"It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone in the world would do it... The "hard" is what makes it great... the world is yours..."

After 14 agonizing years of waiting, (only 6 for me since I played the first game in 2015) the DS's cult classic rpg finally got a sequel. I remember in the hype build-up for this game it was hard for me to manage my expectations. The World Ends With You was more than just a game I loved, that game shaped my taste in how I view character interactions, music, art and writing. I played it at the perfect time in my life to relate to the main characters and replaying it became a yearly tradition for me for several years after I beat it.

And that second playthrough is the most important part of both my experience with the first game and the second.

When you're first experiencing a story, you're only thinking about the moment to moment plot beats of the narrative. The second is when you start to appreciate how everything ties together, how the themes and main ideas are communicated. When I first played the original, I loved it but there were some things about it that confused me, it wasn't until after I read the secret reports and did a second playthrough where I saw and appreciated how the lore ties into the story that I truly loved the game and it became my all-time favorite.

And funnily enough, I had a very similar experience with neo twewy. In my first playthrough of the game, I knew I liked it but I wasn't sure how I felt about the supporting cast, the themes and the length and pacing. But in my second playthrough, a lot of things just "clicked" this time around, a lot of interactions early on hit a stronger chord with me when I knew where the characters were heading and where the game was going with these ideas. Now that I've done my second playthrough, I understand it a lot more and it's become one of my favorite games of this current era of gaming.

My biggest problem with Neo is the length and pacing of it. At their core, The World Ends With You is an action rpg that explores the characters and their endeavors in one single city the entire game. You visit the same streets and locations every day with progress only being halted by wall reapers who give you little mini objectives. These games also feature highly naturalistic dialogue that uses a lot of slang and referential humor but also feature a lot of lore logs locked to postgame.

Everything about The World Ends With You's concept alone fits perfectly on a handheld rpg with replayability. The first game is 25 hours, not as short as the likes of Chrono Trigger and Live a Live but not a lengthy game like Xenoblade or Persona. So replaying this game and messing around with the postgame aren't super big asks of the player, you can beat it in about a week if you're playing briskly or a couple of weeks if you're playing slowly.

Neo The World Ends With You is about 40 hours long, putting it in the same camp as the likes of Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei and most other big console rpgs. And while they feature you exploring huge and diverse environments, introducing various new characters and enemies throughout their long runtimes. Neo The World Ends With You features you running through the same streets, running into the same people and fighting the same enemies with different colors the entire length of what is normally a very long and diverse rpg. Traversing the postgame and replaying it are much bigger asks of the player, most people don't replay long rpgs unless they're big fans of those games.

And yet despite that, I can't help but love Neo more than a lot of those rpgs regardless. Some of it is from the game riding on the coattails of its incredible precursor but man, the incredibly expressive dialogue portraits (plus the way the game uses artistic techniques of framing them to make them more dramatic), the naturalistic dialogue leading to characters speaking over each other, cutting each other off or even saying things at the same time. The combat system giving you funky and fun ways of styling on enemies and the fact that this game gives you a really fun way of getting around with sound surf. Good GOD I wish other rpgs would give you a fun way of traversing their overworld.

So while it does neglect a handful of its supporting cast, it doesn't use its filler as well as the first game and kinda goes on longer than it needs to. I still love this game a lot even if that love will always have its complications. There really isn't any game that quite captures the appeal of it just like how there isn't any game that quite captures The World Ends With You's appeal. And in a way, I'm glad this game went in this direction even if it isn't what made me love the first game so much.