Clive Thompson writes "Sometimes, a game is so ridiculously complicated it just begs you to throw it away.
That's how I felt after an hour of playing The World Ends With You, the hot new role-playing game for the Nintendo DS. In TWEWY, you're a classic Square Enix hero: a surly teenager who comes complete with mysterious secrets, a broken emotional life and spiky anime hair. Everyone gasps in astonishment a lot, and you're thrust unwillingly into a cosmic conflict with creepy monsters.
It's the "conflict" part that drove me crazy. TWEWY offers a combat system that is incredibly innovative and brilliant -- but also impossibly, annoyingly convoluted. It defied me to hurl my DS against the wall.
And yet I didn't. I actually wound up loving the game. And therein lies a very interesting lesson, which suggests that even in our age of superaccessible, EZ-games like Wii Sports and Guitar Hero and Bejeweled, there are rich delights to be had in videogames that are more complicated than a moon landing."
