Neo The World Ends With You Reviews

Epitome: Square Enix

Neo: The Globe Ends With You lot is a competent RPG haunted by its predecessor

Newcomers might go lost in Square Enix's follow-up to a xiv-year-old game

Past Jul 26, 2021, xi:00am EDT

What do the games in a series or genre owe to each other? How exercise they inform and build on each other? Afterward playing Neo: The World Ends with Y'all, a reboot-cum-sequel to a critically-acclaimed fourteen-year-one-time Nintendo DS game, this question sits at the forefront for me. Especially since, at least according to the serial' creative producer Tetsuya Nomura, Neo: TWEWY isn't really a sequel to its video game predecessor.

Back in April, Funimation began simulcasting a The World Ends with You anime flavor, 12 episodes designed to tell the get-go game's story and eliminate the need to play the game itself entirely. Inside the space of most v hours, viewers can get all caught upward with the story of Neku Sakuraba and his friends, Shiki, Beat, Rhyme and Joshua, as they all get transported to an alternate, afterlife version of Shibuya, Tokyo chosen the Underground. Trapped in the Underground with no way to reach anyone in reality, Neku and his friends fight a group of supernatural executioners called Reapers for control of their lives and the fate of Shibuya.

I didn't play The Earth Ends with You when it was originally released on the DS, but it's currently available as both a mobile telephone game (which I did play) and as a 2018 Nintendo Switch port. There are elements of the game that are definitely dated — seeing flip phones everywhere is wild, and Neku wears a pair of Bluetooth headphones continued to a mark-shaped MP3 player around his cervix — and these elements are what the anime attempts to modernize, while maintaining the original game's story and bringing its emotional beats to new audiences without all the systems and lore.

As the final episode aired in June, gamers got a chance to play the new game'due south demo on PlayStation 4 and Switch — the ultimate marketing move. That demo rules, by the way — it'south a free, well-nigh-feature-consummate gustation of Neo: TWEWY from the prologue to the finish of in-game Mean solar day 2. Y'all can level your party up to level 15, and your save carries over to the master game.

Paradigm: Square Enix

Is watching the anime necessary to enjoy Neo: TWEWY? No, just information technology does provide some vital context for a lot of the proper nouns the game throws at you lot basically from the start. Otherwise, the beginning of the game focuses on new people in a new situation with new stakes. It doesn't really hold players' hands throughout its form, even though there is a big glossary of terms tucked away inside one of the menus. This ways the game can be confusing, simply there isn't much time to dwell on that at showtime — because Neo: The World Ends with You is an incredibly busy game.

Players take on the role of Rindo Kanade, a teenage Shibuya resident who, along with his friend Tosai "Fret" Furesawa, gets trapped in the Cloak-and-dagger and is cut off from this mortal plane, known as the Realground. Rindo and Fret are forced to team upward and participate, alongside four other teams, in a deadly game chosen the "Reaper's Game," run by literal grim reapers (Shinigami, as the game refers to them in Japanese).

The Reaper's Game sounds easy plenty, if a chip dire, on paper: the team with the most points at the terminate of the 7th day of play wins, and the squad in last place faces erasure from existence. To earn points, teams must complete challenges the Reapers set for them, as well equally erase hordes of Racket, the personification of the turbulent thoughts and emotions of all the people moving through Shibuya. In guild to do all of this, characters are given metal pins called Psych Pins that channel their latent psychic abilities into a bevy of crushing energy attacks and useful passive techniques.

Prototype: Foursquare Enix

As a pair, Rindo and Fret are in way over their heads, but luckily they're joined past Sho Minamimoto, who comes and goes as he pleases and helps them out when he finds it convenient. Minamimoto pushes the pair to find a 4th teammate, college student Nagi Usui, later a couple of days. Rindo, Fret and Nagi become the core of the Wicked Twisters squad and the truthful protagonists of Neo: TWEWY.

The trio is delightful, if a scrap stereotypical, in their roles every bit the whiplashed teens new to the Reaper's Game. Nagi is an otaku and a stan for a gacha game Elegant Strategy and thinks Minamimoto looks like a character she has a vanquish on from the game. Fret is extremely too happy-go-lucky and ever flirting with the leader of the Variabeauties team, Kanon Tachibana. Rindo is repose, withdrawn, and seemingly indecisive to a error, always deferring to others in the grouping whenever something needs to happen. Withal, he loves his friends and will do anything to keep them safe — even going so far every bit to turn back time to do it.

The Wicked Twisters split their time between battles and hanging out in Shibuya. In battles, the barrier betwixt the game'south combat mechanics and full-on push button-mashing is thin. You assign psych pins with different powers and button presses to dissimilar characters. These pins can exist described as "rapid-tap," or projectile, telekinesis, sword and melee attacks; "tap," or bomb- and trap-laying attacks; "charge," which are generally surface area-of-effect attacks that damage a large amount of Noise or other teams at once; and "hold," which includes a variety of attacks and powers ranging from powerful laser beams to healing moves. Putting all of these unlike types of moves into practise can feel like a complex dance at times, and the learning bend to perfecting this dance is fairly steep.

Image: Foursquare Enix

At that place's no control editing outside of assigning characters and pins to particular buttons. In fact, the game does not seem to exist very attainable in general — on Switch, the settings are sparse, with just a single toggle for subtitles, and there seem to be no options related to colorblindness or other visual impairments. I practice non know if this is the case on the PlayStation four version or on the PC release on the Ballsy Games Shop due out later this year. This is a shame in terms of assuasive the almost JRPG fans possible to play the game.

While Neo: TWEWY prefers fast-paced combat to slower fighting styles (you're graded on speed and efficiency), you lot tin mostly play notwithstanding you desire. Sure pin combinations will control the field, preventing enemies from moving and attacking; other pins will practise higher impairment to certain enemies based on elemental type. Each pin has a cooldown rate and an assail limit; reach this limit, and you'll have to expect a certain corporeality of time earlier that graphic symbol can use their psych once again. If you don't put thought into your "pin decks," or sets of dissimilar combinations of pins, you might detect combat starting and stopping a lot, with frequent awkward moments where anybody just stands around waiting for their pins to recharge before returning to the fray. This can have devastating consequences in certain contexts, like boss battles and concatenation fights.

Yous soon learn to rely on the Beatdrop system to apace have enemies out. While individual pins might be powerful enough to defeat enemies on their own, Beatdrops let players link attacks together in wild and flashy combos. If yous tin successfully drop the beat (bring some other character in to assail after staggering an enemy), you earn "Groove," which can be used to execute a massive finishing move on the entire field. Fail to driblet the beat speedily plenty, and you might lose Groove progress instead.

Battles accept place when you "Scan" a part of the metropolis for Racket. They're a bit like random encounters, except you tin can chain multiple encounters together. These "multi-reduction battles" increase the amount of feel both the characters and their pins get, also as increase the likelihood for rare pivot drops and more coin — not to mention less time grinding spent overall. Adding to this effect is the ability to increase the difficulty before combat, which further increases the likelihood of rare pin drops, as well equally the amount of experience points yous go.

Prototype: Square Enix

This difficulty toggle is one instance of how much the game wants you lot to become more powerful. For instance, setting the squad level to one volition bring y'all back to the amount of HP you started the game with while keeping everything else — attack, defense force, etc. — the same, meaning if yous tin can dominate the field, you lot stand up to gain a lot of experience with no real downside. On top of that, at any time yous tin revisit before chapters with weaker enemies who nonetheless driblet loftier EXP, making grinding a breeze. Having problem with a late-game boss, like I did? Become back to week one and grind out some levels while your favorite podcast plays in the background. The one gripe I accept is that if yous get back to a previous chapter, you will have to sit down through all the dialogue in that chapter once more, with no "skip all" button in sight.

The game does a lot to make you lot feel powerful without making you overpowered, and this balance maintains itself regardless of the difficulty setting yous cull. Bosses are still tough as nails on Piece of cake difficulty, but switching to Easy gives y'all only enough of an edge to eke out a victory most of the time. I just as frequently switched the difficulty to Difficult and drained my HP to Level i in social club to max out the amount of EXP I'd earn from gainsay and level up via grinding faster. This is not simply tolerated past the game; it is admittedly encouraged.

Battling isn't all you do. Shibuya is fully 3D and explorable, and the different areas of the city await gorgeous. Despite beingness 3D-rendered spaces, they hold onto the painterly qualities of the 2D backgrounds in the original TWEWY. Shibuya is world-renowned for its food and shopping, and so of course, the game puts these elements front end and centre. Between battles you traipse around the district, encountering a bevy of interesting article of clothing boutiques and restaurants that all make your team more powerful. Eating a character's favorite food provides them with a pocket-sized-yet-permanent boost to their stats; doing this repeatedly might earn good favor with the restaurateur, who will then offering a secret menu detail to y'all with a bigger bonus. (Like other games with food systems, overeating is possible, and it means yous won't be able to eat once more until your hunger meter is completely empty, which only happens when you lot fight.)

Image: Square Enix

Similarly, most of the clothing shops you enter have a combination of clothes and pins that increase your squad's effectiveness via the game's Threads system. They generally receive new shipments every in-game day, so buying clothes constantly is a must. Each item of clothing provides some kind of stat boost to HP, attack or defense, in improver to an active ability that gets unlocked when a item grapheme's style stat reaches a certain bespeak. The higher your style stats beyond the board, the more clothing you'll be able to take full advantage of. The most interesting attribute of Threads is that every graphic symbol tin can wearable basically any commodity of clothing in the game, even if the item's active ability is meant for a particular character, and regardless of the character's gender. The main merchandise-off is that you don't actually run across the characters in outfits other than their main designs, so their utility is basically but for stat tweaking and boxing-preparedness.

In addition to eating, clothes shopping, outfit-planning, and psych pin management, there is one more major organisation: the Social Network. This is a sprawling spider web of connections with various NPCs, including teammates, with Rindo at the eye. Each node is a different person, and attached to each person is a perk that drastically improves your game. Some of the perks are adequately easy to achieve, like "eat at this eating house three times to get a underground menu item," or "accomplish level three affinity with this clothing retailer for new gear."

This is where Fret and Nagi really come in handy. Everyone in the Clandestine has some kind of latent psychic ability, and Rindo's cadre partners have particularly helpful ones. Fret tin can jog anyone'south memories, which can help to solve puzzles, open pathways, and get people to exercise what you lot desire. Nagi tin dive into people's minds, which allows you to battle Noise that have attached themselves to targets' souls. When this happens and yous do well in boxing, you tin earn extra "Friendship Points" to spend on the Network and even unlock new nodes in it.

Image: Foursquare Enix

Other perks are unlocked only past playing through the story, and these include quality-of-life improvements like "Printing B repeatedly to move through Shibuya faster and earn Groove if you can friction match the tempo of the background song." Still other perks are earned through the completion of side quests that kickoff showing upwards after Day 4. Completing these side quests earns you Friendship Points. There's no right or wrong answer to how yous spend your points. By the time credits rolled on my playthrough, merely by playing the game as normal, I had completed two-thirds of my Network.

All of these dissimilar systems are fairly unobtrusive while actually playing the game. I didn't feel like I had to juggle anything or that I was too encumbered by whatsoever detail affair. The game encourages you to discover your comfort zone and doesn't try to cajole you lot out of it very often. Even as characters were added and removed from the Wicked Twisters' roster over the course of the story, I was able to proceed gameplay moving smoothly forth with just a few small adjustments to my pivot deck.

Neo: The World Ends with You is more than an endless series of fights bound together by a bunch of systems, though. Every graphic symbol – protagonist, antagonist and deuteragonist – has quite a fleck to say and do throughout the game, and their relationships to each other grow to be pretty circuitous over time. Dialogue flows pretty naturally, for the most part; these teens are not portrayed as Teens™, there is no overuse of Gen Z (or fifty-fifty Gen 10 or Gen Y) dialogue to drive habitation that Rindo and Fret and Nagi — to say nothing of the many members of the slightly older yet still supposedly hip supporting cast — are Absurd and With It or whatever. Even when a graphic symbol uses a little likewise much slang, it doesn't feel super forced.

Sometimes, some of the characters do feel like the embodiment of archetypes and tropes. For example, the main antagonist of much of the story, a Reaper from Shinjuku named Shiba Miyakaze, can best exist described as simply "a less goofy Maximillion Pegasus, from Yu-Gi-Oh!" Another adversary, Tanzo Kubo, is but bizarro world Columbo. At that place are fashion models and popular idols who human activity, predictably, similar fashion models and pop idols. Sometimes the game feels a fiddling fleck black-and-white in its portrayals of people and depictions of moments, simply everything in its narrative works together really well, creating a world that feels both stylized and relatable.

Image: Foursquare Enix

There are very few fully 3D in-game cutscenes, and about of them are relegated to the very end of the game. Everything else is done in much the aforementioned way as the original game, with characters sharing dialogue in drawn, static panels, nearly like a visual novel. These scenes are fairly long, but a adept chunk of them are voiced, then you're not having to but sit effectually silently reading thousands of lines of text. Takeharu Ishimoto (Kingdom Hearts 3, The Globe Ends with You) returns as the freelance composer of the game's soundtrack, and his tracks serve as a nice, constant background companion as yous play. (The classic rails "Twister" from the original game makes its return here in a neat way, so exist on the lookout for that.)

Mechanically, graphically, from moment to moment, Neo: The World Ends with You is enjoyable, and for many players that's going to be enough. The gameplay hits a sweet spot betwixt deliberate turn-based gainsay and hack-and-slash commotion; information technology almost feels similar to a fighting game like Skullgirls at times. The voice actors sound great, and the writing isn't cringey. It's competently fabricated.

And yet, I felt like Neo: TWEWY badly wants to get out of its own way and exist its ain game, only it merely can't pull it off. Nearly everything in the game is a reference to its predecessor. Sometimes, the game manages to brand this work, similar with the pivot-based battle system and its drastically improved inputs over the touch controls on the mobile and Switch versions of TWEWY. Other times, the game actually wants players to call back what happened in a particular, random moment of the post-game content in The World Ends with Yous: Terminal Remix — content that just wasn't covered in the anime for which Neo: TWEWY is supposed to be the direct sequel, and which Square Enix indicated newcomers to the series should scout to become the lowdown. This trouble only compounds as the game reaches its conclusion.

Epitome: Square Enix

I played the original, so the references landed for me, simply the newcomers the game clearly expects to concenter might struggle. What messes me up is the merits past Nomura that Neo would be a sequel to the anime and non the game. Neo feels much more like a sequel to the Switch port of TWEWY — every bit it should logically be. You can, right now, get back and play The World Ends with Y'all: Final Remix on Switch, and I don't know why Neo is supposed to shy away from that. Ultimately, I think it's a shame that Neo doesn't know whether it wants to be a new thing for new fans or something for Hardcore Players Just.

If you're a fan of the franchise, there'southward a lot here for you specifically. If you're coming in fresh, the game is going to throw a lot of jargon at y'all in a very short corporeality of fourth dimension, and and so information technology'southward going to striking you with references to prior events with which you won't be familiar. You don't need to play the previous game or spotter its anime accommodation, but doing so might aid with context. If none of the narrative stuff interests y'all, there's plenty of in-game stuff to collect: I'm currently working on completing my pin collection, whittling down my Noisepedia and hunting down graffiti (the game's version of achievements). When this game shines, it really shines, even if maybe also much of that shine is refracted by its past.

Neo: The World Ends With Yous will be released July 27 on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, as well as on Windows PC later in 2021. The game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a pre-release download code provided by Square Enix. Vocalism Media has affiliate partnerships. These practise non influence editorial content, though Vocalism Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information near Polygon's ethics policy here .

Neo The World Ends With You Reviews,

Source: https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22592191/neo-the-world-ends-with-you-review-square-enix-nintendo-switch-playstation-4-pc

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