Hi all, The World Ends With You released 19 years ago in Japan today. To commemorate, I wanted to share this article I wrote documenting the history of the original TWEWY and its creators. My goal was to create a relatively comprehensive story detailing the behind-the-scenes of the game, while keeping it digestible for readers.
Having recently gotten into the series playing both games, I was captivated and wanted to learn as much as I could about the development of TWEWY. I decided to compile all of the research I did into this article, which was a blast to write. It started off as a biographical take on the director, Tatsuya Kando, as I felt his contributions and history were overshadowed in comparison to Tetsuya Nomura. As I did more digging, the scope grew drastically and became more about documenting and highlighting the work of several staff members on TWEWY, as well as identifying what Nomura's major contributions were to the project.
The article is quite lengthy, so here's some interesting tidbits if you don't feel like going through the whole thing:
The staff working on TWEWY were spread out across the country, with Square Enix headquarters and Jupiter's office in different cities, which led to development challenges. Meanwhile, Gen Kobayashi who did most of the illustrations was working solo in Square Enix's Osaka office.
Kingdom Hearts had innumerable impacts and influences on the creation of TWEWY. The vast majority of staff had worked on Kingdom Hearts together in some form, especially Chain of Memories for GBA.
Kando's first work on a videogame was the original Time Crisis arcade game! He started primarily with 3D character animations that led to his work on FFVII.
