PixelVixen707

How to grok the freak popularity of young adult literature among people who are officially adults? Maybe it was Buffy that lured the twenty- and thirtysomethings back to stories about what many call the worst years of their life: high school. In the case of genre YA books, maybe it’s nostalgia for the early sci-fi and fantasy books that welcomed so many of us geeks into our own lonely puberties: the safety net of lasers and witchcraft wrapped around heroes who prevail over everything, even their own insecurities. Or maybe because the greatest YA novelist of them all, J. D. Salinger, got it right: adults are phonies, and even we don’t want to read about them in our free time.

Whatever the reason, young and older geeks have found common ground with auteurs like Joss Whedon or authors like Stephenie Meyer, Sean Stewart, and the like. And that’s why The World Ends With You, an oddball game from Square Enix, resonates so strongly.

The heroes here are young people with issues, living in modern Shibuya, where “noise” plagues the psyches and fashion dictates everything – even your attack stats. The twist is that the young heroes in this story are literally invisible: they’ve all died before their time, and now they’re trapped in a “game” that threatens to end them for good. The protagonist, Sakuraba Neku, doesn’t jibe as a survivor-type: he skulks down the street in his headphones, and doesn’t want help from anyone. But only through teamwork can he survive, and slowly he starts to respect– and eventually, feel responsible for – the other teens who help him.

Moody youngsters are a staple for Square Enix. But The World Ends With You innovates not just with its modern setting, but its gameplay: new moves are purchased or picked up through pins, whose power depends on fickle trends and whose attacks are carried out with stabs and swipes of the stylus against the DS screen – making this an action RPG, albeit one with plenty of nuance for stat-junkies. The game starts slowly to warm you up to its concept and then paces itself brilliantly as you race from block to block and triumph over your tormenters. But the hook lies in watching those characters mature before your very eyes: they’re at precisely the age when self-doubt turns into self-reliance, when the personality is immature enough to annoy but unshaped enough to turn into something noble.

As one character puts it: “The world ends with you. If you want to enjoy life, expand your world. You gotta push your horizons out as far as they’ll go.” Or to quote another: “Any tree can drop an apple. I’ll drop the freaking moon.”

That sense of personal growth contrasts sharply with the far more popular Wii Fit, which ate $90 of my eating funds and left me unfulfilled. The gimmick that has drawn people to the Fit – even including my mother, who does not even own a Wii – is that it’s a fun and easy way to get in shape. Except it doesn’t promise you better health: it just suggests it can make you fitter, happier. Oh, and it’ll improve your posture – which is presumably a big fad in Japan.

I feel pretty good about myself. From my ass to my heart rate to my general disposition, I’m in a good place. Which is good, because Wii Fit barely tries to improve me. It lets me set goals for fitness and weight loss, it gently nags me if I miss a day’s exercise, and it fills my head with soothing promises that a few “strength” exercises - like bending your arm, and unbending it – or bite-sized yoga sessions will lead to lifelong health. Two weeks in, it hasn’t worked. The game’s reluctance to offer a rigorous, structured workout – or even so much as a playlist to keep you sweating from one exercise to the next – makes it a curiosity, rather than a serious exercise tool.

I’ll admit the yoga was soothing, and the balance games show potential. The stepaerobics rhythm game was also surprisingly fun – though Rock Band burns more calories.  As a gateway tool to get you off your couch and possibly into a gym, it serves its purpose. But at $90, it’s a disappointment. Not only is it low-budget software peddled to low-rent dreamers, but it doesn’t even try to push your boundaries.

The reason I still read young adult fiction is to dream about being in a state of transition – when everyone’s miserable, but everything is possible. We can look back at high school because we aren’t like that anymore. But our chance to grow up is gone. The Wii Fit knows we’re over the hump – and so it never tries to change us. It just pats us on the head as if to say, “I know you’ve already given your best. I expected nothing more.”