#WeeklyGameMusic: Give Me a Chance (The World Ends With You)


#WeeklyGameMusic: New week, new music. This time we’ll cover Give Me a Chance, composed by Takeharu Ishimoto and sung by Ayuko Tanaka and Mai Matsuda. It’s a composition from the cult-hit Square Enix game, The World Ends With You, an almost trading card game (TCG) JRPG and a banger soundtrack.

You can tell The World Ends With You is created by the same company famous for their Final Fantasy franchise when it stars an anti-social, brooding teen named Neku. This insufferable jerk eventually learns to get better when he’s suddenly pitted in a life-and-death game about fighting sound-based monsters and lazy grim reapers using a deck of shirt pins. To survive this terrifying game, this loser must make a sacrifice arbitrarily chosen by the game master (in this case, his memory, of course) and pair with a partner to fight together with. Did I mention this all makes sense in context?

Anyway, where The World Ends With You best shines is its real-time combat. Originally developed for the Nintendo DS, this game utilizes nearly every single feature in the portable console, including — get this — the closing-the-lid sleep function, as part of combat. Unfortunately for this blogger, his introduction to the game was on iOS, so he’ll describe how the combat works there instead: The World Ends With You TCG-like battle system operates by having each pin execute when a specific touch or swipe gesture is made. Multiple pins in a deck may share the same gesture; the pin placed on the top of the deck gets prioritized first, until it hits a cool-down state, in which the rest of the pins takes effect. Partners can also be summoned, using yet another gesture assigned to them: this helps build both a combo meter, and a super attack. It’s super fun, and I highly recommend checking it out!

The World Ends With You is available on Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Nintendo DS.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Ascension (Dear Esther)


Around five years ago, I used to post video game music with the hashtag, #WeeklyGameMusic. To be honest, I’ve been really wanting to revive the series again, so here it is: new week, new game music. While I originally stuck to only one music per franchise (this series is about introducing the highlighted game to the reader as much as its music), it’s been so long since the last post, I’ll be resetting my past queue and allow myself to revisit some old franchises I’ve already introduced in this blog series. Anyways, where else to start then Dear Esther‘s Ascension, composed by Jessica Curry.

Dead Esther is most well-known for kicking off the often derided Walking Simulator. Despite its criticism, though, I do believe the indie developers, The Chinese Room, answered a genuinely interesting game design question: what happens when the player is given conflicting information while they attempt to progress the story? How will they react when the story contradicts what one observes, and even itself? The game randomly choosing pre-written narration is a central part of the player’s experience as they make an attempt to piece together the clues they’re given. And, at least as a game designer, I find that fascinating.

Dear Esther is available on Steam for Windows and Mac.

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