This review contains spoilers
[start of review]
This very long review is an update to my demo impressions now that I've finished the game. Those original impressions can be seen below the review. Spoilers for both TWEWY and NEO TWEWY ahead - if you've not played TWEWY yet, please play the DS version if possible.
I knew going into this game that it wouldn't be the best game ever - I wanted to be realistic, but I didn't want to try being overly pessimistic. As one could see from my demo review below, I was trying to be hopeful even though I saw a lot wrong from the get-go.
This game exceeded my expectations. However, it also did little to stop itself from being barely above average.
NEO TWEWY is a game carried by its gameplay. It manages to be a new spin on the multitasking hectic battles of the original, but it does so without meaning or an understanding of what made the original good. It had plenty of missed opportunities: for example, despite the game adding in elemental and input affinities and having up to 6 characters playable at once, there are no traces of characters having specific preferences for brands, elements, or inputs. Putting even one of these things in the game would have made each individual character less bland in gameplay. In practice, this means that in NEO TWEWY the characters all feel exactly the same to play as outside of their numbers. In a game following up on another which emphasized the value of differences between people, I find it pretty sad that this flew under the radar. The closest thing to the idea I put forward was that a few pins will only mutate if equipped by a certain character. That's pitiful. (It also bothers me that Neku has been nerfed to use only one pin at a time and Beat has been semi-buffed to be able to use any pin. Bleh, inconsistency.)
Still, the way the game plays is fun (though my fingers hurt by the end of it). Putting together cool pin combos is satisfying, and on the actual battlefield it's cool to get groove combos down as well. I found the super attacks to be underwhelming, unfortunately, and I also found it disappointing that the game had a level of legit pin powercreep that TWEWY never did. Of course, its battle system also lacked the narrative relevance that TWEWY's did, but that was to be expected. It also ran like shit on Switch, and I've heard it's not really that much better on PS4.
Aaanyway, I'm getting too negative here. To say more good about the gameplay, I think the movement on the overworld is nice, especially once you unlock Beat's extra movement abilities. Chaining Noise is easier than ever and the game practically begs to be 100%ed (though unlike with the original, I don't think I had enough attachment to this one to really try for the 100%...). The in-battle quotes, while repetitive at times, are fun and silly and certainly enjoyable (just make sure to turn down voices to 5 and sound effects to 4 while having music at 10). The music should be turned up to 10 for a reason: a few tracks did annoy me, but by and large this OST is pretty damn good and has a few standout tracks that challenge TWEWY's better ones. Oh yeah, playing as Neku and Beat is a nice throwback for sure, and playing as Sho is a treat (though he and Neku barely have time to shine due to when they appear). The NEO redesigns in general are cool, particularly for side characters like the Prince and Uzuki. Neku looked a bit off to me but besides that I was happy, especially considering Shiki's full face was finally revealed.
Speaking of which, NEO is a game filled with fanservice of varying degrees of quality. It sprinkles it fairly respectfully for the majority of its runtime but dips a bit too deep into it in the endgame to the point of overshadowing the main new characters (unsurprising considering how underbaked said characters are for 2/3 of the game). Despite the fanservice thankfully not being offensive to the characters of the original game, this once again failed to do so with any real meaning or understanding of what made them revered and beloved in the first place. I didn't need to see an extended "where are they now" reel of Neku and his friends. The ending of the first game did that job just fine by presenting a somewhat ambiguous but very much optimistic vision not only of Neku removing his headphones, but also of the gang finally getting back together to hopefully live life together with Joshua watching over them. While it's great that Rhyme found herself a new dream and Shiki's business took off in NEO, I really didn't need to see those things. I could already hope for the former based on the secret reports in TWEWY and assume the latter based on Tsugumi's image in Solo Remix (not to mention just general optimism - again, a feeling that's emphasized in the original's ending).
I guess this would be a good time to segue into the characters. I'm about to rant about the protagonist, so skip this paragraph if you don't care about that. Rindo is legitimately frustrating to watch due to his botched character arc and his genuine incompetence at almost all times throughout the story. Him learning to take responsibility and make his own choices is a good lesson to learn, but his arc is just a series of statements he and others make about how he is followed by him making some decisions to serve the plot. In reality, Rindo doesn't show his intended character flaw much at all. He constantly makes completely stupid decisions specifically so that the plot can force him into using his time powers, and even then he's taking responsibility for everything every time he goes back even if he doesn't choose to do so. I can go on about him having a very shaky base character to develop from, but that'd take too long. Rindo's problem isn't that he doesn't take responsibility or make his own choices; it's that he's incredibly dense. Even when his time travel powers supposedly come back to bite him in the ass he still fucking turns back time to fix everything. FUCK Rindo. You know what might have been neat? Maybe acknowledging that the very power he uses is not necessarily a responsibility but instead can just be a way of pushing it away. Maybe have Rindo legitimately use the power for some personal gain rather than for survival. That'd make his uses of it in early week 3 - the most intelligently written uses of the power, I might add - actually meaningful. The game's writers instead opted to only focus on the responsibility Rindo has with his power, seemingly forgetting how he'd heroically bitten the bullet and used it a handful of times long before he had moved forward in the arc he allegedly has.
With that rant over, it's now time to talk about the other characters. NEO TWEWY actually did give me a pleasant surprise in that its new main characters besides Rindo were actually pretty compelling - Shoka, Fret, Nagi, and Kanon stood out with the former two having nice arcs and the latter two being great stable characters. The problem I have is mainly that the two who do develop don't really do so at all until the second half of the game; while Fret's problems are teased at by Kanon just a little bit in every encounter of theirs, it means almost nothing to the player until Fret is finally given the screentime to deal with said teases. For Shoka, she has her screentime cut early on and doesn't really return for anything meaningful until almost 2/3 into the game - at that point, the player had only ever really seen her as Reaper Megan. She didn't really have a base to develop from, which is why almost all of her development was based on recontextualization. It worked, yes, but it's just another example of an underlying problem this game has...
NEO TWEWY has some elements of the skeleton of TWEWY, but it didn't build very creatively upon it and did not improve, either. The pacing of the first third of TWEWY was quick to suit how it was an extended tutorial of sorts and a starting point for Neku. It introduced almost all the most important characters to the plot while also introducing players to the Reapers' Game as a concept (not to mention subtly setting up the Conductor's final gambit). NEO got the memo that the first week ought to be an extended tutorial but had no real ideas to work on during said tutorial. At most it gives a few nudges and hints that Sho had ulterior motives and that the Ruinbringers were cheating, as well as sooorta introducing the Reapers' Game to newcomers to the franchise. In terms of character setups it did almost nothing. The Deep River Society were erased following their introduction and the Purehearts got basically 0 screentime. The Ruinbringers had one of their members appear on one day and then had his actual (boring) characterization show up on the last one. Only the Variabeauties got more than one minute of screentime, but even then they weren't featured heavily until the next week.
Going into week 2 in TWEWY brought the player into finally getting to understand how the eponymous Reapers functioned as a hierarchy as well as what their jobs actually meant. It gave Neku a true test of his developing character in the form of Joshua, who just happened to also be an extremely crucial character in his own right. Further, it established the mystery of Neku's death and the mystery of the Shibuya River. Perhaps most importantly it set up the highest point of relevant power in the game: the Composer. By comparison, week 2 of NEO was quite a lot more barebones. Its missions were mostly filler to give more screentime to the Variabeauties and Purehearts - good on them for that - but the problem was that the missions were still just filler. It was great that Beat showed up, of course, and I love him to death... but he didn't add anything of value to things besides being an exposition dump to catch newcomers up to speed with what happened in TWEWY. Up until the tail end of week 2, little of interest happened once again. The end did at least expose the Ruinbringers' cheating ways by showing that Shiba was indeed their leader... but I personally found that twist more frustrating and immature than anything else. Perhaps others disagree.
Week 3 for TWEWY obviously ramped things up. Neku's character arc was in full swing, having gotten past the turning point and now finally meeting back with a familiar face in Beat. Week 3, while technically being an entirely 'filler' week in terms of missions, used its time to finish up Beat's own smaller arc and act as a final test for Neku to show how he'd changed. The Reapers got more screentime than ever and the stakes were ramped up high, and as more and more of Shibuya was brought into the Conductor's instrumentality plot, there was an increasing sense of dread and isolation that was palpable by endgame. While NEO tried to ape that last bit, it had long since shot itself in the foot in those efforts. While week 3 was most certainly the best part of the game in terms of actual shit happening, a lot of it happened too fast and too close together. The days in which major characters were actually erased - especially Kanon - were meaningful in that they cut the 'good guy' cast down to just the main characters. However... soon afterward the party grew to six members, two of which were veterans of the first game and considered living legends. So many characters besides them were still roaming the streets and doing their own things, too, and so the atmosphere of dread that the silver Dire Dire Docks sky brought was dulled and defanged constantly. The stakes were effectively equal in both games, but TWEWY had the balls to actually put the pressure on the player. On top of all of this general failing at atmosphere, NEO took its weird shit way too far right at the end of the week with a pretty pitiful payoff.
For some reason NEO had to try copying some of the base ideas that TWEWY's big endgame twist had. First, the idea that the supposed main antagonist was truly a puppet of sorts for someone who seemed to be their lesser - while admittedly I think NEO did it just fine, I found that the actual resolution was handled sloppily. That brings me to the second similarity - that some kind of final gambit would have to be overcome in order to save Shibuya. However, again, the resolution was uh... strange in one. In NEO's case, it was...
- Kubo summoning a fuckton of Noise coming from Rindo's special time pin, then slaughtering all of Rindo's friends
- Going back in time in order to get Shiba not to attack the party
- Kubo summoning a fuckton of Noise coming from Rindo's special time pin, then slaughtering all of Rindo's friends
- Meeting Haz, then going back in time in order to get Shiba to help the party, but also bringing in Rhyme to help hack shit and discover the Noise's weakness, and also bringing in Shiki to repair Tsugumi's Mr. Mew doll to free her from her prison, but also convincing that one Reaper with the ugly haircut to talk to Shiba
- Beating up the Noise, then summoning up a super attack to finish them off
In TWEWY's case, it was...
- Having a 10-second Western-style duel with Joshua
The difference between these two, besides the former being hilariously convoluted, is that the second one was a big bow meant to tie up Neku's character arc as well as Josh's much more subtle one. The first one included as some part of it the idea that Rindo's character arc was being fulfilled, but as I described before it was effectively just him going through the time travel motions. This time, he just had higher stakes. ... I would argue that him making the choice to go back in time after meeting Haz was just due to some reverse psychology, not as some powerful indication of his growth of character. It frankly isn't anything I wouldn't expect him to do on day 1.
Oh gosh, the comparison game is getting a bit old by now, isn't it? I'll do one last one before I move onto talking about NEO as a standalone game again. As I stated in my demo review, NEO uses the title of TWEWY with basically zero substance and very little understanding of the first game's merits. The very end of the game gives you a little screen showing the title going from NEO The World Ends With You to NEO The World Begins With You, clearly echoing the way the first game did that in its own secret ending. Funnily enough, it was that exact point which convinced me to sit down for an hour and write this whole review down. The way "The World Begins With You" was used in TWEWY, while pretty cheesy, was actually meaningful. It flipped the title (and Mr. H's statement) in a way that didn't invalidate it, but instead complemented it: with Neku finally removing his headphones in the RG, the growth of his world could finally begin. In NEO, the title change meant literally nothing in the context of the game. If anything, it reminded me of how NEO and Final Remix effectively robbed Neku of the world 'beginning' with him. Fuck that shit. I could also go on about how the secret post-credits conversation between Josh and Haz was just a subpar attempt at doing the one-sided convo Josh and Mr. H had in TWEWY, but I'm already making this 'final comparison' way too long.
It's high time we get back to NEO as a standalone game. I think that in terms of it being 'what it is' - an anime-styled modern JRPG marketed for mass appeal - it works fine. Hell, it might even be a quality example of such a thing. It certainly didn't talk down to the player with its writing very often, and it put forward enough interesting ideas to hopefully draw newcomers into playing the original game (hopefully on the DS). It does play well as I said and for newcomers there's likely little to complain about there, as my gripes were largely made up of "okay but why didn't you take [idea X] further?" based on my experience with the first game. I think the extra mechanics added for the main characters were all passable, with Rindo's having the most wasted potential.† Obviously the game running like shit on consoles is something that wouldn't be good for anyone, so I'm imagining the PC version (unfortunately on Epic Games) will be the definitive one.
However, I think to players of the first game it's far more of a mixed bag. By that I don't only mean that it'd be more of a mixed experience like my rating suggests, but also that I'm sure plenty of TWEWY players will love this while a lot of others will see the faults and chips in the game that I have. I do hope that all those fans who (for some reason) wanted a sequel to TWEWY were satisfied with this game. I didn't want one, and this didn't really satisfy me more than the bare minimum. It's a shame, really, and I hope that this doesn't spawn a franchise; if it does, I hope they take the direction that I mentioned in my demo review below. A proper jump away from Shibuya or even Japan to see how Reapers' Games (and Angels) work in different parts of the world would be ideal, particularly if we get a character-focused game with a fairly comprehensible plot rather than the fanservice-focused and weirdly complicated-yet-railroady mess that NEO put forward.
NEO TWEWY is a whole lot of things, but a great game it is not. It tries too hard to be TWEWY-ish to forge an actually notable identity of its own, but it doesn't commit hard enough into its TWEWYness to do too well in its department either. While it's still a good enough game in its own right, more objective problems like its framerate and choppiness take it down to less than properly playable. Indeed, every positive I have to say for it has a negative to face it, and even playing the game just for its good gameplay can be hard because of how wordy and laggy the damn thing is. As I said before, I really do hope that the missteps of this game will be learned from if we are to get another TWEWY game in the future. If we never do, that's fine too - I was never really asking for this one in the first place. After months of wondering whether my favorite game of all time would be soiled by its successor, I'm glad to finally be free of the burden of worrying about this game's quality. It's just... decent. And in a world of shitty unneeded sequels, this decent unneeded sequel might as well be a blessing.
[end of review]
† I thought it was a pretty weak stand-in for most players only being able to use a few pins in TWEWY, but I didn't mention it since that'd bring in another comparison and is frankly far more nitpicky than the other comparisons. Also unrelated but Shooter Dan/Tin Pin Slammer aren't in NEO which really fucking saddened me.
==============================
[demo review]
Just putting down some general thoughts and demo impressions here to look back on when the final game releases.
I'm firmly in the camp (if there is one) that is saddened by the fact that this game exists as it does. The extra content in TWEWY Final Remix did everything it could in those final few minutes to undo the solid ending the original game had. This game being a sequel presumably to the anime recreation of that content is sad, and it being a sequel at all is kinda pitiful.
Everything about this game just seems needless and artistically disingenuous: the original TWEWY, down to its title, had a strong emphasis on broadening your awareness and horizons and opening up your world. The sequel borrows the title seemingly without the nuance or purpose it had, and it makes sure to pick up not only with a bunch of returning characters from the first game but also without actually moving outside the small tight-knit "world" of Shibuya. Not only is this a missed opportunity (seriously, imagine a Reapers' Game in a different country!), but it also seems tone-deaf. The game also had no reason to exist as a direct sequel considering how well-contained the first one had been, and what I've seen and what I know of its premise make it seem almost cashgrabby (it further worries me in that sense that Neku is being made into way more of a bland shonen protagonist in the anime and the pre-release media for this game).
Now for actual demo impressions. As a general character action game/ARPG, it's pretty solid. A little bit too button-mashy, but there were a few interesting pin/psych combos that I thought synergized well. I'm hoping this means there'll be plenty of opportunities to put together a cool pin set that works around the player's unique playstyle.
The dialogue is hit and miss - the slang feels a little more out-of-date than TWEWY's did for its time, but it works. The chocobo stickers in the texting app are adorable, so props for that. The general writing for the first two days doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, and I do hope that that's how the game stays for the whole thing. If it was intended to just be a soulless and disrespectful project, I'd rather it not give a shit than to try to be Serious(tm) and ruin things further. The few serious parts that did show up throughout the game were genuinely cringeworthy. The first game's characters at face value weren't too terribly inspired, but here they're... somehow even less so, and certainly uninteresting. They seem like very typical fandom-bait type characters in the vein of something like Danganronpa, which is pretty worrying. It makes it significantly more difficult to take the serious parts, well, seriously.
The music is good but I'd call it pretty overhyped. I don't enjoy any of the remixes in the game but the new tracks have all been good shit from what I could tell, though. The game has pretty slick and well-placed UI elements, though they feel very of-the-times in a way that will probably date this game almost as much as the dialogue.
There's not much else to comment on here. I'm hoping I'm supremely and horribly wrong and that this game winds up being great, but this is something I don't think I can be all that optimistic about. When it does come out I'll do my very best to have a good time with it, that much I know. And hey, the soundtrack will probably be good too.
This very long review is an update to my demo impressions now that I've finished the game. Those original impressions can be seen below the review. Spoilers for both TWEWY and NEO TWEWY ahead - if you've not played TWEWY yet, please play the DS version if possible.
I knew going into this game that it wouldn't be the best game ever - I wanted to be realistic, but I didn't want to try being overly pessimistic. As one could see from my demo review below, I was trying to be hopeful even though I saw a lot wrong from the get-go.
This game exceeded my expectations. However, it also did little to stop itself from being barely above average.
NEO TWEWY is a game carried by its gameplay. It manages to be a new spin on the multitasking hectic battles of the original, but it does so without meaning or an understanding of what made the original good. It had plenty of missed opportunities: for example, despite the game adding in elemental and input affinities and having up to 6 characters playable at once, there are no traces of characters having specific preferences for brands, elements, or inputs. Putting even one of these things in the game would have made each individual character less bland in gameplay. In practice, this means that in NEO TWEWY the characters all feel exactly the same to play as outside of their numbers. In a game following up on another which emphasized the value of differences between people, I find it pretty sad that this flew under the radar. The closest thing to the idea I put forward was that a few pins will only mutate if equipped by a certain character. That's pitiful. (It also bothers me that Neku has been nerfed to use only one pin at a time and Beat has been semi-buffed to be able to use any pin. Bleh, inconsistency.)
Still, the way the game plays is fun (though my fingers hurt by the end of it). Putting together cool pin combos is satisfying, and on the actual battlefield it's cool to get groove combos down as well. I found the super attacks to be underwhelming, unfortunately, and I also found it disappointing that the game had a level of legit pin powercreep that TWEWY never did. Of course, its battle system also lacked the narrative relevance that TWEWY's did, but that was to be expected. It also ran like shit on Switch, and I've heard it's not really that much better on PS4.
Aaanyway, I'm getting too negative here. To say more good about the gameplay, I think the movement on the overworld is nice, especially once you unlock Beat's extra movement abilities. Chaining Noise is easier than ever and the game practically begs to be 100%ed (though unlike with the original, I don't think I had enough attachment to this one to really try for the 100%...). The in-battle quotes, while repetitive at times, are fun and silly and certainly enjoyable (just make sure to turn down voices to 5 and sound effects to 4 while having music at 10). The music should be turned up to 10 for a reason: a few tracks did annoy me, but by and large this OST is pretty damn good and has a few standout tracks that challenge TWEWY's better ones. Oh yeah, playing as Neku and Beat is a nice throwback for sure, and playing as Sho is a treat (though he and Neku barely have time to shine due to when they appear). The NEO redesigns in general are cool, particularly for side characters like the Prince and Uzuki. Neku looked a bit off to me but besides that I was happy, especially considering Shiki's full face was finally revealed.
Speaking of which, NEO is a game filled with fanservice of varying degrees of quality. It sprinkles it fairly respectfully for the majority of its runtime but dips a bit too deep into it in the endgame to the point of overshadowing the main new characters (unsurprising considering how underbaked said characters are for 2/3 of the game). Despite the fanservice thankfully not being offensive to the characters of the original game, this once again failed to do so with any real meaning or understanding of what made them revered and beloved in the first place. I didn't need to see an extended "where are they now" reel of Neku and his friends. The ending of the first game did that job just fine by presenting a somewhat ambiguous but very much optimistic vision not only of Neku removing his headphones, but also of the gang finally getting back together to hopefully live life together with Joshua watching over them. While it's great that Rhyme found herself a new dream and Shiki's business took off in NEO, I really didn't need to see those things. I could already hope for the former based on the secret reports in TWEWY and assume the latter based on Tsugumi's image in Solo Remix (not to mention just general optimism - again, a feeling that's emphasized in the original's ending).
I guess this would be a good time to segue into the characters. I'm about to rant about the protagonist, so skip this paragraph if you don't care about that. Rindo is legitimately frustrating to watch due to his botched character arc and his genuine incompetence at almost all times throughout the story. Him learning to take responsibility and make his own choices is a good lesson to learn, but his arc is just a series of statements he and others make about how he is followed by him making some decisions to serve the plot. In reality, Rindo doesn't show his intended character flaw much at all. He constantly makes completely stupid decisions specifically so that the plot can force him into using his time powers, and even then he's taking responsibility for everything every time he goes back even if he doesn't choose to do so. I can go on about him having a very shaky base character to develop from, but that'd take too long. Rindo's problem isn't that he doesn't take responsibility or make his own choices; it's that he's incredibly dense. Even when his time travel powers supposedly come back to bite him in the ass he still fucking turns back time to fix everything. FUCK Rindo. You know what might have been neat? Maybe acknowledging that the very power he uses is not necessarily a responsibility but instead can just be a way of pushing it away. Maybe have Rindo legitimately use the power for some personal gain rather than for survival. That'd make his uses of it in early week 3 - the most intelligently written uses of the power, I might add - actually meaningful. The game's writers instead opted to only focus on the responsibility Rindo has with his power, seemingly forgetting how he'd heroically bitten the bullet and used it a handful of times long before he had moved forward in the arc he allegedly has.
With that rant over, it's now time to talk about the other characters. NEO TWEWY actually did give me a pleasant surprise in that its new main characters besides Rindo were actually pretty compelling - Shoka, Fret, Nagi, and Kanon stood out with the former two having nice arcs and the latter two being great stable characters. The problem I have is mainly that the two who do develop don't really do so at all until the second half of the game; while Fret's problems are teased at by Kanon just a little bit in every encounter of theirs, it means almost nothing to the player until Fret is finally given the screentime to deal with said teases. For Shoka, she has her screentime cut early on and doesn't really return for anything meaningful until almost 2/3 into the game - at that point, the player had only ever really seen her as Reaper Megan. She didn't really have a base to develop from, which is why almost all of her development was based on recontextualization. It worked, yes, but it's just another example of an underlying problem this game has...
NEO TWEWY has some elements of the skeleton of TWEWY, but it didn't build very creatively upon it and did not improve, either. The pacing of the first third of TWEWY was quick to suit how it was an extended tutorial of sorts and a starting point for Neku. It introduced almost all the most important characters to the plot while also introducing players to the Reapers' Game as a concept (not to mention subtly setting up the Conductor's final gambit). NEO got the memo that the first week ought to be an extended tutorial but had no real ideas to work on during said tutorial. At most it gives a few nudges and hints that Sho had ulterior motives and that the Ruinbringers were cheating, as well as sooorta introducing the Reapers' Game to newcomers to the franchise. In terms of character setups it did almost nothing. The Deep River Society were erased following their introduction and the Purehearts got basically 0 screentime. The Ruinbringers had one of their members appear on one day and then had his actual (boring) characterization show up on the last one. Only the Variabeauties got more than one minute of screentime, but even then they weren't featured heavily until the next week.
Going into week 2 in TWEWY brought the player into finally getting to understand how the eponymous Reapers functioned as a hierarchy as well as what their jobs actually meant. It gave Neku a true test of his developing character in the form of Joshua, who just happened to also be an extremely crucial character in his own right. Further, it established the mystery of Neku's death and the mystery of the Shibuya River. Perhaps most importantly it set up the highest point of relevant power in the game: the Composer. By comparison, week 2 of NEO was quite a lot more barebones. Its missions were mostly filler to give more screentime to the Variabeauties and Purehearts - good on them for that - but the problem was that the missions were still just filler. It was great that Beat showed up, of course, and I love him to death... but he didn't add anything of value to things besides being an exposition dump to catch newcomers up to speed with what happened in TWEWY. Up until the tail end of week 2, little of interest happened once again. The end did at least expose the Ruinbringers' cheating ways by showing that Shiba was indeed their leader... but I personally found that twist more frustrating and immature than anything else. Perhaps others disagree.
Week 3 for TWEWY obviously ramped things up. Neku's character arc was in full swing, having gotten past the turning point and now finally meeting back with a familiar face in Beat. Week 3, while technically being an entirely 'filler' week in terms of missions, used its time to finish up Beat's own smaller arc and act as a final test for Neku to show how he'd changed. The Reapers got more screentime than ever and the stakes were ramped up high, and as more and more of Shibuya was brought into the Conductor's instrumentality plot, there was an increasing sense of dread and isolation that was palpable by endgame. While NEO tried to ape that last bit, it had long since shot itself in the foot in those efforts. While week 3 was most certainly the best part of the game in terms of actual shit happening, a lot of it happened too fast and too close together. The days in which major characters were actually erased - especially Kanon - were meaningful in that they cut the 'good guy' cast down to just the main characters. However... soon afterward the party grew to six members, two of which were veterans of the first game and considered living legends. So many characters besides them were still roaming the streets and doing their own things, too, and so the atmosphere of dread that the silver Dire Dire Docks sky brought was dulled and defanged constantly. The stakes were effectively equal in both games, but TWEWY had the balls to actually put the pressure on the player. On top of all of this general failing at atmosphere, NEO took its weird shit way too far right at the end of the week with a pretty pitiful payoff.
For some reason NEO had to try copying some of the base ideas that TWEWY's big endgame twist had. First, the idea that the supposed main antagonist was truly a puppet of sorts for someone who seemed to be their lesser - while admittedly I think NEO did it just fine, I found that the actual resolution was handled sloppily. That brings me to the second similarity - that some kind of final gambit would have to be overcome in order to save Shibuya. However, again, the resolution was uh... strange in one. In NEO's case, it was...
- Kubo summoning a fuckton of Noise coming from Rindo's special time pin, then slaughtering all of Rindo's friends
- Going back in time in order to get Shiba not to attack the party
- Kubo summoning a fuckton of Noise coming from Rindo's special time pin, then slaughtering all of Rindo's friends
- Meeting Haz, then going back in time in order to get Shiba to help the party, but also bringing in Rhyme to help hack shit and discover the Noise's weakness, and also bringing in Shiki to repair Tsugumi's Mr. Mew doll to free her from her prison, but also convincing that one Reaper with the ugly haircut to talk to Shiba
- Beating up the Noise, then summoning up a super attack to finish them off
In TWEWY's case, it was...
- Having a 10-second Western-style duel with Joshua
The difference between these two, besides the former being hilariously convoluted, is that the second one was a big bow meant to tie up Neku's character arc as well as Josh's much more subtle one. The first one included as some part of it the idea that Rindo's character arc was being fulfilled, but as I described before it was effectively just him going through the time travel motions. This time, he just had higher stakes. ... I would argue that him making the choice to go back in time after meeting Haz was just due to some reverse psychology, not as some powerful indication of his growth of character. It frankly isn't anything I wouldn't expect him to do on day 1.
Oh gosh, the comparison game is getting a bit old by now, isn't it? I'll do one last one before I move onto talking about NEO as a standalone game again. As I stated in my demo review, NEO uses the title of TWEWY with basically zero substance and very little understanding of the first game's merits. The very end of the game gives you a little screen showing the title going from NEO The World Ends With You to NEO The World Begins With You, clearly echoing the way the first game did that in its own secret ending. Funnily enough, it was that exact point which convinced me to sit down for an hour and write this whole review down. The way "The World Begins With You" was used in TWEWY, while pretty cheesy, was actually meaningful. It flipped the title (and Mr. H's statement) in a way that didn't invalidate it, but instead complemented it: with Neku finally removing his headphones in the RG, the growth of his world could finally begin. In NEO, the title change meant literally nothing in the context of the game. If anything, it reminded me of how NEO and Final Remix effectively robbed Neku of the world 'beginning' with him. Fuck that shit. I could also go on about how the secret post-credits conversation between Josh and Haz was just a subpar attempt at doing the one-sided convo Josh and Mr. H had in TWEWY, but I'm already making this 'final comparison' way too long.
It's high time we get back to NEO as a standalone game. I think that in terms of it being 'what it is' - an anime-styled modern JRPG marketed for mass appeal - it works fine. Hell, it might even be a quality example of such a thing. It certainly didn't talk down to the player with its writing very often, and it put forward enough interesting ideas to hopefully draw newcomers into playing the original game (hopefully on the DS). It does play well as I said and for newcomers there's likely little to complain about there, as my gripes were largely made up of "okay but why didn't you take [idea X] further?" based on my experience with the first game. I think the extra mechanics added for the main characters were all passable, with Rindo's having the most wasted potential.† Obviously the game running like shit on consoles is something that wouldn't be good for anyone, so I'm imagining the PC version (unfortunately on Epic Games) will be the definitive one.
However, I think to players of the first game it's far more of a mixed bag. By that I don't only mean that it'd be more of a mixed experience like my rating suggests, but also that I'm sure plenty of TWEWY players will love this while a lot of others will see the faults and chips in the game that I have. I do hope that all those fans who (for some reason) wanted a sequel to TWEWY were satisfied with this game. I didn't want one, and this didn't really satisfy me more than the bare minimum. It's a shame, really, and I hope that this doesn't spawn a franchise; if it does, I hope they take the direction that I mentioned in my demo review below. A proper jump away from Shibuya or even Japan to see how Reapers' Games (and Angels) work in different parts of the world would be ideal, particularly if we get a character-focused game with a fairly comprehensible plot rather than the fanservice-focused and weirdly complicated-yet-railroady mess that NEO put forward.
NEO TWEWY is a whole lot of things, but a great game it is not. It tries too hard to be TWEWY-ish to forge an actually notable identity of its own, but it doesn't commit hard enough into its TWEWYness to do too well in its department either. While it's still a good enough game in its own right, more objective problems like its framerate and choppiness take it down to less than properly playable. Indeed, every positive I have to say for it has a negative to face it, and even playing the game just for its good gameplay can be hard because of how wordy and laggy the damn thing is. As I said before, I really do hope that the missteps of this game will be learned from if we are to get another TWEWY game in the future. If we never do, that's fine too - I was never really asking for this one in the first place. After months of wondering whether my favorite game of all time would be soiled by its successor, I'm glad to finally be free of the burden of worrying about this game's quality. It's just... decent. And in a world of shitty unneeded sequels, this decent unneeded sequel might as well be a blessing.
[end of review]
† I thought it was a pretty weak stand-in for most players only being able to use a few pins in TWEWY, but I didn't mention it since that'd bring in another comparison and is frankly far more nitpicky than the other comparisons. Also unrelated but Shooter Dan/Tin Pin Slammer aren't in NEO which really fucking saddened me.
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[demo review]
Just putting down some general thoughts and demo impressions here to look back on when the final game releases.
I'm firmly in the camp (if there is one) that is saddened by the fact that this game exists as it does. The extra content in TWEWY Final Remix did everything it could in those final few minutes to undo the solid ending the original game had. This game being a sequel presumably to the anime recreation of that content is sad, and it being a sequel at all is kinda pitiful.
Everything about this game just seems needless and artistically disingenuous: the original TWEWY, down to its title, had a strong emphasis on broadening your awareness and horizons and opening up your world. The sequel borrows the title seemingly without the nuance or purpose it had, and it makes sure to pick up not only with a bunch of returning characters from the first game but also without actually moving outside the small tight-knit "world" of Shibuya. Not only is this a missed opportunity (seriously, imagine a Reapers' Game in a different country!), but it also seems tone-deaf. The game also had no reason to exist as a direct sequel considering how well-contained the first one had been, and what I've seen and what I know of its premise make it seem almost cashgrabby (it further worries me in that sense that Neku is being made into way more of a bland shonen protagonist in the anime and the pre-release media for this game).
Now for actual demo impressions. As a general character action game/ARPG, it's pretty solid. A little bit too button-mashy, but there were a few interesting pin/psych combos that I thought synergized well. I'm hoping this means there'll be plenty of opportunities to put together a cool pin set that works around the player's unique playstyle.
The dialogue is hit and miss - the slang feels a little more out-of-date than TWEWY's did for its time, but it works. The chocobo stickers in the texting app are adorable, so props for that. The general writing for the first two days doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, and I do hope that that's how the game stays for the whole thing. If it was intended to just be a soulless and disrespectful project, I'd rather it not give a shit than to try to be Serious(tm) and ruin things further. The few serious parts that did show up throughout the game were genuinely cringeworthy. The first game's characters at face value weren't too terribly inspired, but here they're... somehow even less so, and certainly uninteresting. They seem like very typical fandom-bait type characters in the vein of something like Danganronpa, which is pretty worrying. It makes it significantly more difficult to take the serious parts, well, seriously.
The music is good but I'd call it pretty overhyped. I don't enjoy any of the remixes in the game but the new tracks have all been good shit from what I could tell, though. The game has pretty slick and well-placed UI elements, though they feel very of-the-times in a way that will probably date this game almost as much as the dialogue.
There's not much else to comment on here. I'm hoping I'm supremely and horribly wrong and that this game winds up being great, but this is something I don't think I can be all that optimistic about. When it does come out I'll do my very best to have a good time with it, that much I know. And hey, the soundtrack will probably be good too.