I downloaded and played a good chunk of The World Ends With You on an M3 card- however, as I liked it and it is easily available domestically, I later went out and bought the physical cartridge!

It kind of makes me feel like less of a filthy pirate and more like a modern-day gamer Robin Hood or something. Except I suppose I ultimately just give money to the rich. Yyyeah.

So, as I often do, I wrote my feature on The World Ends With You a bit prematurely. I still stand by most of it, though I like it quite a bit more overall now that I’ve gone from ‘used to’ the mechanics of it to ‘ensnared hopelessly.’ It’s been a while since I’ve run across a game with such a rewarding learning curve- starting out, every battle was an E-Rank, skin-of-my-teeth experience and if I won any items from the ordeal, then whoopty doo. Now I’m effortlessly dancing the two fighters around the screen, defeating Noise by the threes and fours, and all but showered by rare drops and pins at the end of every battle. The only tough decision now lies in whether to start over and pick up all the stuff I missed early on- or whether to plow through the rest of the game before doing so.

Little by little, I feel a bit better~

Just checking in to shoot the shangola and deliver another status report as such. Halfway through No More Heroes now, which I have to say is a game that has the common decency to be totally clear as to how the hell long it’s going to take you. Having beaten #6 and watching gawky loser Travis confess that he ‘loved the soul’ of the chick now missing her head marks the halfway point of the game excluding postgame content. And as much as I’m enjoying it, I think I might actually do some of the postgame content, which is a rarity. Hunting down Lovikov Balls and buried treasure throughout the city is inexplicably more fun than doing the same exact thing in many, many other games. Maybe it’s the retro-gaming veneer slathered all over that makes them feel more like “OH! DISCOVERY!” than “Ok if I do this nine more times I can unlock a flannel jacket.” I keep wanting to compare it to Kill Bill Pt. 1, mainly due to the hit list and over-the-top bloody swordfights, though sadly Travis has yet to kill Quentin Tarentino in cameo.

The thing that gets me- and I’m not even sure myself if it’s in a good or bad way, is how utterly disconnected Travis seems to be from his opponents. Most of them plain don’t exist until he’s actively hunting them down, whereas most games would slap you about the face and mouth with foreshadowing along the lines of “HOLY CRAP, DID YOU HEAR ________ KILLED A HUNDRED MEN WITHOUT A SCRATCH ON HIM ON LIVE TELEVISION?!” On the other hand, the bulk of the play time is spent raising funds at menial jobs around town, which works fine for a guy like Travis, but brings to mind the weird mental image of the likes of Dr. Peace picking up trash and pumping gas.

And singing. Of course.

One of the more unsavory side effects of the game on my psyche is I think I just might watch Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly if it were made into a real show, and I’ve spend a chunk of today attempting to Google for images of the Glastons/Glastonbury so I might try to cobble together Lego mock-ups of said robots.

Speaking of Lego, the Exo-Force Arachnoid Stalker is awesome. I want an army of them.

I’ve added a Reviews category that’ll sort out the actual ‘feature length’ reviews from all the gaming-related blog posts.