As mentioned earlier, your partner the other character on the top screen can be set to auto if you don’t feel like dashing your eyes between the two screens but, the controls aren’t really that complex. The game covers both left and right handed users and what happens is, whenever you press a button either on the D-Pad or XYAB, a “Combo Map” with arrows appears. You can then follow these arrows and execute combo hits. To make things more fun, you can try and get the right cards that you get to see temporarily on along the top of screen. Once you have enough of these cards, you can make your two characters execute a powerful attack that covers both screens. It’s kind of like a limit break that you see in a lot of RPGs.


Pick the right cards on the top screen and pull off powerful specials like this.

Another thing that makes the “Cross Slide” battle system interesting is that you “Neku” and your partner share the same HP bar that stretches across both screens. So, if your partner just happens to be having a hard time on the top screen, you could find yourself dying unexpectedly because you’re too busy eyeing both screens. The good news is, you both fight the same enemies and their HP is also linked. Thus it’s usually a good idea to aim for the same enemy on both screens.

The action can get intense with the number of enemies you can have on the screen at once which is what makes battles pretty fun. I didn’t use to mind about random encounters but with RPGs becoming more complex than they used to be, it’s not just about surprise encounters anymore so I’m not a fan of titles that still use them. Fortunately in WW, you can choose when to fight Noise (apart from events of course) by entering “Scan” mode and tapping on the various symbols that appear. You can even chain battles for better rewards and because your remaining HP gets carried over to the next battle, the overall challenge is a little greater too.


No random encounters. You pick when to fight the Noise.

The problem I have is with the controls. Both moving around and attacking on the bottom screen are performed using the stylus so a lot of times Neku doesn’t perform the right actions. It can be frustrating when you’re trying to dodge attacks or falling objects and all Neku does is stand there showing off his moves. The top screen doesn’t suffer the same problem because basically, you’re just using the arrow keys to tell your partner which direction to attack in. However because of this, most of the time you’re just bashing the left or right button which makes the whole idea of playing two battles simultaneously just a little less exciting.

Outside of battles, you’ve got the whole bustling Shibuya area replicated before your eyes free for exploring. You can “speak” to people or scan their minds to gather information and move on with the story. There’s a fair bit of “quests” involved in the game. Most of the time there are Death Gods blocking access to an area and you’ll have to follow their instructions before you can move to a new area. It’s nothing hard though because most of the time they just tell you to defeat certain Noise monsters or collect certain badges. There are also of course, the main story objectives which require a little more work such as figuring out the right “keywords” to use or answering a quiz.


Remind the guy what he forgot to buy using the right keyword.

For the RPG veterans out there or those who have played MMORPGs, I’m sure you’ve been through quests where you got very frustrated because of an outrageously low drop rate. Well in WW, you’ll be glad to know you can actually adjust the drop rate freely but at the expense of lowering your character’s level. It’s a fair enough trade off and gets those “obtain so many items” quests done quickly or if you just want to save up cash.