In this rare postmortem, originally published in Gamasutra's sister Game Developer magazine, the creators behind acclaimed DS title The World Ends With You at Square Enix and Jupiter describe exactly what went right -- and wrong -- while making the innovative touch-screen title.
Takeshi Arakawa, Tomohiro Hasegawa, Tatsuya Kando: "The World Ends With You was our team's first game for the Nintendo DS -- a platform that we felt had limitless possibilities. The three of us who were primarily responsible for the game had previously worked as artists for the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series, but had never directed a game before.
The game wound up taking two years to develop, which is a considerable amount of time for a portable game, and was a continual trial-and-error process throughout. We feel that the resulting project was eclectic and ambitious, but not different just for the sake of being different."
