getting shutdown PP, then stop. In the bonus chapter, you can buy a “Hollow Leg” item, which lets you eat as much as you want. So you’re forced to spend three weeks to beat the game once, then you can grind out all of the bonus content in a weekend. I actually spent about 15 hours on the main game, then 18 more on the bonus content, so it’s not like there isn’t enough to do.
And the aesthetics are totally J-Pop. The areas are all taken from snapshots of Tokyo with names slightly changed. The game’s armor system is a collection of fashion brands (based on the Chinese Zodiac) that you can make more popular by wearing. The background music is all catchy pop tunes, which Neku himself will rock out to on his headphones as his idle animation.
Oh, and the ominous title? It’s about being a loner. If you cut off other people, anything outside youself? The world ends with you.
I just want to make things a little more smooth
In the world of “translation vs. localization” there are a lot of ways to go, and often a balancing act between keeping the original intent of the work and making it accessible to the new audience. The team for this game did an excellent job of localizing a game about Japanese pop culture, by turning it into a game aimed directly at the American Japanophile.
In standard RPG convention, Neku wakes up and discovers that he has amnesia, and needs to fight monsters to win some sort of “game”. This, of course, leads into a battle against God and a lesson about the Power of Friendship. No surprises there.
The actual arc is much more enticing (and after you finish the game, you can find “secret reports” supplying background details on it in a second play-through) because it’s actually a Job story. God and Satan have made a wager, and Neku’s life is going to suck, suck, suck because of it. And the ending is a little non-standard, and just a little subversive.
The battle system is frenetic—you’ve got two characters, one on the top screen of the DS being controlled by the cross keys, and one on the bottom screen being controlled by the stylus. If you’re not an insane twitch gamer, the existence of an auto-battle function for the top screen is what makes the game playable. 99% of the equipment only makes a difference to Neku on the bottom screen (there are a lot of different powers you can use by equipping different pins, so it’s not just slash-slash-slash), so the game designers obviously had the “ignore the top screen” type of gamer in mind.
The experience system is the most elaborate anti-grinding setup I’ve ever seen. Your Attack and Defense stats increase by eating food, but you can only eat 24 “bytes” (battles worth) in any 24 hours of real-time, so fighting battles after that can’t raise your stats. Your pins gain experience (and possibly evolve into better pins) from battles, but they also gain “shutdown PP” from not playing the game, and “mingle PP” by interacting with other people’s DS systems over wireless. Some pins only evolve from the latter two. What this creates is a system where you play for an hour or so every day, enough to fight the requisite battles to digest the limited food and rearrange the pins getting shutdown PP, then stop. In the bonus chapter, you can buy a “Hollow Leg” item, which lets you eat as much as you want. So you’re forced to spend three weeks to beat the game once, then you can grind out all of the bonus content in a weekend. I actually spent about 15 hours on the main game, then 18 more on the bonus content, so it’s not like there isn’t enough to do.
And the aesthetics are totally J-Pop. The areas are all taken from snapshots of Tokyo with names slightly changed. The game’s armor system is a collection of fashion brands (based on the Chinese Zodiac) that you can make more popular by wearing. The background music is all catchy pop tunes, which Neku himself will rock out to on his headphones as his idle animation.
Oh, and the ominous title? It’s about being a loner. If you cut off other people, anything outside youself? The world ends with you.
