A Story About The World Ends With You

Preface

It is 2008. I am thirteen years old. I live in a holler in southern Kentucky. But simultaneously, I live a double life on the internet. I’m part of a fairly sizable community of role-players who visit a certain forum every single day and continue to write about the lives of characters we have invented. To me, though the world I was writing in was purely fantastical, there was something so much more alluring about it than reality. It was hyper-real. And the interaction between the players in this space was what kept me coming back.

We were preteens so our stories were endless melodrama: grand scale conflicts, troublesome family histories—all the tropes you associate with the Young Adult fiction that demographic has made so lucrative. But it is impossible for a couple dozen creative minds to inhabit the same space and not explore the minutiae therein. Those were the stories that fascinated me most. What did our characters do between these important moments? What did they worry about in the same way I worried about who did or did not like me? Which other characters did they want to do the horizontal Monster Mash with? Now, some people on the internet take that last question and run with it, but it was just a piece of a much larger puzzle for me. And at thirteen years old, whether you realize it or not, every puzzle you work on is of the same unfinished picture. They all seek to add some detail to the question

WHO AM I?

You figure things out about yourself when you interact with other people. In a lot of ways, a person is just a huge chunk of marble that needs to be slowly chiseled away until whatever is in there is free. And while you can take all the time in the world to figure out what your inner shape is, it’s other people’s hands that will actually do the chiseling. Sometimes it will be rough. Sometimes it will break part of what you wanted, what you saw in yourself. But every strike is necessary to reach the end product. And while little bits of that could happen in the roleplaying we did with one another, the real work was done in behind the scenes conversation via miles and miles of text logs from instant messaging clients.

Deep breath.

It is 2008. The protagonist of The World Ends With You is a spoiled, anti-social mess. He lives in Tokyo. But at the same time, he lives a second life that exists entirely within his own head. This purple-dressed youth fancies himself an aloof anti-hero like the intelligent yet distant protagonists of every popular anime of the era (see Wikipedia entries or unfortunately archived Live Journals RE: Death Note, Code Geass, etc.), but this persona is the same one so many teens and preteens adopt. It makes them feel, even if only for moments at a time, like some part of their life is under control. When even their own bodies are constantly shifting in new and exciting ways, when their minds are mired in endless pools of hormones, and when everyone around them suddenly appears to be a wholly different person, they need that. A kid needs to feel powerful once in a while, even if they’re smart enough to know they aren’t.

The World Ends With You is a Japanese role-playing game originally released for the Nintendo DS and subsequently ported to mobile platforms, the Nintendo Switch, and the television. In over a decade, it has gathered what could generously be called a “cult following.” Partially a product of character designer and all-around madman Testsuya Nomura and developed in-house at Square-Enix, The World Ends With You has the unfortunate distinction of being a sort of red-headed stepbrother of the much more profitable and marketable Kingdom Hearts franchise. World suffers from a number of the same narrative malignant growths its stepsibling does, but the core of it is so… creative, that it almost feels criminal to compare them.

But this is not an analysis of The World Ends With You’s gameplay or design philosophy, nor is it a history lesson in the admittedly fascinating development of the game we eventually got to play. This is not a review of software or the experience of playing software. This is a story. A story about The World Ends With You and a story about myself.

—

Part 1: Shiki

When I was thirteen years old in the year 2008, I was a member of several roleplaying message boards. One of these, perhaps my personal favorite, was themed around Kingdom Hearts—a ludicrous series of video games used as an excuse to mash the animated universe of Walt Disney Pictures and the aesthetics of Square’s Final Fantasy into one arguably cohesive whole. This was a very small message board, unlike most of the others I played a part in. But as a result, our community was tight knit. We knew one another’s first names, which at that age in that space was kind of a big deal. To avoid possible complications and to protect the identities of these people that were, at one time, the most important people in the world to me, I will only be referring to them with variations on their usernames from that time. This will make more sense later, I assure you.

I remember being told about a new video game via MSN Messenger, the platform we all adopted to communicate outside of the boards. My friend, Lira, had been obsessing over this game for weeks and desperately pleading with the rest of us to play it. It was from the Kingdom Hearts people, and it had so much style. It was, in a word, cool.

And then I remember sitting in a truck, riding home, with a freshly purchased Nintendo DS game. My attention firmly locked to those two tiny, poorly lit screens. And from the tin-laden speakers I hear the voice of the protagonist I’ll be accompanying electronically for the next several days and emotionally for the next several years…

“Outta my face! You’re blocking my view!”

This charming young man is Neku Sakuraba, a teenager caught in the center of the intricate web of events we will soon become privy to. Like us, Neku is unfamiliar with the concepts that are going to be thrust upon him. There’s a concept in fiction writing that is often at-odds with video game design. Because writers are stubborn creatures of habit and longingly pine for the days when “writer” was a career that was celebrated alongside movie stars and socialites—a time when everyone wore togas and animals were allowed in stores—they refuse to refer to this concept with anything other than its traditional Latin name: in medias res. Roughly, this means a narrative is beginning somewhere less akin to the beginning and more akin to the “middle.” Action is already occurring, the plot is already in movement, and all the necessary exposition to set up a fantasy scenario like the one in The World Ends With You is skipped in favor of starting the story in a more engaging way.

This storytelling device works well in film or novels because, hey, we’ll pick it up as we go along. In games, however, the experience is different. Suddenly “picking it up as we go” becomes an active task. It isn’t as simple as memorizing some new vocabulary through context clues—the nature of the medium is that we are directly involved in the narrative before us, at least to some degree. Starting a story in an active way, while still a wonderful device, requires the audience to use both their minds and their hands. This is coupled with our protagonist having no memory of how he entered the game or much at all beyond the basics of who he is. What’s more, Neku is an inquisitive guy. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he isn’t passive like the cliché amnesiac hero. Neku asks questions, a lot of them, and he draws conclusions. It’s subtle, but despite his loss of memory, he’s still very much a developing character actively engaging in the world around him.

Over the course of the next half hour or so, carrying us through the introductory chapter, we and Neku learn some of the building blocks of the urban fantasy we’ve fallen into. We are Players, capital P, and we are participating in what is called the Reapers’ Game. Every Player must put forward an “entry fee” to participate and we quickly learn that Neku’s was his own memory (which we’ll explore later). We don’t know why we’re in the game and we don’t know what the end goal is, or even how we got involved. But what we do know is that we have been given a mission via text message and a shock to our hands revealing a ghostly timer. If we do not complete the mission before that countdown hits zero, we will face “erasure.” Which I believe is fair to assume is something we don’t particularly want.

In genres that require conceptual legwork—your fantasy, your science fiction—worlds will be built upon a foundation of those concepts. How you introduce them to your audience and how you explain them will fundamentally impact how they engage with the work. It’s important to note that not every idea you have has to be complete, fleshed out, and relevant to the world from the perspective of the characters. Take, for instance, the incredibly related Star Wars: A New Hope. Hang on, I know you’ve probably seen your quota of Star Wars-related YouTube analyses this week already BUT hear me out.

In one scene, we cover an immense amount of world-building that is and is not important. When Obi-Wan takes Luke to his home and has an actual conversation with him, a lot of nouns start getting thrown around: Jedi Knight, Clone Wars, lightsaber, and the Force. All of this is done in about two minutes. In two minutes, the groundwork for what this universe could be and would eventually become was laid by an old man who didn’t even want to be there. The Jedi are mentioned, as are these “Clone Wars,” but we don’t dig very deeply into those ideas. The Clone Wars don’t come up again at all for a very, very long time. But we are introduced to the concepts of a lightsaber, a kind of weapon, and the Force, some form of energy or spiritual thing that Obi-Wan clearly reveres. And… we move on. These ideas will come up again, but this is when they are introduced. And how they are introduced.

I bring Star Wars into the conversation not just because I will do so at any given opportunity, but because this scene (when coupled with the cultural context surrounding the property) is a two-minute master class in worldbuilding. An audience must be introduced to concepts before they can be a part of your story, naturally. The challenge is in deciding when and how to do that introducing. You don’t want to drop everything on your audience at once, nor do you want to slow down the pace of the story to explain a lot of concepts that, frankly, are easily forgotten again. All of these pieces will come together, but their sheer existence gives us the impression that the world we’re visiting is large. Larger than we probably thought previously. And that many, many stories could be told within it. But this one, the one we’re engaging with now, is an important one.

Similarly to Obi-Wan’s casual mentions, we will get more of that foundation laid once we’ve gotten a little farther into the story—the Star Wars scene occurs about a half hour into the film, FYI. But for now, these words are what we have to work with: Reapers, Players, erasure. Depending on your patience for this sort of scaffolding in fiction, you may find yourself put off immediately. Or, if you’re a thirteen-year-old boy in southern Kentucky, completely pulled in.

What makes The World Ends With You so engrossing from the first minute is how heavily it relies on its incredibly strong aesthetic. The game is an attempt to encapsulate a modern moment into an RPG. It has roots in fashion, in graffiti, in street music, in the existential power and dread that comes from living in an urban sprawl. To my pubescent mind in 2008, it was as alien as anything in Star Wars ever could have been. I could count the times I had been to the “big city” on both hands and, spoiler alert, that big city had a population of only about 300,000. Comparatively, Tokyo—the setting of our adventure—was hovering just under 9 million at the time. Life there and life where I was were so radically different that even the crowded crosswalk of the game’s first scene felt to me like part of the fantasy. It was easy to get lost in and to secretly long for in the back of my head. Imagining myself not as the stylish hero of an unfolding tale, but as a person confident and capable in a place so large that a single human being could get lost in the simple movement of it.

That’s the impression we are given of young Neku. He’s cold, distant, and he has no desire to be a part of anything other than his own life. He claims to have his “values,” whatever they may be, and wanders the city with his headphones on. Bulky, over-ear cans that would be hard-pressed to let in much of the ambient noise surrounding him.

And it is no coincidence, of course, that the grunt enemies we encounter throughout the game are called “Noise.” Neku meets the first of these many-shaped beasts just after the opening cutscene in a tutorial designed to teach us… how to run away from battle. I can’t think of another RPG that teaches you to flee before it teaches you to fight, but it’s hard to compare The World Ends With You with its contemporaries in most respects. After this, we meet a girl who calls on us to form a pact (highlighted in red to reflect either importance or the words of Christ). This is Shiki and she’s our partner now. In the Reapers’ Game, the Noise will set upon hapless Players and force them into battle. Only Players who form a pact with a partner can even damage the Noise. Meaning that those unfortunate souls who don’t make quick friends in stressful situations are doomed to be erased. Having a partner played directly into the gameplay of World’s original release, where each character was placed on one of the Nintendo DS’s screens and controlled independently. Shiki with the physical buttons on the console and Neku via the touchscreen. This design was deliberate in that the team wanted to create something unique for the DS platform. But in later releases of the game, this entire idea had to be reworked into a simpler use of your partner to make up for the lack of an additional screen. Control in all versions is awkward to learn and fascinating when mastered, but it’s a hump that not every player will want to force their way over.

Shiki is a lot of things. She’s patient, to a point, and fascinated by fashion. She sews and makes other people’s designs into physical pieces. The stuffed cat she attacks with in battles is one of these creations, as is her entire ensemble. But most importantly for us in the beginning of this story, Shiki is a voice for frustration. Neku is obstinate and cripplingly detached. Shiki, a level-headed young woman, is there to course-correct the boy when he goes a little too far off the rails with his anime loner act. Shiki is a challenge to Neku just as much as the game itself is. She is one of many pairs of hands that will be needed to chip away at the marble to find whatever it is that is so guarded within. And, in turn, Neku will play a similar role for her. Their relationship in these opening chapters is taut and easily influenced, which makes for a much more fun dynamic than the love story I had found myself expecting. A boy and a girl, y’know, fiction tells me they have to kiss.

I remember chatting with my friend Lira soon after starting the game and I specifically remember their reaction when I told them I thought Shiki was fun. “She breaks my heart,” they said. “I relate to her so much. I am her.” Of course, this didn’t mean much to me at the time, as I was still so firmly in the beginning. But as I grew to know Shiki’s character, I could not help but think about what Lira had said here. Why, I wondered, did they relate so much to this character?

What was affecting them in that way?

Shiki is, in essence, a façade. Throughout these opening chapters, she frequently refers to her phone. Not to text or call, but to just… look at it. We eventually discover that her wallpaper is a photograph of herself and another girl. Shiki tells us this is a picture of her and her friend Eri. That Eri was a clothing designer and that the two of them had worked together on every project. Eri is, to Shiki, the gold standard of what she wants to be. Though Shiki does the sewing, Eri has all the ideas. Eri is the genius who makes their fashion venture real. Shiki has tried to design her own pieces, but has not seen much success, which has only strengthened the reverence she has for her friend. Shiki is simultaneously proud and jealous of her best friend’s talent. She sees her friend living exactly the kind of life she wants: to be capable, to be confident, and to be cool. In her own eyes, Shiki is none of these things and yet Eri embodies them all. It’s a place we’ve all been at one point or another. Someone else is standing in that oh-so-green grass and it just so happens it’s all we’ve ever wanted.

In chapter 6, Neku spies a girl that looks exactly like Shiki in the same crosswalk area our story began in, the appropriately named Scramble Crossing. Shiki is visibly rattled by this, but it doesn’t take a lot of pressing to get the truth. That girl is Eri and the Shiki we see is the result of what she gave up to participate in the Reapers’ Game: her appearance. We see a Shiki that is what she truly wanted to be, Eri, in the most literal sense. The character, though ostensibly capable of pushing Neku toward being open about himself, is shielding what is at her own core out of fear and jealousy.

This revelation made me want to talk to Lira.

·     Got through the first week.

o   yah? What did u think

·     Thinking bout Shiki a lot

o   Lol u have a crush

·     No!

·     I just think she’s cool.

o   Yah

·     What did you mean when you said you were like her?

o   T.T long story

·     I have time.

Lira had a complicated home life. Their father had passed when they were young, but they remembered the tragic details vividly. Their stepfather wasn’t the kindest man. And as the eldest child of a remarried wife and a dead man, they felt a little ostracized in the family home. This was one of the earliest exposures I had to a truly undesirable situation in one’s daily life. I understood hardship, conceptually anyway, and had my own problems—don’t we all—but I was lucky enough that the family trouble I had was not ever-present. At that time, my largest concern was loneliness. Living in the middle of actual nowhere with interests so far from what was readily available made it difficult to be a teen. Internet friends were the only real social life I had outside of school, and because of that, I was desperate to keep them. Lira especially was important to me. Though only two or three years my senior, their guidance was invaluable in the way a freshman will cling to that one cool upperclassman. They told me their troubles, confided in me the difficulty in their home life. And in turn, I got advice about things I didn’t know how to ask my parents. What to believe in. Who to trust.

I trusted Lira completely. And, in some ways, I still do.

Our Kingdom Hearts-based website was coordinated by a trio: Lira, myself, and a third user we’ll call Keru. Keru and Lira started things and were friends IRL, in some place where people could do that sort of thing without having to drive thirty minutes just to see another person. I didn’t know where they were, only that it was urban, but I so desired to be in that kind of place that I would live vicariously through their stories of what, to them, were mundane days. A traffic jam. A train ride. A mall. All of it captivated me and sparked some amount of jealousy within. I longed to be in a place where I could stretch and grow without the constant watch necessitated by having your parents take you everywhere—the unfortunate truth of living so far away from everything, having no older sibling, and being unable to drive oneself.

·     Is it about keru?

o   Yah

o   She’s just so cool and collected.

o   I mean she’s random 2 lol

·     But you wish you were more like her?

o   Sumtimes

o   Sumtimes I wish I WAS her

·     I see.

I had separate chats with both of them and a group chat for all three of us. I liked Keru but we never hit it off the way Lira and I did. To give you an idea of what that looked like, the chat between Lira and I was constantly active—we’d ping one another sometimes with nothing to say. Keru and I, on the other hand, would only talk about things related to the site. And with such a small forum, there wasn’t a lot to manage, and not a lot of talking about it needing to be done.

These online relationships were the fire that forged my ability to navigate social situations and the impact of that is still pretty apparent even all these years later. By and large, they allowed me to present the person I believed myself to be. He wasn’t some cartoonishly different version of myself, but he was more confident and talkative. In public, I was much shier and quiet. It was hard for me to know how to talk to people and a lot of the time I worried far too much about what they could possibly be thinking, though there was no evidence pointing to anything specific. It’s not great when you’re neurotic by age 10, but that’s the hand I was dealt. At thirteen, it allowed me to identify with Neku more than I’d like to admit so many years later. He sheltered himself in his music, hid from the real world. And it was only through the fantastical construction that is the Reapers’ Game that he allowed himself to open up at all. That vulnerability was inspired by his newest friend, a girl who wished so dearly to be someone else.

I didn’t have psychic powers, but the similarities were there.

Then there are stakes. I think pieces with an “anime” aesthetic often are thought of as “low stakes” in fiction because of how often characters cheat death. Just like the Western comic book, a hero from an anime or manga is guaranteed to get back up again. Dragon Ball’s Goku does it a few times—and the popularity of that series in the west no doubt helped cement the cliché. So there’s some uphill work for a storyteller to do in a space like this just to move past audience expectations. Somebody dies, eventually they’ll get better. A writer choosing to work within this preestablished aesthetic will have those expectations to deal with and The World Ends With You handles this in a way that I think is just shy of utter brilliance.

They kill off a character. Wholly and completely, only a couple hours in.

On their journey through the Reapers’ Game missions, Neku and Shiki encounter another pair of Players. Beat and Rhyme, who appear to have some history. Beat is a street punk type who speaks loudly but less than thoughtfully, and Rhyme is a calm-to-a-fault girl of reason. In many ways, they mirror Neku and Shiki perfectly. Though each pairing reacts to the world differently, the result is largely the same. Beat is brash and boisterous, to the chagrin of others. Neku is quiet and annoyed, which also wins him no friends. Meanwhile, Rhyme and Shiki are stuck solid as the logical compass of their respective teams. Rhyme weighs down Beat’s punk lingo with careful thought. Shiki, as we have discussed, serves as a human counterpoint to Neku’s rejection of other people. Naturally, Rhyme and Shiki hit it off quickly. And whomever Rhyme likes is okay by Beat, leading to scenes where Neku is the odd man out. A veritable fourth wheel on this strange tricycle. Beat and Rhyme manage to endear themselves in a short amount of screen time.

Which makes it all the worse when Rhyme is devoured by a large shark-like Noise during the second day the pairs spend together. Saving Beat from being chomped, she leaps and pushes him out of the way. And that’s it for Rhyme. She’s been “erased.” And Beat, the bull-headed boy he is, sees it as his fault instead of the monster’s or that of the Reapers who sicked the creature on them. This is mostly all we see of Beat in the first week’s story, until its conclusion, with only a couple of interlude scenes of him brooding spliced in from here. In short, without a partner and unable to fight Noise as a result, Beat is whisked away by Mr. Hanekoma—our story’s walking Deus ex machina—so that he may live to fight another day.

The beat by beat of The World End’s With You’s first arc isn’t terribly important outside of these key moments. Each day plays out like an episode unto itself with the end goal of winning the game ever in mind. As we progress from mission to mission, a new one given to us each day, we learn a bit more about the mechanics of this strange world. We, and all Players of the Reapers’ Game, exist in a space called the UG or Underground. Everyone we see around us who isn’t a Player, the masses of Tokyoites moving about their normal days, exist in the RG or Realground. The worlds are not necessarily separate but inhabit the same physical space. It’s just that except in special circumstances, those in the RG have no idea the UG even exists. They are unaware of Noise, Reapers, and the Players moving about. Those in the UG cannot speak to or touch people in the RG, but they CAN influence them, which becomes quite important as we move on with the narrative. Players can “scan” an area, allowing them to sort of read the foremost thoughts of the RG inhabitants in their vicinity. They can also see when Noise, often attracted to negative emotions, are attaching themselves to those same RG residents without their knowledge. Players can defeat the Noise and, consequently, alleviate those emotions. Or they can occasionally “imprint” an idea on a particularly vulnerable person. Something like reminding someone of a task they need to complete by imprinting a word onto them that makes them think of the issue—one character needs to find a fuse to fix a lighting issue, but promptly forgets. Hearing and then imprinting the word “blackout” on him makes him think of the blackout directly, which lets him connect the dots to “oh yeah, I need to get that fuse.” It’s fascinating seeing the limited interactions you can have with the real world and the game does not shy away from highlighting how ghostly your actions are. A Ouija board stand-in makes a couple of appearances, which you naturally have complete control over.

This is convenient because you’re already dead.

That’s sort of the big revelation in this arc. The Reapers Game is not just an exercise at random. Players are vying for a prize. Make it to the end of the game and get a second chance at life. It’s a test of character, of endurance, and of one’s willpower. Between the physical requirements of teaming up to beat the Noise and the intellectual challenges presented by each day’s mission, the idea is that anyone who makes it to the end of the week will be truly worthy of that second chance. It is not lightly given, and Players are working against a stacked deck. Their ante—as we touched on earlier—is whatever they treasure most. For Shiki, it was her appearance, inspired by how selfish her jealousy of Eri was. For Neku, it’s his memories. While convenient for us as newcomers to this urban fantasy world, needing to learn the ropes just as he does, it also says a lot about him early on. Neku too, valued himself more than anything else. Whoever he was, whatever values he was on the verge of espousing in the opening cinematic, that’s what he gave up to play the game and go for the prize.

I love the narrative device of your protagonist vying for something mysterious. The nature of how winners “return to life” isn’t explained. Neither is how their treasures are taken from them. There’s flash of light and it just happens. But we know, generally, that there is a prize to be won and we dearly want it. Highlander is one of my favorite pieces of fiction for this very reason. In fact, it shares quite a bit of DNA with The World Ends With You. The Immortals of that story are all physically fighting and killing for the mythical “prize” about which no one knows a thing. The twist in that story, because a twist in a mystery is necessary and engaging, is that the prize for the last Immortal standing is mortality. An end to an endless cycle of violence and the chance for the very last of the kind to live as a human being. It is natural, I think, to expect a twist with the prize in The World Ends With You. And indeed there are a few on our path from here to the conclusion. But what The World Ends With You is able to do by virtue of its medium, something Highlander couldn’t do, is keep the audience on the hook far longer—the runtime of a movie is much shorter than the average role-playing game. We reach the end of the first week, we see our heroes face off against the Reaper in charge of the game—aptly called the Game Master—we win the boss battle. Hard cut to Neku waking up in the center of the Scramble Crossing just as he did in the opening scene. We are cheated out of the conclusion we expect, given a taste of a twist, and told to keep playing. But things will change this time around.

There’s this moment at the very end of chapter seven that touches me in the most powerful way. Throughout the arc, Neku refers to Shiki not by name, but by common shorthand or insults that turn into slight shots of endearment: hey, you, or Stalker. But before heading in to face the Game Master, Neku and Shiki discuss meeting with one another in the RG once this is all over. Shiki, of course, will look very different, but says she will carry the same plush around so he can identify her. Neku says he’ll “think it over” and calls her by name. Shiki. It’s this moment where you see the culmination of the game’s first chapters. Neku moves, begrudgingly but not completely, away from his anti-social stance. The week has forced him to grow as a character, which is the purpose such fantastic trials should serve in our stories. Not for show, but for reason. Here, the reason is evolving this protagonist into a better person. And if you had not noticed the cracks on the way—and you would be forgiven for not applying close reading skills to a 2008 DS RPG—this moment makes it clear for everyone: Neku is changing. Maybe just a little. But it matters and it’s because of someone else. He’s growing to care and, by extension, growing up.

I remember when Lira and I traded our first names.  I won’t use theirs here, and it has since changed, but the exchange was slow and painful. In many ways, going from our usernames to actual names was the sign of a solidified friendship. Of something real and clear that was meaningful to us both. It didn’t really matter what we called each other, and such a thing is largely symbolic, but that symbolism was important. It’s a feeling I think a lot of people at that age at that time will be able to remember. And it echoes so strongly here when Neku finally calls his partner by her name.

It’s Shiki.

It’s Lira.

Regardless of what it is, it’s much more personal.

When Neku wakes up in the Scramble, we learn that he has entered another round of the Reapers’ Game. At the end of everything, after defeating the Game Master, Neku and Shiki are greeted by the Conductor—sort of the second-in-command of the Reapers, under only an enigmatic figure called the Composer who decides all the rules for each game. The Composer has decreed that in this game, only one Player may return to the living world. Three Players survived all seven missions: Neku, Shiki, and Beat. Beat requests to join the Reapers for some unclear reason, which comes as a shock to both Shiki and Neku—after all, the Reapers are ultimately responsible for killing Rhyme. But before they can feel too inquisitive, the Conductor reveals that Shiki scored the highest—though he does not reveal the metrics used, only claiming that the Reapers do in fact keep scores for all Players. As such, she is allowed to return to life. Neku then is presented with a choice: Join the Reapers like Beat did, accept erasure, or play again. Neku accepts playing again and promises Shiki he will meet her in the living world once he wins this next game. Shiki swears she will wait for him every day in the same spot, a statue of Hachiko (a Japanese dog famous for waiting for his dead master’s return at a train station in Shibuya every day for nine years). The Conductor, looking very pleased with himself, returns Neku’s ante to him as the game has concluded. Suddenly Neku remembers his own death, or at least where it occurred. But the way he died is still a mystery.

This twist, however, leads into our next. The price paid in each Reapers’ Game is what the Player values most. And now, because of his growth, Neku’s ante is not his memories any longer. It’s Shiki.

So Shiki has, in essence, been taken as a sort of supernatural bargaining chip, forcing Neku to play another round of the game not just for his life, but for hers as well. The stakes, though similar to what they had been before, are now explicitly clear. This is a game of life or death, and our main character has two souls on the line. It’s a tricky spot to be in…

—

Part 2: Joshua

You know what else is tricky? Watching as teenagers go through the unfortunately common process of growing apart. We’d only been maintaining our Kingdom Hearts site for a year or so when Lira and Keru started fraying a bit. I believe it started with a boy—isn’t that just the way? —and some kind of mutual interest that only panned out for Keru. In situations where a choice is the center of a conflict, that choice will have to be made eventually. Suddenly, Lira had a lot more time on their hands and Keru had a lot less. I wasn’t exactly the best support system; I certainly did not understand the processes of someone else’s teenaged mind. In fact, I didn’t understand my own.

At the same time, I was wrestling with powerful loneliness. I felt a little like a misfit in my own family and I was explicitly one in my small town, which tended to lean highly conservative, highly religious, and highly frustrated at the slightest provocation. It seemed every realization I had about myself during the period one is supposed to kind of straighten out their brain a bit was a problem for small town Kentucky. This was not something Lira nor Keru understood, though I desperately tried to speak to them both about it. In their big city, about a thousand miles away, they were naturally exposed to more diverse mindsets and cultural influence. My day to day was largely defined by the opinions and beliefs of a kind of cultural elite that had no problem letting you know when you weren’t one of them.

And before anyone brings this at me, it wasn’t a money thing. None of us had money. We were in small town Kentucky.

Where Lira saw themselves in Shiki, I loathed how much of myself I could see in Neku yet wanted to see in Joshua, the young man quickly introduced into The World Ends With You’s second arc as Neku’s new partner in the Reapers’ Game. Much like his initial meeting with Shiki, Neku has little say in forming a pact with this young aesthete. Joshua, as we will learn throughout the course of the second week’s story, is unique for several reasons. Perhaps foremost is that he is voluntarily playing the Reapers’ Game. He’s here by choice, though the how is not outlined until later, leaving players in the real world to look at the implications of his dialogue and connect some dots.

The conflict between Neku and Joshua as partners centers on their similarities and, in a manner of storytelling that I maintain only an interactive medium can achieve, I found myself dragged somewhere into the middle of it. Neku was cool and learning, but Joshua had confidence—and that was something I sorely lacked. It probably didn’t help that his character is the most implicitly sexual in a game that creeps close to that line but never really crosses it. With his partially-undone shirt, penchant for innuendo (usually directed at Neku), and feminine voice—all tied together in a character that is frequently called “pretty” by others—Joshua stands in defiance of genre-definers that focus on women as the center of sexual desire: Final Fantasy’s Tifa from the original release of 7 or Lunafreya from 15, the Blades of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, or any woman who has ever appeared in a Persona game. He also stood firmly on the threshold of my bisexuality, giving just that little hint that maybe there was more to be found in the world than I’d thought (hey, that’s a theme of the game!).

I can’t claim that realizing I had any amount of attraction to this fictional boy opened my eyes to my own sexuality. It didn’t. But there’s a domino somewhere in that all too long line of cause and effect with his name on it.

It’s Joshua’s confidence that I so wished I could relate to. In some ways, I still do. At one point, Joshua desires to travel to a specific location to meet with Hanekoma. But Neku is so focused on the game that he refuses to go anywhere until they know what their mission for the day is. So Joshua invents one. He pretends that his objective is the mission so he can get this orange-haired dingus to escort him all the way across the city. The cojones to intelligently go for what you know you need, to work around a problem rather than through it, is exactly what I wanted to find during my teenage years.

What I wanted—what I think a lot of teenagers want, actually—was any semblance of control over my life. To feel like, for once, I had the upper hand in something. That age is all about finding that independence little by little, but where I lived prevented a lot of that in the ways I wanted it. So the internet was my place to go to exercise some form of confidence. In fact, there’s such a distinct difference between who I was in my daily life and who I was online that it’s a little harrowing in hindsight. I want to ask: Why did I feel it necessary to play at being the cool guy, even when every attempt I could have made would have the opposite effect? But I know the answer already. So do you. It’s the chance I got, so I took it. You’d probably have done the same. Online I was a storyteller, able to create these narrative threads our characters would adventure through. I could concoct puzzles and see who had the wherewithal to solve them—or if their solution was cleverer than my intention, to tell them they were right and take credit for being far more of an organized mind than I ever actually was. My world was expanding, day by day, and most of that happened on the internet with people I will probably never physically meet. At this point, even if I did, I don’t think I’d know it was them.

How crazy is that? To know that these people who helped me grow up, who I loved, are all so far removed from where we were when we were all together that I wouldn’t recognize them on the street. Hell, I never knew what most of them looked like even back then. The thought of knowing that it’s unlikely but that I would never know even if it DID happen is surreal. You don’t get that feeling from your high school friends years after graduation. Everybody grows and changes, but you can still recognize that part of them you knew. But what I knew of these people, and what they knew of me, was all conveyed in words. Text on a screen. Visually, not that different than having complex feelings about a video game’s characters.

Text on a screen.

My relationship with Lira was just that—a bunch of pixels in the shape of letters, strung together in words and sentences. But it was as real to me as anything outside of the online world. I remember staying up all night once, just talking about our families. Lira told me the story about their dad, how he died. We never talked about it again but I remember every vivid detail they recounted. What he looked like. Things he said. And, this one specific image that is stuck in my mind as this tragic moment so visceral that memory almost makes it seem like I was standing there watching. When it was time to say goodbye, they were unable to accept it and ran and hid under a bed. Lira missed their opportunity then and over a decade after hearing that story, I still think about it sometimes. The specifics are not my story to share, but how hurt they felt so long after the fact and how they communicated it to me that night will be with me in some form until I die. That was the moment that, to me at least, cemented our relationship as one of the most important in my life. This person, again a person I had never even seen, had trusted me enough to open up about this part of their life that haunted them. And though I could not even pretend to understand what that felt like, I could recognize the importance of the moment. That night is when Lira went from being my “online friend” to my sibling. I idolized them for their strength and ability to articulate this complex story, even though it was clearly a difficult thing to revisit.

The game’s title is its central theme. One’s world does, in fact, end with them. No matter how many people you have in your life, how many people you love, there is no way to experience life except through your own eyes. Everything about those people is perceived by you, processed by your mind, and stored away. That’s your entire world—perception—and there’s no way to merge yours with someone else’s. The closest people may actually see the world completely differently. It’s like a high-stakes version of asking the question: What is blue, is it the same for everyone?

What is the world? What is the world to you?

For Neku, it starts very small. The entire world doesn’t stretch farther than what he has interest in and what he pays attention to. Those over-ear headphones of his aren’t just a fun stylistic decision, their constant presence represents his own refusal to move beyond himself. Neku blocks out the world. He actively avoids letting his own world grow. And while the overall plot of “oh, I have to learn to have and accept friends” is overplayed in Japanese media to the point of parodying itself, at least here it stretches beyond the most basic of interpersonal relationships and speaks more to the internal complexity required to make that change. Neku, for reasons we never learn, is a traumatized young man and part of that means he doesn’t want to let the world in. He pushes it out. With his attitude, with his music, with his inner monologue. Meeting Shiki and competing in the Reapers’ Game is what forces him to consider what that means. That’s why she becomes so important to him in such a small amount of time. It isn’t puppy love; it’s seeing this other person as the key to a larger world that keeps getting preached to him and, whether he’ll admit it or not, looks more and more appealing. She is the first step outside of his own little world, the first other person he’s willing to let in and expand to include. That’s why the Conductor takes her as Neku’s entry fee in the second week.

Joshua on the other hand is a new kind of trial for Neku. He’s self-focused, he’s driven, and he knows what he wants—even though he won’t share. In a lot of ways, he’s radically different from Shiki and her effect on Neku. Where she was a gentle nudge in the right direction, Joshua is a violent thrust that will force our hero to either scramble to keep balance or lose it completely. Neku has to remind himself of the lesson of the first game’s missions—to trust other people, to let them in—more than once as Joshua continues to pursue his own goals and be aloof about them seemingly only because it’s fun for him. We get more context as the story progresses, of course, but a lot of the second week is framed as Neku learning bit by bit about the importance of pushing his perception out wider as the two-man team goes on little excursions throughout the Tokyo ward. Structurally, this is a strength and a weakness in the game. Much of the story is episodic, with a particular mission being mostly self-contained, but the context of the larger story is necessary to understand why anything is happening. That isn’t a weak link in the story’s chain, but its weirdness and overtly anime-inspired everything can be off-putting to people who, for whatever reason, have written off either that medium or games in general. But it’s still worth bearing through and experiencing. It’s a narrative that I believe has a beautiful core, but it must be played for that to be clear. Writing the beat by beat of The World Ends With You down on paper and feeding it to someone would probably not push them to play it. It sounds wacky. It sounds tonally lost. And it sounds like it’s overly reliant on its own internal lore. None of that’s true, but again, outside appearances would lead you to think otherwise. It’s a problem a lot of Japanese games see with western audiences, most of whom are unaccustomed to the culture that influences these stories. Believe me, you don’t need a Master’s Degree in Weeb to enjoy The World Ends With You for what it is. You just need an open mind.

Coincidentally, an “open mind” is kind of a rare thing to find in your average teenager. As we begin to feel some real control in our lives, we tend to push it as far as we can. Thus the “rebellious teen” idea that pervades every middle school in America. My circle of friends was pretty tame. We never went out smashing mailboxes. We never went on shop-lifting sprees. We never spent drunken evenings around a bonfire on the lake. Again, living in the middle of nowhere sort of precluded me from participating in much of anything out in the real world—the meat space that I was starting to think of myself as being forced to be a part of. But online, it was a different story. I was troublesome, I could be flirty, and yes, I sailed the seven seas. The digital frontier was where I was allowed to be an individual, undefined by the place I was in or my family’s name. Everything I had on the internet was mine, results of long periods of careful cultivation and crafting the image of who I wanted to be instead of who I was. Like Neku, I was shutting out the world around me in a desperate bid to be a person I just was not.

If I had to venture a theory, most people I considered my “online friends” probably saw through me like an uncomfortable shower curtain in your uncle’s house. But Lira was the only one who called me on it. It’s part of what made me love them, genuinely. To me, they had really taken on that older sibling role. I would look to Lira for advice like they had seen so much more of the world than I had. I mean, they had, but also the two-year difference in our ages made me feel like they were wizened far beyond myself. Of course, this was the age where I thought the same thing about kids who snuck beers from their frequently laid-out dads but hey, that’s a different story altogether. Lira was a voice of reason and care that made me want to be a better person. They introduced me to new music and games, I learned basically everything I know about Japanese culture from wanting to keep up with them in conversation. And it was fun! I wasn’t much of a rebel, but I would sneak to watch reruns of mid 2000s Adult Swim because of Lira. I was in love with them, truly. It was a platonic kind of love that felt like I had at least this one person in the world who wanted to see me be better—to take me under their wing. A mentor, I suppose, though the age difference makes that terminology a little odd. Regardless, it was unlike anything else I’d ever experienced and, if I’m honest, I never felt it again. Lira was a singular force, able to push through the garbage that we build up around ourselves as we try to be who we want to be instead of who we are, without realizing that those barricades just make growth harder. They understood that and they did not shy away from tearing it down so that other people could continue to grow. When I think back on my friend and our time together, that is what stands out to me the most—they cared for people in such a genuine and selfless way that they could not help but be the most beautiful soul I’d ever encountered.

What’s funny is that in telling this story to you, I originally thought what came next happened over a period of years. But it didn’t. Everything was far more truncated. It’s that time dilation effect you don’t even realize you experience as you grow up. The younger you are, the longer time seems to stretch on because any individual day is a more significant percentage of your total lifetime than it is when you reach an age where you like to sit and reflect on things like this. My memory tricked me into believing that the next part of our story was far more epic than it was. This isn’t critically important, but an observation I feel is worth noting.

What is important is that over the next few months, Lira began being less active on the boards and in our personal chats. Fairly quickly I found that our intrepid threesome had become an army of one. This did nothing for my oppressing loneliness. But it was the way of things, I was told by other friends. Knowing people online was a very transient kind of relationship.

It didn’t make me feel any better.

Joshua’s arc in The World Ends With You is the central chapter, sandwiched between two shorter weeks. The meat of Neku’s development into a more adult man is in these middle chapters. Joshua, as a character, is the catalyst for who Neku must become. Shiki’s optimism and friendship-based morals are but a foundation where the rest of who a “complete” Neku will be built. Alongside Joshua, Neku is forced to go beyond the typical anime-esque “my friends are my strength” lesson and think critically about himself and his perception of the world around him. As the second week progresses, we start seeing the cracks in the young man’s tough guy act. He comes to realize that “living free,” as he so strongly desires to do, isn’t about shutting everyone else out so that you have your own little world to yourself—it’s about letting others affect and shape your world, making it larger, and as a result you become better. Stronger for their influence. Not just friends, but everyone you meet—passerby, enemies, literal monsters—will touch your world in some way. All of them, from insignificant to unforgettable, will chip away at your marble. Being “free” means understanding, accepting, and enjoying this fact. No man is an island, as they say, least of all fashionable urban teens.

The big twist in Neku’s unintentional quest to become a better person is that Joshua murdered him. There are hints in the form of visions leading up to the fourth day of the second week, but at that chapter’s conclusion we see the death for ourselves firsthand. Neku reads Joshua’s mind and sees the boy running into an alleyway with a gun, training it on him, and firing. Neku slumps over and the memory ends. Presumably he would wake up shortly after in the orientation for the Reapers’ Game.

Witnessing his own life taken from him is the truest test of Neku’s trust and potential for growth. Had this happened with Shiki, he would have killed her—as evidenced by the fact that he almost DID kill her because a lady with a very good haircut told him to. But now, he waits. He says he doesn’t have enough evidence. That what he saw isn’t conclusive. That he can’t afford to fight his own partner when Shiki’s life is on the line. These are not excuses, but reasons. So he bites his tongue. And he waits. Sure, he asks some questions in an attempt to get info. And he naturally loses his cool and lets the cat out of the horribly cramped bag quickly, but he just takes in Joshua’s indirect response (“So what if I did?”) and continues as best he can. He struggles, immediately, with himself. Trying to determine what the right course of action is here, but what’s important is that his primary consideration is not getting his own satisfaction. It’s Shiki’s life, someone else’s value, that drives him now. That’s proof he’s grown already in this short span of time. He’s a better man than he was at the start.

The culmination of this comes in the final day of the week, when Neku and Joshua finally face down the Game Master in a battle. Though they win, the GM is undeterred and prepares a high-level MacGuffin-class attack that will surely be the end of our protagonists. But then, Joshua, the self-centered and arrogant boy we’ve been traveling with, who we believe is responsible for our own death, sacrifices himself to get us out of the blast zone. Neku wakes up, again, in the Scramble Crossing...

Lira was still active online, but their thoughts were clearly elsewhere. As close as I thought we were, I didn’t know what was going on until I finally flat out asked them about it. They had been spending a lot of time with a guy, let’s call him A, and had been feeling alive for the first time out there in the big world. See, Lira was a suburb kid through and through. The city was there, but overall, their life was dictated by the school day in many the same ways mine was. There were just more options when the final bell rang than always going home and waiting for the next morning. Now, with A, they had the freedom to really get out and about. They were seeing the “real” city independently. I expressed happiness for them and asked some questions about A to which I did not receive straight answers.

Looking back, I should have seen a red flag. But I always figured Lira knew what was going on and how to navigate the world around them. It’s absurd now, they were only two years older than me, and we were both babies anyway. Turns out, naturally, they didn’t have absolutely everything together like I had thought.

—

Part 3: Beat

The third and final week of The World Ends With You is where we really see the fractures that have been building across this city we’ve been exploring. The Game has begun yet again, but this time we are assured it is for keeps. No tricks, no strings, no loopholes. Neku must compete in this final Game with an imposed penalty: he will be ineligible to participate in the Reapers’ Game ever again.

This is, in essence, his last shot.

Because the Reapers love bureaucracy, the results of week two are nullified and Neku’s entry fee—Shiki, if you’ll recall—is carried over. However, in a twist so underhanded I refuse to believe an American insurance company didn’t come up with it, every Game requires an entry fee and Shiki does not count twice. Therefore, the Conductor takes Neku’s third price: every other Player. Meaning, up front, that Neku has not only Shiki’s life in his hands, but the lives of everyone who competed in the last Game. And he must face this challenge alone. This means that he will be unable to form a pact with another Player and, therefore, be unable to damage any Noise he comes across. He’s walking prey with even less of a chance than he’d ever had before and no right to refuse.

Fortunately, this sees the reemergence of our good friend Beat.

In this revisitation of the game, there’s something very poignant to Neku being saved by the sometimes-friend, sometimes-foe character we’ve seen in passing since week one. There’s an emotional connection there and enough of one to justify this moment feeling deserving of a well-angled fist pump. And at the same time, it ties into our other story so neatly…

I had not been contacted by Keru in a very long time. She had dropped off the face of the earth as far as I was concerned, having taken up with the real world and being out there living it up. That’s why, when I got an actual text message from her on my cell phone, I immediately felt uncomfortable without reading a word.

The three of us always had our instant messenger. But at an earlier point in our friendship, before anyone split off, we’d exchanged phone numbers with the explicit rule that they only be used for emergencies. No part of me assumed that Keru had not stuck to the plan and, indeed, she had. She told me that Lira had been caught drinking. And that they had been doing it a lot over the past few months. I asked if A had anything to do with it and immediately, she knew who I was referring to and that the answer was a solid yes. Suddenly we had a more significant problem on our hands. Our friend was taking their new-found freedom a little too far and we both feared they’d end up hurt. But we also knew them well enough to understand that either of us swinging in with any sort of moral or emotional concern about their behavior would be dismissed at best or, at worst, encourage them to push even harder. Lira was a beautiful soul, but they didn’t cotton to advice. We were teens, again.

Children lost in the woods.

That night, I confronted Lira without revealing how I’d received my information, though I’m sure it wasn’t exactly difficult to suss out. Their reaction was about what I expected: calm but indignant. They had been caught, sure, but there was nothing to worry about. A little vodka was just a little vodka and a night on the town was just a night on the town. I was by no means a teetotaler, but personal experience dealing with alcoholics (a story for another day entirely) had me worried. I knew that the frontline defense against a problem was brushing it off and that’s what I felt like I was seeing. Lira assured me they’d be more careful.

This almost exact conversation happened a few more times. I expressed worry, they talked me down, we parted friendly, rinse, repeat. And every time I’d hear a little bit more about A. I didn’t know him, had never spoken to him in any context, yet I hated him. It felt like he was stealing my friend away, like he was changing them into someone else. It was the purest form of teenaged jealousy— “No wait, pay attention to me!” But while he played a part in Lira’s development, the real culprit was the passage of time. We all grow and cope differently. As childhood ends, truly ends, we emerge butterfly-like from a hormonal chrysalis made of whatever it was we valued in our youngest days. Much like the butterfly, we too leave it all behind as we spread our wings.

Neku goes through this same transformation. His “values” that he namechecks with angsty abandon in the opening cutscene are well and truly the shell from which he has been breaking free as the story has unfolded. Solitude, his idea of freedom, is now the opposite of what he’s fighting for. He’s still in this Game because he thinks people have immense value. That they’re worth saving. In a subtle shift from our first impression of the character, we’ve watched him grow up. And for some of us at just the right age, at the right time, playing this game on the poorly lit dual screens of a Wal-Mart furnished Nintendo DS, maybe we grew up a little too.

Beat’s reintroduction into the story proper sees him forfeiting his place as a Reaper out of respect for Neku, who he feels is being taken advantage of yet again. Beat sacrifices his place in the otherworldly organization to play the Game as Neku’s partner, knowing full well that without a pact, there’s no hope of a Player finishing the Game. The Game Master reveals herself and tells our heroes that there is but one mission this week: to find and defeat her. She will hide somewhere in Shibuya and wait there until she is discovered, or time runs out, at which point Neku will have officially lost and all Players will be permanently erased. The GM takes this weird little Noise that’s been hanging out with Beat since he became a Reaper as his entry fee, which upsets him.

Now here’s a part of the story that gets frustratingly dumb but can’t be glossed over because of its overall importance to the general narrative arc:

When Rhyme was erased in the first week, Mr. Hanekoma (again, just this story’s Deus ex machina) somehow “gathered up” all the parts of her soul and stored them in a pin. Beat made a new pact with that pin, ostensibly Rhyme, so he could survive the first week—mostly by hiding out in Hanekoma’s coffee shop. When the first week ended and the three survivors were presented with their choice, Beat chose to join the Reapers because he had thus far been unable to use the pin and figured they could teach him since they can summon Noise in a similar fashion. AS IT TURNS OUT, the weird little bat-ferret Noise Beat was chilling with, is the Noise summoned when that pin is used and because that pin contained what remained of Rhyme, the Noise is essentially her.

So, Beat’s entire motivation since joining the Reapers had been to find some way to return Rhyme to her normal state. Of course, since he gave up being a Reaper to partner with Neku, that pin was taken from him as an entry fee since it was the most important thing in the world to him: Rhyme, his sister.

All of this is revealed to us kind of half-heartedly in the third day of the third week. Beat’s entire arc is clarified as Neku, and the player, learns not only that Rhyme was Beat’s actual sister, but all this other in-universe resurrection junk that undermines what was so compelling about Rhyme’s death: the stakes. I mentioned this before, but The World Ends With You forces players to reckon with the harshness of the game world’s reality by sacrificing Rhyme up front. Even though we’ve gone through most of the game with no reason to read into her death as more than what it appeared to be, taking the gravity of that away here is frustrating. Beat’s arc feels like something out of Kingdom Hearts, with the unnecessary complications of that series’ storytelling sinking their grubby fingers into what had been a much less wacky coming of age tale. I take some solace in most of it occurring off-screen and being summarized, but its existence brings down the overall value of the narrative. The game’s writers did not just jump through hoops to get Rhyme back into the story, they invented them.

Beat’s flaw has been something he’s wrestled with off-camera while Neku has been playing the Game thus far. He sees himself as a loser. Lackadaisical. In a piece of Japanese media, heroes with low self-motivation aren’t uncommon. The culture pushes its youth to “study hard and get into a good school,” with plans for college being a key part of one’s high school experience. Sort of how we push kids in America to know what they want to do for the rest of their lives by the time they’re 18, but on an even faster track. However, Beat echoes the heroes of other Japanese works with central characters who don’t have a specific “dream” or ambition to be the “best” whatever—Cowboy Bebop’s Spike Spiegel, Yusuke Urameshi, or the latter-day Saitama of One-Punch Man. Beat, however, doesn’t have a spaceship or superpowers. He’s just a kid. A kid who was put down by his parents for his lack of enthusiasm and only received support from his sister: Rhyme.

There are similarities to be drawn between Beat’s situation here and Shiki’s from the first week. Beat isn’t jealous of his sister in the way Shiki was jealous of her friend Eri, but Rhyme was a reminder (a Rhyme-minder if you will) of his own failures. In life, she had been a successful student with a bright future while he struggled through his days. And in death, she guided his hot head toward standing a chance in the Game.

Jealousy is far from exclusive to teenagers, it’s an incredibly and undeniably human emotion. Lira was jealous of their friend Keru for having things “figured out.” I was jealous of A for the time he was spending with Lira. And Lira and I were jealous of each other for what we perceived to be easier lives.

Obviously, I can only speak from one side of that dichotomy, but for me I still felt the same complex concoction of emotions I had before, there was just some salt on the side now. There seemed to be a world of opportunity in front of Lira and they could take it in any direction they wanted. That was the city, I figured, oblivious to the intricate social web that comes with living in densely populated areas. I think Lira had a slight bit of jealousy for the comparative simplicity of my bumpkin life—where there were far fewer social contracts to write and uphold. I don’t believe they would have traded places with me for a second, but I also think that part of the appeal of A in their life was that that relationship was simple. They were young people in love and lust, with the desire to cause some trouble and live a little. I can’t fault them for wanting that. I DON’T fault them for wanting that. If anything, what I feel now is anger toward myself for my initial jealousy. Had I been more emotionally intelligent at that age, perhaps I could have navigated our relationship better. Maybe I could have found some way to help Lira with whatever it was they were going through emotionally. Maybe the whole story could have turned out differently.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

I remember very distinctly a specific morning in high school. The weather was overcast. Gray. Clouds drifting violently above in the winds that clearly precede a storm. There’d already been a light rain, a precursor to what was coming, and the roads were slick. I remember the smell of the horribly sugared-up coffee I had had only a half hour before hanging in the air around me, a whiff of stale caramel chasing it. I didn’t drink coffee very often but would on mornings when I needed to drive. My mother was a teacher so I would on occasion take her, myself, and my sister to the school area in the morning.

I’d drop off my mom so she could do whatever it is teachers do before classes start, then take my sister to her school, then come back to the high school, park, and mess around on my phone before the first bell. I pulled the accident-prone-protected iPhone 3GS out of my pocket, fumbled around with the buttons to get the screen on and I saw my first text message from Lira. It was a goodbye. The wording was concerning, it sounded more like a permanent farewell than the passive fallout of teenagers moving on from one another. It scared me in that way you know when something is wrong without evidence. My stomach turned, my heart slowed, my vision blurred. I sat there for a good while trying to figure out what to do next.

I tried to call them. Naturally, it rang until I reached voicemail. I drove away from the school, skipping classes to figure out what to do. I kept trying to message them on any platform I could. I checked in with a couple of people I knew in passing from their real life. I checked in with Keru. No one knew anything and every answer I got just made me feel more anxious. Eventually, I broke etiquette and did some stalking. I had enough information to get a home phone number and I called it.

There was no answer there either.

I had to sit with this worry, the feeling that my friend was in a bad place, for most of that day. I tried to distract myself by playing hooky—eating out for lunch, swinging by the pawn shop, the sorts of things you do in a town with nothing in it. But every minute was an agonizing hour. I cried a lot that day.

Eventually, I got a call back from a number I didn’t recognize. I let them leave a message, too scared to answer. I listened to it immediately. It was Lira’s mother. Lira had taken a bunch of pills with intent. It had been a close call, but they were in the hospital now and things were going to be okay.

I remember how insistent she was in that message in telling me that it was “going to be okay.” I don’t know if she was trying to convince me or herself or was just an older woman showing a scared boy some kindness. She knew of me and I of her, but we never knew one another. This missed call was and is the extent of our relationship. To her, I’m the boy from the internet she had to break the news to. I don’t know if she ever remembers that moment, thinks back on that day, but I hope she doesn’t. I hope there is peace there, for what that’s worth. If she does remember our conversation, amidst an ocean of much more important events immediately surrounding it, I at least hope that she knows she was very caring to take that time out for me.

There’s no easy way to tell a story like this and it is difficult to tie it in with something that is, ostensibly, a work created to entertain. I knew from the minute I picked up The World Ends With You for the second time in the year 2021 that I would have to talk about this in some form. I have dreaded getting to this point in the piece. I’ve dreaded writing it out, trying to be honest and thoughtful. I’ve dreaded reading and editing it, hoping to convey my feelings to a hypothetical future reader. And I’ve dreaded recording it, knowing that this story that has been so close to the core of me was going to be something I shared with anyone else, let alone strangers on the internet. That it would transform from this ethereal experience into the very thing that started it, ended it, and reminded me of it:

text on a screen.

As The World Ends With You draws to a close, a lot about the fiction in which the story is set is revealed to us. A hierarchy among the supernatural is established. At the top is the up-to-now only mentioned Composer, the entity in charge of all of Shibuya. Below them is the Conductor, the most prestigious and capable of the Reapers, who follows rules set by the Composer concerning the game and manages it from a distance. Below him are the game masters who primarily precede over each “round” of the Reapers’ Game. Then there are the Reapers themselves, the common foot soldiers as it were. And finally, the Players, who once were alive within the RG and now compete within the UG for another chance at life.

Beat and Neku fight their way into where the Conductor has based himself throughout this entire ordeal, ready to defeat him (and whatever the Composer is) to set things in Shibuya the way they believe they should be. There are battles, over-the-top endgame level fights designed to test everything the real-world player has been practicing over the last several dozen hours of playtime.

Then, as is tradition, we get our big reveals. Joshua appears again and it turns out he is the Composer. This entire scenario, everything that has happened to Neku and the other Players over the last month, has been the playing out of a different game between the Composer and Conductor. Shibuya had, over time, grown into a city full of people like Neku—they actively shut out the world around them and chose to exist in their own little bubbles. The Composer saw this as a corruption of what a city was supposed to be and, because he’s a planar being with immense power, decided to erase the entire city itself to solve the problem. Scorch the earth and start again. But the Conductor, who lived in the city as a part of the RG as well, thought that erasure was too dire a choice and asked the Composer to refrain.

Instead, the Composer proposed a game. If the Conductor could remake Shibuya into a place that better fit some arbitrary ideal of what a city could be (to my understanding, the idea being just that the area behaves more like a “community” than a collection of individuals), then the city would be spared. However, the Composer would choose one Player to enter the traditional Reapers’ Game as his proxy because his own abilities would be too unbalanced for the game to be played fairly. The Composer willingly gives up his higher powers for a time, retreating to the RG as Joshua. There, he finds and shoots Neku to use as his proxy in the game and now we’ve come full circle.

Since Neku has managed to triumph over every challenge presented to him, he has well and truly won. Which means the Composer has won. The Conductor’s timer runs out and the Composer erases him. Neku, understandably confused and angry, challenges what it is that Joshua thinks should happen next. But Joshua instead proposes one last game. The winner will get to decide what happens to Shibuya, the implication being that his own choice would be what it had always been: erasure. Neku accepts, because what do you do in that position, and Joshua proclaims that their game will be a duel. As in a traditional duel with pistols. Each of the boys takes a gun and paces away. They turn and face one another, weapons trained. Neku is crying, thinking to himself about how the most important thing he had learned over the course of this whole mess was to see the value in other people. To trust them. To expand his own world to include them.

He lowers his weapon, unable to fire. Joshua shoots. Neku falls to the ground. As his vision fades, he sees Joshua and Hanekoma smiling over him.

He awakens once more in the Scramble Crossing and shouts to the sky. Only, this time the people around him don’t keep walking as if he were a ghost. They stop and stare. Neku has been returned to life and the city has been spared.

Neku was Joshua’s proxy because he was the worst example of what Joshua saw in Shibuya. He was selfish, closed-off, and hated everyone else around him. But he grew as he played the Game and changed into someone unable to kill another even with incredibly high stakes on the line. That change, seeing the worst of what Shibuya offered become kind and open, was enough to make Joshua reevaluate the city and its people. And that’s that. Our Players return to life and off-screen the primary characters—Neku, Shiki, Beat, and Rhyme—plan to meet one another in one week.

When a little time had passed, I heard from Lira again. They explained what happened and why. The short of it is that A was a bad man. He was defective and harmful and poisonous. And he had directed all the resulting anger and emotional pain onto my friend. My friend had accepted it because they loved him. This had culminated in physically abusive behavior and Lira beginning to believe that they somehow deserved that. There was an additional complication as well, which pushed everything over the edge, though I cannot go into what that was without revealing personal information that it is not my right to. Regardless of the specifics, the result was that Lira thought the world (and A, I suppose) would be better off without them in it. And thus… what happened.

I was relieved they were okay, to be sure, but simultaneously I was angry and miserable. My reaction was selfish frustration. How could they have gone through that and not say something? It took getting a lot more “being a person” under my belt before I understood just how easy it is to slip into something painful and not say a word. I saw others do it for different reasons, big and small. I did it for reasons big and small. But that day, at that hour, I was mad. And I didn’t hide it. The conversation was purely through text, and it only lives on as a sort of ghost roaming through the abandoned Microsoft server that once operated its instant messaging clients. Words I spoke at least a decade ago now just bits of bytes somewhere where nobody has bothered to tread in almost as long. My reaction to Lira’s choice forever engraved into hard data some place. Really, most of our friendship lives there too. So many of those talks. Everything they taught me. The times I learned to be more vulnerable and caring so maybe I could help them in return.

All of it. Somewhere that exists. In some liminal space that isn’t physically present or accessible that houses all of it. Everything we were.

But much like the butterfly, we had to leave our chrysalis behind.

There was no formal “end” to our relationship. No big fight or idealistic clash. Nothing to mark the occasion at all. After that, it just kind of slipped away. We would send a rare message to one another over the subsequent years, like a Facebook post here or there. For a moment, we reconnected, and I learned a lot about where their life had taken them since and the people who were in it. We don’t talk anymore. I don’t know where they are or what they’re doing. I don’t really know that person anymore. The person I was and the person they were when we were friends don’t really exist now. We’ve grown up. Gotten older if not wiser. And I think that the connection that was there once just doesn’t exist for the people we are now. It’s difficult to phrase. Attempting to simplify would result in something like: if Lira and I met today, we would probably be acquaintances at best. Alone, that statement doesn’t mean much. But with the context that, at least at one point in time, I called this person my family, it hurts to write or say or think. I believe they are well and I hope that they are happy and healthy. That’s the most I have now.

Trust takes a lot out of a person. And it can't be realized fully until you've not only trusted someone else whole-heartedly but had someone you whole-heartedly trust break it. I think my friendship with Lira taught us both a lot about trust. From my perspective, I had loved this person so dearly that they were as family to me but had felt like that trust and care had been thrown away so they could cope with their life in unhealthy and dangerous ways. I didn’t know this was happening when it mattered most, and my mind was trained on what I could have done. From theirs, I presume they had finally put their trust in me enough to let me know everything only to have me not accept it. In our final real conversation, we faced one another with our emotional weapons drawn and I had not pointed my pistol at the sky.

I turned on my friend and I fired.

That moment is what will stay with me out of all of this. The chips were down. My back was to the wall. Every last chance idiom you can think of had shown up for its turn. And when it was over, there wasn’t any smiling, or zero hour reveal that everything would be okay. We just continued to grow apart. We had done quite a lot of chiseling to each other’s marble and ultimately left an apparent flaw behind.

—

Conclusion

There is so much more to the story that Lira and I share that just cannot reasonably be told in a video relating what we went through to something that was meaningful to us. There are entire sections that cannot have parallels drawn between them and The World Ends With You because they simply aren’t there. Entire videos could be made detailing the game’s particular commentary on consumerism and the place of fashion in the lives of everyday people. Or the mechanical complexity of simultaneously controlling two characters that is so present in the original DS release. Or how players were encouraged to take breaks to generate experience for their abilities in a time when “mobile game” was just a fledgling thought. You could probably talk a bit about Tin Pin Slammer if you really wanted to. You shouldn’t.

The point is: I won’t try to jump through more hoops than I already have to include more details of our lives, but some highlights you won’t get here are: Lira’s brief stint as a fandom mini-celebrity, our shared struggles with drinking to cope, and a beautiful car that I accidentally drove over a bank into a field, flipping it and walking away with just a concussion and a lot of thoughts about death.

Those teenage years really do fly by, don’t they? Even the tamest of us will have a demon or two to wrestle with.

Lira is a full person. And so am I, I like to think. Tying our real lives up into a Neku-shaped bow isn’t realistic or fair to either of us. There are a lot of points to our story that I think unite nicely with The World Ends With You’s narrative, that’s why this video exists at all. This game was a distraction at the time, pulling me in with an obsession that allowed my mind to be preoccupied by something other than my very peculiar social life. Replaying it now, it is much more than that. It’s a direct connection to a very specific point in my life, a time when I was essentially a wholly different person than who I have become. And thanks to it, I’m able to meditate on my relationship with Lira. Not just revisit it, but critically think about it. Consider how I could have been better, how I could have learned from Neku and worked harder to push my own world’s borders even farther. Consider how I can do those things now.

But… when I boot that Final Remix up on my Switch, I flip back to 2008 faster than a word. For a few confusing hours, I am in the middle of our friendship. I can see my friend again, in a manner, and I can think about what I would have done or said differently.

Or… not. That’s not it exactly. Dwelling on that will drive you crazy. What I think about, really, is what I would say to them now. And, after working on this for more hours than I care to share, I think I have a satisfactory single sentence:

“I loved you and I hope you are well.”

In the same fashion, there are elements of the game’s story we didn’t delve into here because, largely, they aren’t relevant to what I wanted to focus on: the title of the game, the meaning in the core story, and the people caught up in it. There’s a fascinatingly deep lore present in this one game that I hope is built upon competently and confidently in the sequel, but the finer points of The World End With You’s universal laws just aren’t important to this story. In fairness though, I’ll tell you some of what we glossed over: parallel universes that canonically exist and cross lines with the primary one, extended planes of reality that continue in a ladder-like hierarchy above the RG and UG, and the role of actual angels in all of this.

I should also mention that there is an additional bit of story in the Final Remix version of the game I played for this video that was not present in the 2008 original. In an ideal world, I’d have played it and come to some glowing realization about my friendship with Lira or my life online as it once was and how those things shaped me into the man I am today. Then I would have waxed poetic about how I could only come to those conclusions with the benefit of hindsight and that, had the content existed when I was a teen, I’d not have “gotten it.” But real life is rarely so clean cut. Though I understand bits of the added scenario will connect the game to its forthcoming sequel, I was bored of it quickly. Perhaps because of the emotional investment of revisiting the main plot and working on this piece, very little of what was on offer in this extra chapter was appealing to me. I wasn’t playing The World Ends With You because I wanted to challenge myself with the admittedly fascinating combat system, I was here for the coming-of-age tale and my personal connection to it. The exploits of our unfortunately forced-upon protagonists alongside a new, oddly designed, anachronistic mini-Reaper just didn’t hook me.

Just like the flashing of days in The World Ends With You, your teenage years go by in what seems retroactively like a blinding mess of lights and color. Who you were then, who you wanted to be, so alien from anywhere you'll end up. And though you know those days stretched on and on as they were happening, now it's all gone, coming back in flashes of fog. A song in the car, a smell as you walk past a restaurant, the way your second beer tastes after drinking the first too fast. Moments that define us, though no one else would ever know it.

A person is so internal. Every thought you have, every feeling, every way you've processed information has shaped you. Hundreds if not thousands of other people chipping just a bit of your marble away.

When Neku and his friends meet up after their return to the living, the game makes an unsubtle but well-earned final declaration. Neku tosses off his headphones and the screen goes white. The game’s logo fades in with new text that reads “The World Begins With You.” One could read this as a simple inversion of the suggested logic of the title, but I believe it is not a revision but an addition. The world begins with you and the world ends with you. Your perception is all you have, but you are not helpless in trying to direct it. With patience and care, you grow, and you find yourself closer to whatever that final shape is. Because of what others give you in every interaction you have.

What I'm saying is that sometimes you're a lonely kid in the middle of nowhere. And sometimes you're a confused kid stuck in a giant sprawl of a city. But regardless of where you find yourself, you must remain open to the presence and influence of other people and smart enough to know when that influence is good or bad.

Everyone is born a chunk of marble, there's nothing you can do about that. But we ultimately decide who we let carve away at it.

Our perception, such as it is, only goes inward. We see the world around us, we can even reason out why things are the way they are. But the only true knowledge we have, the only thing we know without dispute is what's in our own head. The name of the game isn’t exactly subtle, but it is intelligent. It's an observation: the world ends with you. Your world, what you can perceive, begins and ends with you. You just have to determine how big you'll allow that world to be and what perceptions from other people you'll let shape it.

So next time you roll your eyes at a phone call. Or wait several hours to reply to a text. Or react too quickly to a friend’s vulnerability, remember that the world that other person inhabits begins and ends with them. And, for one reason or another, they want you in it. It might be worth your time to let them chip away at your marble, and to chip away at theirs.

Who knows? This one might be your masterpiece.