There are lots of fantastic ports for the Nintendo Switch: Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Diablo III, Dark Souls, Gekido: Kintaro’s Revenge, etc. The NES online brought us lots of NES titles, and now there’s another ported game that we can add to the huge library of Switch games. The World Ends with You was originally released for the Nintendo DS, then some years later it was remastered for mobile as The World Ends with You: Final Remix, and now that remaster has been ported to the Nintendo Switch. If you ever had a DS, then you must have heard of this RPG. It has been on my list of top Nintendo DS games to play. It’s nice to see new life brought into such a classic. The World Ends with You: Final Remix is one of those games that can be considered a hidden gem, but does this new remaster hold up? Should you get it?
In The World Ends with You, you play as the protagonist named Neku who has an anti-social personality and tries to shut himself out from the world around him. The game starts off as he wakes up in Tokyo’s Shibuya district with no memory of how or why he ended up there. You find that you are in a replica of Shibuya known as the Underground and are stuck taking part in a strange game. Other people don’t see you because Neku is dead, and the only other people who can see and interact with him are other players and masters. All players have pins and are a part of the game to see who gets brought back to life. These pins have abilities called ‘psych’, and the one Neku first gets grants him the ability to read people’s minds and hear their innermost thoughts, an ability you will use a lot throughout the game.
There’s a number of ways to play The World Ends with You. You can play it in handheld mode and use touch screen controls (drag your finger across the screen to move Neku and to perform attacks for your pins – like tap/slash on an enemy, tap/slash an empty space or touch an object to use it). You move Neku by touching the screen, and he’ll run to that point; you also use the touch screen to edit your pins for battle, to fight the Noise in the area, to use other settings and to dongle between the normal soundtrack or the remixed one. You can also use one Joy-Con to point and click to play, but it can be a bit of a challenge; for example, in the middle of a battle, you can be trying to move the Joy-Con fast to defeat the Noise, but if you go off-screen, the Joy-Con can get de-synced. That’s a pain, and this flaw led to me getting many game overs compared to when I played in handheld mode. You can even play the game through co-op and have someone play as your partner. The best way to play co-op is in handheld mode as well, but motion control can be kind of fun too in a chaotic way.
The World Ends with You: Final Remix looks stunning with its beautiful graphics conveying just the right tone and feeling when you are playing. When I think of games that are well balanced with a dark story and perfect graphics, I automatically put this game right alongside The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. The characters look sharper, crisper, and compared to the original DS version and the mobile version, this is definitely the best looking one.
The soundtrack is phenomenal, and I couldn’t decide which version of the soundtrack was better or which one I wanted to listen to the most while playing the game. At any time you can open the menu and switch between the new remix or the original soundtrack – unless you are in mid-battle, of course. When I wasn’t fighting the Noise, I spent a good amount of time just leaving the game on and getting lost in the soundtracks.
The World Ends with You: Final remix has lots to offer: beautiful graphics, an amazing and upbeat soundtrack, a fantastic story that gets you hooked and is hard to put down, and even a new chapter after you beat the game that gives you a few more extra hours of play time, and yet it still leaves you wanting more from it. The only thing that I can nitpick at is the Joy-Con controlling. If that issue could be fixed with a future update, then that would be fantastic.
The World Ends with You: Final Remix is one of those fun games that should be played at least once, and it doesn’t matter if you have been gaming for years, most of your life, or are a new generation gamer with the Switch being your first console. Whether you have or haven’t played the original DS game, The World Ends with You: Final Remix has everything a gamer wants: a fantastic story that will keep you wanting more and make you unwilling to put it down, beautiful and vibrant graphics that can hold up against today’s AAA titles with amazing graphics and even those 4k graphics, one of the best soundtracks (and it’s hard to decide if the remix one is as good as or better than the original). If you can look past the controls, this is still one fun, impressive, remarkable game and can easily be on anyone’s list for game of the year. If you have a Nintendo Switch, this game is one of those definite must haves and is lots of fun to play both solo or with a friend.
Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Nintendo
Platforms: Nintendo Switch (also Nintendo DS and mobile)
Release Date: 12th October 2018 (Nintendo Switch)