The first thing that's instantly noticeable about the game is it's visual style, the game is set in Shibuya, which is an area of Tokyo that's crazy obsessed with shopping and fashion, and this really gives the game a great canvas on which to paint. As you walk around the city, you'll notice different areas have different styles, you'll notice buildings fly past in the background. The character design is equally impressive, and the designs definitely highlight the character's personality. All in all, this game looks like a manga comic, an incredibly well drawn manga comic.

The thing you'll likely hear the most buzz about it the battle system, indeed, the battle system is this game is fun, addictive, challenging and completely original. The main way of controlling is the stylus, on the bottom screen you move Neku around by pressing near him, your attacks are determined by the pins you're wearing. Pins are collected throughout the game, and each one holds it's own move, can be leveled up, and some of them can even evolve into better pins. Some pins might fire a bullet in any direction you tap the stylus, some might make a trail of fire when you drag the stylus over enemies, there are loads to choose from. This game has what I call the "Pokemon factor", meaning that, even after you've completed it, you'll keep playing to collect more pins.

Another interesting element to the battles is that both screens are used. On the top screen, your partner will fight the same enemies as you do on the bottom screen, and you control him/her with the D-Pad (or A,B,Y,X buttons if you're a lefty). You use the buttons to navigate a combo map, which means that by choosing good combinations of numbers and stuff like that, you'll do better in the battle. A light disk passes between the two characters on the two screens, and when it's on a character, that character must then perform a certain amount of attack damage before the disk is transferred. Once it's been passed enough, you get some kind of super move, which will temporarily stop gameplay to do some crazy effects and kill a load of monsters. This confusing battle system quickly becomes second nature, and it's more exciting than sitting there watching your character fight for you.

The game has a lot of traditional RPG elements, used in modern ways. For example, clothes take the place of amour. Each area of Shibuya has a brand chart, and you'll get powered up or down depending on how popular the brand of the clothes you're wearing or the pins you're using are. You can also boost your stats by eating food, and this is digested during battles.

One of my favorite features is the level slider. Your characters level up as the game progresses, but you can purposefully reduce their level to gain more pin drops. The lower your level is from your maximum level, the more pins the enemies you fight will drop, so you'll have cooler moves and more money. This let's you fine tune the game's difficulty for yourself, and rewards you for it. Brilliant.

Another thing you can do is chain battles together. You'll never run into a random encounter on this game, you always choose when to fight. You can select more than one battle at once, so for example, you could chain four together. You would complete these battles one after the other with the same HP bar, and the more you chain, the more pins and PP (that's EXP) you will get from the battles. This game even manages to make grinding fun.

When you start up the game, you will get PP for all the time you weren't playing the game! That's pretty crazy, but pretty awesome. It means you needn't feel bad about not being able to play it every hour of every day, because you will still be compensated. Of course you'll always make more PP by actually grinding a bit, but this is a good feature. Also there's mingle mode, which is one of those things where you set your DS up to look for other DS's with the same game in and trade data. I personally think this feature is stupid because you're very unlikely to run into anybody else playing the same game, with their DS in mingle mode in their pocket. On the bright side, you will get points for finding two DS's playing against each other, any game, and you also get "alien" signals, I have no idea what they are. Either way, it's a useless feature, but it's nice that it's there.

There's some really good game music out there, but this is one of the few games I've played the the music would be awesome outside of the game. The soundtrack sounds very street, very modern. It's got some rock, some rap, some electronica, it's all very good stuff. It's so good that I actually bought the soundtrack to the game. Call me sad! The theme tune is one of the best I've heard in ages. That's the English version of Twister by the way.

And of course, the story of this game is really really really good. Be prepared for a lot of reading, and a lot of pointing out the obvious, but the story is so gripping that you won't mind.

All in all, this is one of the most original, and one of the best DS games out there. I'm sure that anyone, even non-RPG fans, will love this game. It's highly recommended.