NEO: The World Ends with You

released on Jul 26, 2021

Explore a stylized recreation of Shibuya, as you take on the role of Rindo to battle for survival and unravel the mysteries of the deadly “Reaper’s Game” in this new Action RPG and follow-up to the classic RPG hit "The World Ends with You."


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It's hard to come up with words to describe how good Neo World Ends With You is.
It's stylish, it's unique, it takes risks both in gameplay decisions(controlling 6 characters at once is actually crazy) and in the story(time travel powers tend to be a red flag if you like your characters to be rational) and it nails it every single time. I hadn't been so engrossed in a JRPG, or even a game in general, since Persona 5 Royal.

underrated! the combat system was so fun and the cast was cute.

Such a massive downgrade from the first. By the time the 3rd week came around, I found myself to be tuning most of the game out, but by that point I was already 2/3 through the game.

The strongest part of the original TWEWY, was in how it directly constructed its story around the character’s conflicts. In order to enter the reaper game, you must have an entry fee, which takes the form of your most precious belonging. In the original, that simply plot point earned each character an instant character point, and gave way for what each of their arcs would become. All of the original characters gain an insane amount of depth for what is a 15 hr DS game, so it’s quite underwhelming, and downright disappointing that this 40 hr game doesn’t have a single character that gets near to touching any of the original characters. That’s most likely why the entire last 3rd of Neo rests entirely on the expectation that you care about the original characters. Thankfully I do, but I still want the new characters to be up to par if I’m expected to be with them for a full 40 hours.

Then there’s the repetition of the story/gameplay. The original TWEWY was structured the exact same way as Neo, but the positive of TWEWY was that it was only 15 hrs long. It doesn’t waste your time, and the mysteries of this world we have yet to experience fuel every single day. Each day in the original was a learning experience for furthering the plot, but it seriously becomes an issue with Neo, where the plot drags its feet in almost every day besides the finale of each week. The story doesn’t actually begin to get to the point until week 3, due to one of the teams stalling for story reasons. But that is absolutely no excuse for how dull some of these days get.

Neo does improve massively on the combat of TWEWY. Basically anything would be better than the original’s, but somehow Neo manages to balance up to 6 whole characters being controlled simultaneously. I’ve never seen a game do that before. It’s quite a large undertaking to not make the combat cumbersome with such an ambitious idea, but it certainly makes it work.

Again, like the original, Neo has just as much style and purpose with its design choices as its original. The cutscenes in particular got a major upgrade. Both the 2D and 3D cutscenes make the effort to remain unique in their presentation. It innovates on TWEWY’s simple 2D character portrait cutscenes with comic book-like panels that reveal each character’s sprites in segmented fashion. It’s quite an interesting way of presentation that I’ve never seen before.

What in the actual hell is this combat.