Every once in a while a game comes along that manages to make me feel such strong emotions in opposite directions about it. This is that kind of game this year, where i don’t simply love parts of it and hate other parts of it, because every game is flawed and has things to hate about it. NEO: TWEWY is a game that makes me think negatively about all the key aspects of it, while also having a lot of good things to say about all the key aspects about it. It’s a game of contradictions, and one that could only exist in 2021.

To give a rundown of how i felt about the first game, i loved most of it, but since i played it in 2020 i was just, not that impressed by this game that’s strongest quality was just how ingrained it was with the DNA of the DS, back when video game consoles had identities that certain games tried to find their place in.

My view of this game was obviously impacted by that, as you can simply tell that this was made for the longtime fans almost exclusively, and that’s pretty much where i can recognize that NEO has a design philosophy that i think fundamentally harms it.

Now to get to the actual game, and it’s always hard to touch upon the gameplay of RPG’s like this, i find that that is the most mixed aspect of the game. The basic combat is unique enough to make it feel like it’s not being railroaded into a more generic combat system from having to leave the DS. Any RPG where i can say that i didn’t really get tired of the combat by the 25th hour is a good RPG. There’s also a fair amount of different ways to play but i also feel that experimenting can take too much time, since things can often just be better or worse than each other in linear ways.

What i do like about the gamplay is the character building, equipment is different as opposed to better or worse in linear ways, and the fashion system is as charming as it was in the first game, it’s one of my favorite parts of the game but i feel like it could have been used more in this one. Eating food is kind of a chore but the ability to build your own stats is refreshing, i love that kind of choice in RPG’s. The ability to control your own difficulty, and being rewarded for turning it up is, again, an inspired choice.

The visuals of the game are haunted by not being as good as ehat came before, but it’s a looker nontheless. A good example of how every good part of this game is connected to a bad part is how striking the art style is, but how much it’s hampered by being in 3D. The character designs are around the same level of quality as they used to be, something about them just doesn’t feel as high-quality as the original, but i like how these ones feel a little bit less like standouts, that sells them more as just random people.

The story is the big division for me, because there is just an unnaturally large amount wrong with it. The pacing is so off that the entire middle third of the game is just a slog to get through, and it doesn’t help that your party changes according to the story, which just adds an extra bit of tedium whenever you lose somebody due to plot.

NEO has an overwhelmingly large problem with the fact that it wants to be it’s own original game, and it wants to continue the story of the original. He who chases two rabbits catches neither. The new party members of this game end up playing second-fiddle to the lingering narratives of a game that never felt particularly open. The party members of thiss game don’t have enough going for them, part of what made the previous game so good was how alive all the party members felt. There’s not enough development for them, they don’t interact enough, by the end of it you can tell that some of them aren’t really meant to be main characters.

There is a level of tedium in the narrative that is unprecedented, there is a ridiculous amount of retreading the same plot points over and over in order to just hammer the simplicities into youtr head, and all that does is make you spend more time lingering on just how little depth their cam be in certain scenes.

The time-travel ability of the main character is enough to warrant it’s own complaint, separate from tedium. Every single time it happened all i was waiting for was for it to end. There’s always been a lot of conversation surrounding the fact that RPG’s will give you certain dialogue options but then, due to linear narratives, never let you accept the consequences of those words. That was never an issue for me before, it is now. Your choices simultaneously matter too much and too little, you have to pick the correct ones, and finding out which ones are correct is, once again, tedium.