I can understand why the novel didn’t want to skip over stages like some of the Kingdom Hearts novels do, but surely there was something that could have been done to avoid making so much of the story identical. (Seriously, The World Ends With You parallels are blatantly obvious, including using clothing as power.) While I like that game, Balan Wonderworld: Maestro of Mystery, Theatre of Wonders simply has too many characters and too short of chapters to come anywhere close to level of that game’s story. That means the loner is forced to interact with everyone as he undergoes Neku-like character development. Of course, they do anyway, and there’s a reason why Streetbeat only sees Balan and Fighter in his visions. ” Oh, and Streetbeat occasionally notices there’s something odd about the amusement park, nature area, or whatever stage he’s at while Lance advises everyone to not dig deeper. I’m worried, so I will/will not join you as we go to meet. For the rest of the chapter, it’s just visiting some sort of themed area with a, “My name is, and yes, I have visions of Fighter, Balan, and. Not only that, but she, like Streetbeat, has had visions involving a young lady named Fighter and a mysterious man known as Balan. So he’s surprised when one day a girl named Clocktower Kid randomly shows up, and she informs Streetbeat there are other stages and masters like them. But Streetbeat doesn’t need friends, and he’s content just dancing away and ignoring the shadowy Negati who are only interested in the shining droplets that are found all over. He has control over its design, which he learned from a man named Lance. Streetbeat, the main character, lives in a strange area called a stage. Most of the novel’s four chapters is the same event duplicated eleven more times, just with Streetbeat encountering a different character. This novel, however, is more than just the usual adventure story monotony. Those games, like most adventure stories, follow a similar pattern: the hero(es) go to a new area, get involved in some sort of incident, and then move on. At times, with the justified alignment, you can’t tell at a glance if the next line’s quotation marks represent someone continuing their thoughts or a new character speaking.Īnyway, this being based on a Square Enix game, here’s the simplest way to describe the story: The World Ends With You splashed with Kingdom Hearts. But having no indents is just so visually unappealing and not reader-friendly.
Just…why? It’s true there are breaks since each of the four chapters are divided into sections roughly three pages long, and there are the occasional old-school-style monochrome sketches.