NEO: The World Ends With You

I first played the original The World Ends With You through its Switch-reworking. Back then, TWEWY had basically become an artifact of a very specific time: it had a very contemporary setting of fashion-hip Shibuya, with themes of modern life loneliness at the advent of phones. It was a peek into a time when anime was growing but not yet really mainstream, and all the little gems could be found on the DS.

Then, the unlikely sequel came in a changed world. Now, the game is competing with anime and RPGs being more mainstream, experimental games are dime a dozen on even the Playstation 4 store thanks to indies, and even Kingdom Hearts 3 looks like a big budget Pixar movie. In this atmosphere, Neo The World Ends With You tries to go big while also trying to stay true to its own idiosyncrasies, and the result is a game out of time.

The game puts its best feet forward thanks to the great basic combat loop, translating the iconic fast-paced and unique pin gameplay. You now play as a party instead of two characters, and instead of touch screen controls use your normal controller to (rapid)-tap, hold or single-press a button to activate a pin, each pin getting assigned to one input (with the exception of the B-button being reserved for dodging, the L-stick for moving and the R-stick for locking onto an enemy). Complementing this setup, and enabling the theme of teamwork cooperation, is the combo system: successfully attacking with one character eventually pops up a short combo timer, and if you attack with another character, you build up a combo percentage. Hit hundred-percentiles, and you can launch a strong combo attack. It's a satisfying flow that keeps combat fast paced, especially once you find pins that work well together.

Unfortunately, it is the meta-game that stretches this fun gameplay into an odious loop. If you get good at the game, you’ll quickly run into limitations: pins get stronger by levelling them up, but there’s a cap on how many levels they can gain (including levels via evolution) and after that they don’t get stronger. Thus, you’ll need to swap them out for pins with a higher base power on level one. Unfortunately, they will run out and be replaced by Uber-pins, which you can only equip one (or two) of at a time. So, while this meta-system encourages you to experiment by swapping out pins constantly in order to level them up, eventually you will run out of fun pins to swap.

It is emblematic of NEO: TWEWY’s ethos of taking everything unique it can from the original and stretching it to its breaking point. You’ll quickly grow tired of the return of Shibuya, as the glacial pacing of the story means you’ll be revisiting the same streets over and over again, punctuated by the inclusion of a bare-bones time travel mechanic, making you even replay parts of the mission again and again.

Add in a story that in the middle is blatantly padded and often forgets about the new characters in favour of its lore/politicking, a massive need to grind for the best items to unlock, and a chain-encounter mechanic that just begs you to balloon the playtime even further, and the magic of the original quickly evaporates behind this extremely mixed experience. NEO: The World Ends With You proves that certain great things were lightning caught in a bottle, and it would be folly to try to bank on these wonders.

Gameplay is on par with the original, but the story drops the ball. The new music isn't as great, either. Story spoilers in supplement. Gameplay wise, the combat is still plenty fun, and they obviously tried their hardest to replicate the frantic, multi-focus feel of the original games combat. The combat does end up feeling different however, with the higher focus on comboing your pins together. This can lead to some very fun Pin combinations, and deck building is fun in and of itself. Overall, still a great game with decent music. I just can't help to feel slightly bitter when I look back on it.

I would recommend Neo to anyone who liked Twewy. Mechanically it kind of rides the coattails of the first game and doesn't introduce much rather than reworking the pin combat to be party based. It's still fun though. The main character is a cardboard cut-out and quite literally the least interesting person in the entire game, plus his character arc is nonexistant, so yeah that's a bummer. The plot is slow to heat up but once you get past the first week (spoiler) it starts to get really interesting. The soundtrack is a lot of buttrock and goofy Japanese hip hop as expected, but it really grew on me. Performance-wise I played the Switch version and there was a lot of slowdown when I used all my pins at once, plus the load times were a tad slow. Plus there were some ugly jaggies but this is mostly alleviated in docked mode. Still perfectlty playable but go for the PS4 version. There's way too much fucking dialog and all of it is delivered through the manga-like speech bubbles. It's not a big deal but after a major fight it feels anticlimactic to see the aftermath via text and character portraits instead of cutscenes. Anyway it's not as good as the first Twewy but it's still a worthy followup. Just brush up on the plot of the first game before you dive in.