Do you recognize both of the characters in this picture? If you don’t, you’ve done yourself a great disservice as far as gaming story telling is concerned, and that’s just if you don’t recognize one of them. I’m going to go ahead and assume that if you missed one of the two(I really hope you didn’t miss both), it’s the kid in purple. That, my friends, is Neku Sakuraba, protagonist in the fantastic Nintendo DS game The World Ends With You.
The game is an RPG released many years ago, made by the same team that created the original Kingdom Hearts. It holds an interesting concept: You are dead, and you have a week to play a “game” against other dead people. If you win, you come back to life. Simple enough right? It never is. This game has many twists, turns, and has some of the most unique gameplay ever in any platform. In case you can’t tell, I love this game. I will give you all a solid write-up on it soon, but for now, let’s focus on where that image is from.
This is from Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance. This is one of the games we’ve all been waiting for. It actually continues the story after Kingdom Hearts 2, so we’re making our way to Kingdom Hearts 3. The story is that both Sora and Riku must take the Mark of Mastery exam, which is related to their ability with the Keyblade. The Keyhole of Sleep is opened, and they both must go through different worlds and from the looks of it, time frames, to get back to the beginning and pass their exam. They talk about the Dream Eaters, and how they are instrumental to all this. Needless to say, there’s still lots for us to learn, but I can’t wait to get my hands on this. It will release this year for the Nintendo 3DS.