The World Ends with You is a DS game from the late aughts that converted me from an edgy, angsty teenager into a teenager hoping for some greater empathetic purpose in life. If you're an adult, I'm not going to tell you the plot will have the same effect on you. In fact, the whole story is kind of all over the place. But bad? Nah. It had a really unconventional control scheme that set it apart from a lot of the shovelware and other half-assed trash that the DS library now carries around as its legacy. The characters are memorable, the theming is consistent, the art style is beautiful, and the soundtrack glues all of those things together tremendously. So a sequel came out a few weeks ago and I was really excited to play it. It's called "NEO: The World Ends with You", not to ever in a million years be confused with "The World Ends with You". Unfortunately, I wanted it on disc and have an original PS4 so I can fuck myself.
My PS4 has been having disc issues for a while. For those fortunate to be unaware of this, Sony thought it would be a fucking great, future-proof idea to make the power and eject buttons on the PS4 touch-sensitive. There's also a weird rubber piece where the eject button is that's supposed to like... protect it from dust or something? The problem is that whoever thought that was a good idea has to be dead now because there's no way they can be this stupid and survive day-to-day life for this long. Rubber expands when exposed to a certain amount of heat. Like, for instance, a compact computer with a big-ass fan attached to it because running itself makes it so fucking hot. As such, a lot of people, myself included had the issue where the expanding rubber starts fucking with the eject button, usually hitting said button repeatedly. I had this issue and decided "alright, fine, I'll take it out" which is something a lot of people have been doing to fix the issue. For me, it worked for a few months to a year. This is it for a lot of people, more or less. For some people who I guess professionally run under ladders, this doesn't fix the issue and the button is still just fucked anyway for no conceivable reason. I'm one of those. If I keep the PS4 unplugged and stash it away somewhere else for a long time and then plug it back in, it works pretty consistently. For a bit.
I streamed NEO: TWEWY for roughly 7 hours the day after it came out (I pre-ordered it like a sucker and got shafted, having to wait a day for a fucking pre-order and the pre-order bonuses didn't even work, so if you haven't noticed yet, this whole experience has been a shitshow overall). Seemed fine. Streamed it again for about 2 hours a day or two later. No issues. Played it in bed for a few days and then bam! It spat out the disk at the end of a 5-fight enemy wave. Right at the end! So I'm trying to look up ways to just get the disk license and iso onto my PS4 for it to just be playable. If you look into it, all the disc basically fucking ends up being is a license anyway. If they're just going to treat it as a collector's item and security pass anyway, then why the fuck can I not just easily save said license and play the game without the disc now that I have objectively proven that I purchased the game for myself. That's a rant for another day and for someone who knows way more about this kinda thing than I do. I could not fucking figure it out. Ripping PS3 discs for emulation is pretty fucking easy, it's the emulation itself that's tricky. Ripping PS4 discs so you can take the disc's contents and use them on the intended hardware requires knowing how to use fucking Ubuntu! Yep! So I hope to figure that out one day but I tried for like 2-3 hours yesterday to no fucking avail.
Anyway, for the whopping total of fewer than 20 hours I did put into the game, would I recommend it to other people? Yeah. Not "YYYEAHHH!!!!" but "yeah".
Let's be clear: I didn't see the announcement for the sequel and think "oh, this game is going to be great and I'm going to love it just as much as I did the first game". I was cautiously optimistic because a lot of the original development team, including the composer, were returning. Still, Square Enix has been up to some weird bullshit for a long time now and no matter how cool h.a.n.d. might be, Square Enix still has their grubby claws on this thing. I was curious how they were going to implement controlling multiple characters at once and how a fully 3D environment would affect the overworld and combat. So I was a lot more excited to see, for better or worse, what they were going to do with the game more than I was excited about the actual game. Now having played it, I can't say a lot is improved but there isn't a whole lot about it that is much worse if that makes sense.
I think chaining noise together is a lot more irritating in this one and I think, if we're not going to consider the plot here for a sec, this is the thing they fucked up the most in comparison to the original game. This is especially annoying because it isn't the biggest deal until you start figuring out how to get bigger rewards and feel comfortable gambling with big waves of enemies for item drops in the first game. It feels like a lot more of a gradual process and was a lot more daunting. I think I spent the vast majority of my time playing NEO at a lower level. For those who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, this is how TWEWY's leveling system works. Like any other action RPG, enemies come at you in waves or with just one big motherfucker of a boss, or in the case of TWEWY, often two big motherfuckers of bosses and depending on the semantics of the planar rules of the original DS game, you could say four big motherfuckers. Each has their own exp. yield but you can multiply how much that is based on two factors. One is your difficulty, which you can change at pretty much any point in the game. So Easy mode gives you less exp. but the fights are a lot easier to manage. Normal is pretty standard though in the case of the original TWEWY, still decently challenging without being overwhelming. The difficulty curve in that game I remember being pretty solid but keep in mind, it has been about three years since I last played it. Hard and Very Hard give you more exp., so much so that Very Hard is a post-game unlock. Each enemy also has a drop rate for each difficulty and that's not just by percentage. The item the enemy normally drops might not drop at all on Very Hard but a much rarer pin might drop instead. This gives the original game a lot of longevity and reasons to come back to goomba-esque encounters post-game without feeling like a complete chore. TWEWY didn't work with random encounters though. You had to scan for encounter symbols floating around the city and drag them to Neku on the touch screen. This makes the encounters harder on top of the fact that you have to beat all of them one after the other. However, this gives you huge multipliers and sometimes this is the only way to guarantee rare pin-drops or even come close.
NEO - "The Matrix", okay cool I acknowledged it, I'm referring to the sequel as "NEO" for the rest of this rant and if you can't pull your head out 1999's ass, that's on you from this point forward. Though I can't blame you, it's a good movie. NEO doesn't do this too much differently except the other difficulties are locked off by this weird social network thing that I'll probably get to in a minute. That's really not terrible just something I found odd in comparison. The amount of encounters you can have is maxed out at 5. I'm sure there's a thing you can get later that either raises the cap or uncaps it. I'm not really sure what the point of this was. I guess it was not to make players overpowered as fuck during their first run of the story missions but also like, if I can stomach it, maybe just let me do it? On top of that, and maybe this is just me, I feel like the combat of NEO is significantly easier than TWEWY. So in both games, your max level is raised by exp. points (no duh, right?). In this game, you can lower your level to fight waves. This makes the fights riskier but also boost that drop and experience multiplier even more. In TWEWY, this ranged from a worthy challenge and a gauge to see how personally good you're getting at the combat to a one-hit-and-you're-dead nightmare. Even on max level, some of the late-game and post-game fights are challenging and if you want those pin drops, you have to play them on higher difficulties with your level reduced. In NEO, I felt like this pretty much just comes down to what you personally think you can handle. NEO is a lot more of a hack-and-slash. Each character in your party is respectively attached to whatever pin you have and that pin is forever set to a button. This makes the controls kind of awkward over time but your damage output becomes so high so early that it barely matters. Once I tried lowering my level, I basically only went back to max if I wanted to absolutely secure victory in a fight without dropping down to Easy. I think I did this twice at most. I was playing at half of my max level or less and just slaughtering everything. At first, you might think it's because I had so much experience with the last game but I haven't played that in years and the combat of these two games are almost nothing alike. So I think they really dumbed this down for newcomers, which I guess is fine. I think they went a little too dumb.
The social network is another example of Square Enix's boner for making weird menus that are just a skill tree that's harder to navigate than a run-of-the-mill skill tree. No, I'm not trying to make another movie reference. In the case of NEO, I think it's fine. Difficult to navigate for sure but not so difficult to read and figure out. It's pretty straightforward and doesn't affect the core gameplay enough to be a downside anyway. I think it adds to some of the theming of the game thus far and it's a clever way of combining the convoluted web of character connections that a lot of games have an obnoxious-looking menu for with the tried-and-true skill tree used by thousands of RPGs for decades.
I shouldn't really judge the story but I will say that the cast of characters in TWEWY is portrayed better than in NEO. I'm not talking about the voice-acting, just the way they're carried in the plot. I was intrigued by Neku and Shiki almost immediately. There was enough mystique behind Shiki and the main struggle to also make every other character a welcome and enigmatic inclusion. NEO feels like the straight-to-DVD Disney sequel of this concept only not as bad. Rindo and Fret are fine characters, I just think TWEWY did a more efficient and poignant job at making me care. I like watching Rindo and Fret interact with this scary world that they've been thrust into but I feel pretty disjointed from the whole affair for some reason. Part of this is because Neku and other characters would get into arguments that proposed various moral dilemmas. This might not sound that interesting on paper but given the confines of the reaper's game, it adds variables to morality that would be obvious in real life. In NEO, a lot of the character conflict just kind of feels like processed drama. It isn't completely ineffective or shallow, it just doesn't hit half as hard as the original. I could say more on this but again, haven't beat the game because my PS4 is a piece of garbage.
The whole equipping one pin to each character is something I'm not a huge fan of lore-wise but perhaps this is explained later or in post-game. Without going on a tangent, Neku uses psyches through pins while other characters channel it through other means. This is why the bosses all have unique abilities and why Shiki has a semi-sentient stuffed cat that kills enemies. Everybody using the pins wouldn't bother me if returning characters weren't also using the pins even though, for the most part, they literally wouldn't have been able to. It would have just been some Hot Topic bogo deal, impulse buy for other characters. As I already said, this is probably explained later so I'll shut up about it now. In any case, I like that the controls were awkward in TWEWY because it actually utilized the DS's gimmick to play into the sync level which also played a big part in the plot. In NEO, they're just awkward based on which pins you want to use at the time. Being able to map your own buttons within limitations would have been nice. Maybe this is a feature later but I see no reason why they should have done that if that's the case.
Reading that last paragraph over again in draft form now and I wanted to address the fact that again, this is complaining about plot points in NEO that might be wrapped up later. There's also the fact that TWEWY's plot was very existential and not fully rooted in reality to begin with and I mean that in a positive and factual way. At the same time, I played almost 20 hours of NEO before my PS4 rejected and ejected it. I feel like that's a lot of time to sink into a sequel's plot and not have this point explained but again, it's TWEWY.
Before the game came out, I read an interview that NEO was going to be like Persona 5 length. I truly cannot see that working for this game but maybe it will. I feel like Persona 5's combat was a lot more open-ended. Whether fights took one second or 15 minutes was largely dependent on a lot of choices made outside of that battle rather than just not having the right equipment or difficulty alterations. In NEO, unless something fundamentally changes the foundation of how the game plays and how the plot is being served up, there's no way this doesn't get stale after a while. I still want to figure this out for myself. Until then, I have been worried about this since before the game came out and now having played a decent chunk of the game, I am just as worried, I just now have good reasoning behind it.
The food system is snappier than in the original. The menus are weirder to navigate but they aren't necessarily worse than in TWEWY. Also, in TWEWY, you're at the mercy of loading everything up on DS hardware. Everything's a lot faster in NEO, y'know, except for the plot. There are a lot of things that NEO lets you have at from the beginning that were locked off in TWEWY. These include the concept of pig noise and being able to see where side-quests might be. In TWEWY, I get why these were not immediately made apparent to the player. In NEO, I guess the developers had no real reason to keep these from veteran players or new players so the game just blatantly lets you know that you can do them and I think that's cool.
The clothing equipment system works about the same. The only thing I'm worried about late game is that they added a lot of different brands to this game. Making different outfits actually affects a lot in the game and this changed a handful of things in TWEWY. Also, in TWEWY, wearing all of one brand made you more powerful. In NEO, there are so many brands that I feel like being able to do this would be more difficult. At the point of the game where you might be able to do this, you'll have so much exp and other equipment that this brand boost would be fairly pointless to even use anyway. Didn't get that far though so this is just speculation. Thanks, Sony.
The soundtrack isn't as consistently good but it's still fitting to the setting and all that. The new inclusions have their bangers and stinkers. The stinkers still fit the atmosphere. The new versions of songs from TWEWY are fucking cool too.
All things considered, NEO is a competent action RPG with a competent plot so far. It has enough unique stuff going for it to set it apart from what people would expect from a modern, anime-looking-ass action RPG. In comparison to TWEWY, I think it doesn't do enough to set it apart from the pack to recommend everyone go buy this thing right fucking now as opposed to the original TWEWY, which I still recommend to people to this day. I can also do that with confidence because for an RPG with as complicated of a plot as it has, TWEWY doesn't take up that much time. NEO fucking does.
NEO is just kind of going for something different and I think it pulls that off. I kind of hinted at this earlier but it's just not as poignant as the original in any regard. Still, I don't want to give off the impression that this is a huge disappointment or total trash. I would love to keep playing the game, hardware willing, and I don't completely regret my purchase. Had I known my PS4 was going to physically reject the fucking thing, I probably wouldn't have pre-ordered it or waited for Switch reviews to get that version instead but you don't care about that so why am I even talking about it? NEO definitely takes characters and ideas from TWEWY in a way that is fun for veterans of the original game. However, I think I could still recommend NEO to newcomers because it does have its own story going on. In any case, I still recommend the original way higher than NEO. I still haven't played the Switch version of TWEWY but maybe I should finally do that sometime. That's still an option by the way if you want to play that first without dusting off your DS Lite or one of your 3 different Zelda-branded 3DS's. Or 2DS's. Nintendo's fucking silly. If you can play it without either console actively fighting back against you, I guess I soft recommend NEO. It's a solid action RPG with plenty of style to possibly make up for all of the things it really doesn't improve over my nostalgia-blind pedestal-hog vision of the original. If you already like the first game but are wary of trying NEO, ehhhhh. I think you'll like it but see if you can wait a bit longer for it to be like $40 or less.
