Sometimes it feels like the role-playing game is trapped in amber, forever doomed to deal in the same swords and dragons laid out by Dungeons & Dragons way back in the day. Square Enix are as guilty as any game maker of holding the RPG back. Sure they experiment, iterating on ideas here, throwing a License Board monkey wrench there. Still, for the most part they've been making the same game for twenty years: a young man living in a fantasy realm wields crystals, swords, and the power within himself to defeat the forces of evil. Every so often they swap fantasy for sci-fi just to keep things interesting. The World Ends With You changes all that. This game is concerned with the here and now. It's about teenagers and their real concerns, things like friendship, self-image and what the hell they're going to do with their lives. The setting is a bit like an alien world. Modern-day Tokyo is unlike any place you've ever been. The World Ends With You transports you to this insane megalopolis throwing everything you think you know about the role-playing game into question.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

The moody protagonist is a Square Enix institution. Maybe The World Ends With You isn't all that original. Neku was forged from the same brooding mold as Cloud, Vaan, and countless others. It's easy to hate him at first. The kid has one of those over-sized anime hairdos and dresses in outlandish cosplay street wear like all those goofballs in Kingdom Hearts. But our hero has reasons to mope. Like real youths, Neku wears his headphones to block out an uncaring world. As the game progresses he comes out of his shell. Neku's slow flowering from mute teenager to civil human being is a dream come true for anybody over the age of twenty who's had to try to exchange six words with a surly teen. One has to imagine that the underage will take away that much more from the story. But enough about Neku, The World Ends With You has bigger fish to fry.

Don't Fear The Reaper

Neku and a handful of other kids have been zapped into an alternate Tokyo – a sort of limbo. The crowds of Shibuya rush past them, not even taking notice of these disaffected teens. The metaphor is a powerful one. They're invisible. In this alternate realm kids are forced to fight for the right to exist against Reapers, sadistic referees who have turned this fractured dimension into a twisted game. Neko has seven days to satisfy all of the Reaper's requests. To survive he enters an uneasy alliance with another “player” -- a friendly, but troubled girl named Shiki.

Only now do all the familiar elements of the role-playing game start to fall into place. But the brilliance of The World Ends With You is the way it contorts these tropes. Looking and being cool is a primary concern for teens, so much of the equipment here has morphed into fashion accessories. Strength and defense are buffed by hip articles of clothing. Skills come by way of pins that players collect and proudly wear. Characters evolve not only by earning a kind of experience, but by eating a hearty meal of ramen or junk food. Once digested (by fighting a handful of brawls) a couple points are added to the player's stats. We haven't seen the “real” world translated into the language of the role-playing games this well since Earthbound. And we know how awesome that game turned out.

You Gotta Fight For Your Right

If there's anywhere that The World Ends With You stumbles it's with combat. Fights take place on both Nintendo DS screens – the rules of the Reaper's game demand that the teens fight in tandem. Juggling both of these kids in real-time is a frequently overwhelming challenge. But the game's creators have taken this difficulty into account. Skills can be swapped out until the player finds the touch screen controls that mesh the best with their playing style. Some attacks call for slashes of the stylus; others ask you to draw a circle or pick up an item and toss it at the enemy. There's a lot of customization to be done here.

And if those attempts fail, the game eventually lets you try fights over at a lower difficulty setting. It's like the game is trying to make up for twenty years of Square Enix torture. The game gives you experience points for not playing, for Pete's sake. Since when have role-playing games been this humane? Free experience during game downtime is just the beginning.

There are a handful of nifty innovations that make The World Ends With You such an interesting modern RPG. Using Nintendo DS Wi-Fi players can “mingle” with other gamers and earn experience for each person they run into. It's sorta like war driving with your handheld. The other folks don't even have to be playing The World Ends With You – they only have to have their DS in wireless mode. If you do happen to stumble upon someone else with the game you gain access to a store that lets you buy the gear they have equipped. On top of that there's a whole, fairly involved Tin Pin Slammer mini-game that players can compete in over wireless. Already the game's pin system stands as one of the best character customization since Materia. All these wireless extras are icing on the desert crepe.

The Kids Are Alright

The World Ends With You may very well be ringing in a new age for the role-playing game -- one where narrative isn't trapped in the fantasy ghetto and where entertainment isn't wrung from an endless experience grind. What we have here is a smartly written, visually stylistic exploration of the teenage mind. Sure, the game uses monsters and magic to attack these themes, but these aren't the same old slimes. Neku certainly isn't the same old hero. The World Ends With You is a J-Pop remix of the role-playing game with way more to say about life than your average fantasy adventure. It's a video game parable, parsing the experiences of high-school kids as life-or-death struggles for identity. Games rarely have things this interesting to say or approach them from this outlandish a vector. Listen up.

Review by: Gus Mastrapa