The DS has been home to plenty of decent adventure/RPG titles over the years, with Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 3 remake leading the way for portable questing on Ninty’s little dual-screen handheld. The World Ends With You (and if you think I am typing the whole title out all the time then you’re in for disappointment) is Square’s latest portable effort, making full use of the stylus and two screens on offer to it to create something… well, something really quite different.

Initial hopes for TWEWY aren’t particularly raised upon discovering that the lead character of the game, a young Japanese chap by the name of Neku, is about as grating as having your fingernails removed by a spoon. Any character whose first few words include ’Outta my face!’ ‘Just go the hell away’ and ‘I don’t get people’ isn’t someone you’d expect to flatten you with their wonderful charisma at any stage through the game, and the slightly annoying female companion he gets lumped in with – Shiki, in case you wondered – is obviously the bubbly, fashion-mad comic relief partner chucked in to balance it all out. Hum.

Luckily, things then surprise you and go on to be quite good. The story kicks off with Neku blacking out and waking up in a place in Tokyo where all the cool kids hang out, except no one can seemingly see him anymore. Through a sequence of events he finds that he is now inside some kind of bizarre virtual reality game whereby players are sent missions to clear an area of Noise – i.e. monsters - and have to complete them within a certain time limit to avoid being ‘erased’, and with Shiki at his side he sets off in an attempt to survive the week, beat the game and save the both of them.

The way in which you are expected to do this is pretty much thrown in your face as soon as the cursory story introductions are over, and it’s not something that you’re going to take to like a duck to water. The combat system that TWEWY throws your way is the gaming equivalent of trying to balance on a pogo stick and do an amusing card trick at the same time, with the bottom screen seeing you guiding Neku around and slashing and scrapping away with the stylus, and the top screen having you press the D-pad in various button combinations to have Shiki fire out some kind of monster-bashing offence.

How well you get on with this is purely down to how perseverant you are as an individual, of course, but it’s certainly fair to assume that TWEWY’s battle system is so much to take in at relatively short notice that it could seriously affect plenty of gamers’ ability to slog through and come out the other end. I constantly bang on about the need for developers to make good use of the DS and its quirks and to be fair Square Enix have tried to do just that by having you not only concentrate on the two screens but also the buttons and touch-sensitive screen at the same time, but there are times when ambition does perhaps get in the way of sensible gameplay decisions, and this one is it.

That’s not to say that there aren’t ways to ease the problem, mind. Throughout the game Neku collects little pin badges that change his attack properties and give him beneficial status effects, and adding to your burgeoning collection so that you can assign a few of them in different combinations becomes curiously addictive the further you plough into the adventure. An additional quirk is that you can wear different outfits and styles as you travel around the painfully hip (blimey, I sound old saying that) Shibuya district, and wearing stuff that’s in fashion in a particular location will give you bonuses for combat to help grease the gears of combat. On the flip side, wearing something out of fashion (sadly not including options such as socks and sandals, shell suits and polo neck sweaters) will harm your stats, and thus swapping into the right clothes for the right occasion becomes a rather crucial gameplay technique.

Another potential godsend for players is the ability to set your partner to automatic control, thus allowing them to focus on what Neku is doing on the bottom screen. The best bit about this is that the AI does a pretty fine job indeed of looking after itself should you wish it to and thus players who don’t want the hassle of juggling two different combat systems needn’t weigh themselves down with it. It’s my personal opinion that the dual combat option reaps dividends and is a more effective battle tool as well as being rather rewarding to practice through, but the option to not have it is there in any case and it works.

Thus, it’s hard to really castigate TWEWY for the multi-tasking confusion that it throws at you, although it is most certainly a minus point and one to be taken into account. Giving it a bit of time and patience pays off no end, and soon you’ll be busy pondering combinations of different pin badges and clothes to give you the added edge. For something that starts off as if the developers wanted to punch you in the face repeatedly it quickly becomes really quite addictive.

This is helped a heck of a lot by the game having not only a unique visual style that harks back to Jet Set Radio, but also a story that moves on from the initial rather wretched emo posturing and becomes rather moving and very enjoyable, with twists and turns aplenty. It certainly puts the floating, ponderous story of Final Fantasy XII to shame, and there are plenty of moments throughout where you’ll actually feel like pausing the game just to take in the latest plot development that you’ve uncovered. Score one for the little consoles getting one over their bigger, more expensive brothers!

In a way, The World Ends With You feels, upon completion, rather like I look back at my school days. The initial sections with the combat system were tricky and for a while I gave up on the thing and left it to the AI, but after a while I put in a bit more effort and it was well worth it when the whole thing came to an end. I might be complicated at times and start with a none-too-impressive lead character moaning on about pretty much everything, but progression really does make sense of it. Give it a bit of time and a lot of love and you’ll be sure to reap those benefits as well.