Final Fantasy VI‘s Kefka and
Radiant Historia‘s Heiss, antagonists who wanted godly power to either destroy the world or remake it entirely. Before playing the mobile port of 2009’s
The World Ends with You and encountering the character Joshua, I might’ve believed that it wasn’t possible for a character to both embody and subvert the “kill the God” trope in JRPGs.
Then again,
The World Ends with You isn’t a traditional JRPG. For one thing, it’s heavily inspired by the contemporary setting of Shibuya, a district of Tokyo, Japan. Not to mention the game is actually set in a parallel version of Shibuya, called the Underground (or UG for short). The game’s protagonist, anti-social teen Neku Sakuraba, awakens in the UG with no memory and is forced to survive a week as a Player in the Reapers’ Game with his first game partner, Shiki Misaki. Joshua comes into the picture as Neku’s second partner when Neku is forced to play another week.