World's End

Until The End Of The World: Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack
$13.96
Don't great soundtracks usually go hand in hand with great movies? Not in this case. UTEOTW was a rambling flop. It made less than one million dollars in domestic box office! Only time will tell if the re-released and longer (5-hour!) Director's Cut could be an improvement.

But the music is sublime and this is a collection of some of the best artists at the start of the 1990s (writing music for the "future").

Enjoy the music even if you can't enjoy the movie!

The End Of The World
$0.89

The World Ends With You
$19.99
I used to play a lot of RPG but quit for a long time because most RPG games are just repetitive. Most RPG games you just proceed through a linear storyline and a lot of battles are turned base. There's really no fun in most of the gameplay because of the lack of action, but they're cool with special effects from battles. The World Ends With You however is ENTIRELY UNIQUE; there is no close substitute to this game.

Graphics:
- Really fluid motion and great colors to the game.
- The cutscene with the anime characters look smooth and fit into the mood of the game.

Music:
- Really catchy with the mood of the storyline.
- Some are in English and some are in Japanese ;)

Gameplay:
- It's a hack and slash with REALLY REALLY good concept. It doesn't get repetitive at all.
- Each slash you do is automatically determined by how you slashed the DS stick and depending on the pin you have, your attacks and the effects will be different. Ex. if you slash across a Noise (the monsters) you do a physical slash on the Noise, but if you gently hold down to DS stick and move it across the screen, your character will create a wall of fire.
- Pins give you different attacks & there are so many pins you can customize (plus they level up)
- Clothing is really nice because you can customize 4 for each character.
- Food enables you to gain permanent stats (don't worry about messing up the stats because there's a fixed maximum for all the stats anyways).
- The ability for you to change the difficulty to gain more experience and better drop rate deserves a noble prize.
- The dual screen lets your partner character help you fight the Noise (they are the same enemy you fight just on different screen).
- You can choose to control your partner by using the arrow pad while you control the main character with the DS stick. If you choose not to, you can set in the option to have the computer play your partner's character 100%. If you control your partner and go inactive for a few seconds, they will automatically take over for you.
- The accuracy and smoothness of the DS stick is VERY VERY sharp.

Storyline:
- Wow it has a really nice twist.
- Things are NOT as what they appear.
- The story is one of the better ones out there - entirely unique and new plot not seen before in other RPG.

Conclusion:
- Even though the first thing you might notice about this game are the fantastic graphics and music. The REAL revolutionizing factor is the gameplay. That's what you're looking for in the game.

Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End (Widescreen Edition)
$29.99
Complex and dark, as an independent film this is an obvious failure on too many levels to enumerate. Yet as the third part of a tryptich, this is a stunning visual and narrative achievement.

The visual effects -- the "visual achievement" part -- have obviously profited from the technological developments of the years following the first film. There is eye candy galore here and for silly folks like me who love watching things blow up in spectacular and impossible ways, there simply is not enough icy coke and popcorn in the world to ever get tired of watching this multi-layered spectacle.

But the story-telling -- the "narrative achievement" -- is the real jaw dropper. Now, granted, this will not qualify as your over the top, academically significant, shrieking franco-european existential angst driven piece of "important" film making. But there is some very real story telling going on here that (a) takes it for granted that the audience is not stupid (which was a real problem for some movie critics when this was first released into theatres) (b) and as a result, unapologetically spins out multiply interlaced lines of story that collide, interfere, reflect and refract with one another. So confident are the story-tellers that they stampede over our expectations at the end, and do so with such meticulous and merciless care that it works in a way that could not have worked otherwise.

Oh, and as with the first movie in particular, do be sure to stick it out until the end of the credits for the "Easter Egg".