The World Ends With You is a crystal-mind game. I mean it’s a solid rock lodged in my memories, a crystal found on the inside of some geode that leaves any fool that picks it up doing something like staring into an endless hallway of mirrors. It’s good but let’s use the passed tense: I don’t know if it’s good but it was good.

There was a time a few months ago when I really wanted to do this over audio: I think it’s important to capture the sound and texture of The World Ends With You. Released on the Nintendo DS in what feels like must have been 2008 or 2007. I don’t know: I refuse to look it up to make sure. I know in my heart where I was: a teenager with a floor-mattress who bitched and moaned online that nobody I know had the game so I could level up my pins. I complained about this to an affable parent who nodded their head – Twey as people call it didn’t become a game I devoured, it became a game that devoured me.

Putting it on a list somewhere of stuff like “Reading Hunter S. Thompson” or “Getting into Aleister Crowley” that dudes shouldn’t be allowed to do before they turn 25, a cutoff curfew for the second hand embarassment I feel for how much The World Ends With You crawled into me.

When you’re living out in the middle of nowhere and you don’t have your own transportation, Any story that takes place in some kind of metropolitan urban area takes on a kind of heightened, mysterious reality. I experienced the neon-green and dusty yellows of the city in The Matrix so much that I could pick them out on those sparse trips to downtown Big City where I live, a city known for dusty yellows but not neon greens. That smell that rolls off of concrete when a heat-wave cascades down a block and you step out of the A/C for the first time, not used to the noise or the atmosphere or any of it just sticks in you. Makes it easy to pick it out, imagine it any time you want.

The World Ends with You has texture, right? That’s where this is going? There’s a choral noise of crowds that grows to a deafen in busy intersections. Music drifts away in alleyways and back streets. The art style of the game pushes you to not rely so much on a minimap – the streets bend and twist and perspective distorts in ways that push you to where you need to go. It is…let’s list off some phrases here. SEO loves Phrases. Hardware Condusive. Artistically Brilliant. “One Of The Greatest Games of All Time – “ – IGN (actually about metal gear solid)

Art can take us to places we’ve never been, can it do it too early? I didn’t hang out In the city as a teenager (because I was playing the world ends with you) but I got to know the textures, colors and moods of it one little sliver at a time through weekend-trips and stayovers at older, more college aged siblings places. When there’s significantly more in about two blocks of their neighborhood than there is in the entire town you grew up in everything seems daunting and colorful. Late Night trips to closed business parks so one sibling could show you their office became the closest a teenager could touch to the packed sprawl of alleyways and pedestrian lanes that choke the body of neighborhoods below the 104 building.

These little slivers build up until you’ve got a lot of feel-good artistic texture. It can get in someone who doesn’t have the real foundations needed to build on it and set up walls. People who start to see art all around them start to blur the details together, to twist perspective. Everything can’t be beautiful all of the time, everything can’t be brought down to Earth when it’s hard to recognize what the soil underfoot is even called. That’s the story of how The World Ends With You got in me and created fascinations that went nowhere.

The World Ends With You is the story of Neku Sakuraba, a miserable emotional teenager convinced he’s the only one alive who sees the world the way it really is. Closed off and withdrawn by choice – a fear of being known that masquerades as confident stoicism. In Neku’s stiff eyed withdraw from reality, you can hear all of the great literary losers reach cry out in the text and say “Mom died today.” Neku’s a purposeless loser creator, head-over heels with art made by a person called Cat that fills him with a sense of purpose and longing every time he runs across it.

CAT’s gotta be a pretty tough guy, who really can see the ugly ugly people around him for what they are. CAT and Neku have in common the shared belief that any slab of concrete is a potential piece of canvas for expression. You don’t ever see Neku’s art, but he’s a teenager so I bet it kind of sucks and wanders a lot like every piece of art you make as a teenager. Guy wears a hoodie backwards for some reason, he’s like 16 and I bet was texting his friends about how his favorite band was Kriss Kross.

Neku’s status as a stoic loser makes him incredibly easy to dunk on, relate to when he’s the same age as I was when I played it, and kind of fondly regard as one of the few JRPG protagonists that doesn’t really get any redeeming qualities while the story sets him up as the protagonist. Neku plays standoffish smarter-than-you and holier-than-thou right up until the end of the first quarter of the game, with much of his negative personality traits hanging around until late in the game.

The Neighborhood of The World Ends With You is depicted as a cultural, capitalist and artistic paradise: It’s implied that much of the cast treat Shibuya as their wonderland, where their true selves come out and can be expressed for the world to see through music, clothes and art. Neku can’t see the streets for the communities they can create and instead idles in his own artistic paradise: one without real intrigue or comfort, with CAT above all. I wish there was a statement in the game even in subtext about the real gulf between Neku and Hanekoma, but I don’t believe there is.

What is Shibuya? The neighborhood, or the people in it. The Game is a battle for a place existing at all. If the person referred to as a The Composer wins, it’s thought that the existence of wherever The Game is being played will vanish forever, as if it never existed at all. It’s a battle for the soul of a place, and winning that battle is dependent on Neku managing to overcome his hate for other people. That’s not me riffing on the plot, no, that’s details explicitly confirmed in the last quarter of the game. For the people who won’t ever play it, yes it is a conclusion you can see a mile away but it’s the journey, right?

Shibuya isn’t stores. It’s not late night parking garages. Our memories keep a place alive, and when those memories fade with time we hold onto the still-living and breathing concrete curing under our feet. Places and storefronts will change, the soul moves on. Gentrifiers move in and cause the worst pain of all: knowing the place can no longer hold the outcasts or even people that lived there before.

Neku’s journey through Shibuya is painted with chance meetings and conversations, meetings that later become tradition and conversations that become stories starting with “Remember when.”

They’re all running through the streets right now.

Hanekoma, also called Mr. H. but who we know is the eponymous CAT I mentioned earlier stands apart from all of this. He’s got an angels investment in the soul of the city, even from his back alley coffee shop he invests himself into. Hanekoma is no longer wandering the streets of the city, even as he’s created a nest he can call home. There is a desperate hope in the story of The World Ends With You that Neku can further grow as he learns to love other people and turn into the type of man he doesn’t even know he’s really looking up to.

We’ll never get that game, because even a true darling videogame is still afraid to let a character get old, to have a protagonist with some years under their belt. I can’t return to the Shibuya of my dreams because I’ve gotten older, I’d be remiss to paint over all of Neku’s chance meetings with new meanings.

I lament the way the world turned out. Just when it felt like the world was reaching out, this fucking disease hits and takes it all away. I have conversations over a keyboard now with others about how we feel cheated. The losers of fiction, scribbling away at our artistic statements on digital underpasses where the concrete doesn’t stink like the city and everything is just a little too temporary.

The world’s selling us a future that takes place inside the home, all of the freedom of the digital age un-locked beneath our fingertips.

Mr. Miracle was released in 2017. The forward by Tom King, DC’s comics chief CIA connected creative who killed people but at least has the decency to write about how killing people leaves you a fucked up guy, talks about how the events of the 2016 election changed him. Big deal, Tom, get the fuck over it.

Scott Free is going crazy. Scott Free doesn’t know if he even wants this life of Superheroes and Intergalactic war anymore, asking the question that anyone sane who’s seen armed service asks: Is any of this, any of it at all worth it? He’s married to a woman twice his height who matches his loathing with love, understanding, and being extremely pissed off. Scott Free is also a short-king, a phrase you should try using around your friends in-real life

He tries to escape a box, and the box is life. We’re introduced to Scott Free with his wrists cut open, bleeding a mess of painted blood all over the ink of the ceramic floor. Scott’s whole life will be stuck in a four-walled box as long as he lives. Shibuya’s no more real than it is fake, than it is on a tiny piece of plastic with three sides and one delineated by the metal prongs where it comes to life when I need it to.

Big Barda, the woman of Scott’s dreams and the one present for the nightmare is trying to tell him something. Let’s change the bathroom. Knock a few walls in the condo down. Scott’s insistent that he likes the open-space of the California condo floor plan.

Scott Free grew up in a prison. A four by five box on a world ravaged by fire. A world so closed off that he says it taught him to know that he liked space. An almost implicit rejection of the pain and suffering he knew. I need this. I need it to be free.

Barda reminds him if you’re still basing your life on what the box taught you, you’re still in the prison.

Neku dies, that’s the big twist of The World Ends With You. Well, it’s the setup: The Whole reason the boy is even trapped in The Reapers Game is because he was a little too lonely, a little too naive, a little too easy to see. Someone marks him as perfect to see if there’s really a soul in Shibuya at all, and he ends up bleeding from a gunshot at a teen age.

We’re holding on to hoping things get back to normal. We want the box. We want to go back to a happy, normal life, forgetting everything we’ve learned about ourselves. Mark my fucking hand with a timer for seven days and make me do it all over again as much as you want, that’s what I’m asking for. Begging. I’m not the only one either.

I think Hanekoma is the reason I’d ever go back to play the god damned game again. Like the little nuggets of hollow aphorisms people who read too much YA novels adopt to get through the hardship of life, I can still recall a chipped and crust covered Nintendo DS speaker chiming to life with a “Yo!”

“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.” There’s a sense the guy has had it all, or little bits of it. Little slivers of dialogue paint him as a guy done running through the streets late at night. Good mentor figures need a little of that world-weary wisdom few people are lucky enough to actually hear in real life. Not the nuggets of truth your parents dispense to you as a kid, not the things you hear in books or interviews. Not the kind of knowledge that comes with a source tag attached.

By the end of the game we’ve saved the soul of Shibuya. Proved what it really means to people – that even if we don’t think someone else’s life has meaning that we’ll never know just how much they contribute. Neku stops looking so deep inside himself it starts to curdle his blood. They don’t meet back up with all of their friends in the end of the game. Some people aren’t going to be along for the ride.

I want to know what happens still. In ways that all of the sequels and spin offs that will be made will never entirely satisfy. I’ve been so hungry to have a mentor my whole life I read into these characters like Mr. H all of the ways I’ve seen myself broken and miserable. I lament about this god damned fucking pandemic and what it’s took from everyone. All I want is to return to the box I had before.

Neku and the cast of the game will grow up. There’s a sequel to The World Ends With You that is recursive in the ways all of these big JRPG franchises can kind of become after awhile. Neku shows back up eventually – older, but still playing The Reapers Game. He hasn’t changed much at all, it would seem – returning to the real world was just a conclusion that wont happen. I don’t stick around the ending, where it gets all metaphysical as if being talked down to. At some point, some of the people making these games stopped getting to be the people running through streets.

I thought about going back to Shibuya for one last go. The nourishing comfort of pleasant memories, the warm blanket of nostalgia. There’s always an avalanche of The New to catch up with, and videogames are sparsely an easy medium to pick back up in an afternoon like a comic book. In the pages of Mister Miracle I see new meanings bleeding out of the ink, but The World Ends With You is locked in a palace not entirely of my own design.

There’s a real life, world famous analogue to the 104 building that dominates the skyline in the game, it’s called the 109 building. There are likely copyright reasons they couldn’t use the real logo, that ocean of copyright law that seperates the United States and Japan. Is it enough to keep me away? What the hell does it even mean to stand on that street? Is that the next hope of the videogame vagabonds – let’s visit Kamurucho and Shibuya and be tourists forever.

Neku, Mr. H, the Reapers Game, it’ll never be real I tell myself.
I cry out “I’m Never Coming Home” with the crack in my voice like a certain folk punk singer, putting enough stress on my vocal chords to make it feel like the truth. Sometimes it seems like I need to remind myself the most important thing of all.

The World Ends With You.