I've spent the past week playing The World Ends With You, an absolutely wonderful title for the Nintendo DS. If you don't have it, you MUST GET IT! Basically, it's an Action RPG that pretty much utilizes everything the DS has to offer at once. It also requires a lot out of the player who wants the ultimate challenge. For those who may not want to be so challenged, it has a scalable difficulty level and various levels of automation to create just the right amount of fun, enjoyment and challenge.

As of this writing, I'm on Day 7, which seems to be the last of the days in the game. I'm sure that there's more to this and I'll definitely post about this once I pass it; if this is the end of the game, it's a really short one. I've really gotten used to the gameplay, which involves controlling two characters (one on each DS screen) in two separate ways. The top character is controlled by the control pad or ABXY buttons, depending on your dexterity. The main character, Neku, is controlled with the stylus on the bottom screen. In essence, victory is obtained by simultaneously tapping, slashing or dragging the stylus and pressing directions (usually left, right and up) on the D-Pad to annihilate various types of enemies. The action can be quite hectic at times. The scaling level difficulty only seems to affect maximum HP, attack and defense values, but I haven't unlocked Hard mode yet. Easy mode certainly seems to show less action out of the enemies, so I'm guessing they attack more often in Hard mode. As you can imagine though, the game can be pretty tough. Good thing you can save anywhere.

The game was so tough initially that I had a game over on my first real battle! The game gives you infinite health during the training battles then warns you that you may/will die on the first real battle and suggests saving. Sure enough, I died hardcore. Boss battles are pretty rough too, as the bosses have much larger amounts of HP than the standard enemies. They also may require strategies that involve the top screen.

I really love the gameplay and wish there were more games that challenged my mind and dexterity like this one. The story is pretty interesting as well. For a game that doesn't look so, it's rather deep and even touching at times.