Wii Fit and The World Ends With You
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.
