this is a game that i find extremely conflicting. it's difficult to accurately convey all the feelings and emotions that arose within me playing this game because i felt a true spectrum of joy and frustration. i was fluctuating anywhere between rating this a 2.0/5.0 and 4.0/5.0, and i ultimately settled on 3.5/5.0 because that felt the most fair appraisal, all things considered. but i cannot stress enough that for as many peaks that this game had, there were arguably just as many valleys.

to start with the gushing, i adore this game's gameplay. the biggest consideration i've had with a sequel to TWEWY has been gameplay. so much of what made TWEWY work was the DS itself. combat taking place over two screens was an inspired choice that you just can't emulate on any console, so color me pleasantly surprised to see that the gameplay of NEO surpassed it for me. combat in NEO is frantic, hectic, rhythmic, opportunistic, and, above all else, extremely rewarding when understood and executed with precision.

this is one of the best examples i've seen in recent memory of "easy to learn, difficult to master". it's very easy to get away with button mashing, especially on lower difficulties, and minimal awareness of enemy behaviors. but try that shit on hard or ultimate and you're done. enemies have revenge values that prevent you from doing too much damage without reprisal, and often have attacks that will either incapacitate your inactive party members if you let them linger for too long. yet, for the most part, they will automatically dodge almost all attacks if they're not using their pin. imagine that! party members who won't take damage when you're not controlling them! it's inspired design, because it keeps you in control of up to six different characters without ever once feeling overwhelming, confusing, or, most importantly, unfair. i find it very funny in a cosmic sort of way that FFVIIR released in 2020 and tried to do "multiple party members in an action JRPG" and failed miserably (for me, at least). meanwhile square releases another game with minimal fanfare and hardly any budget in comparison, and it still outshines FFVIIR in spades.

i really cannot say enough nice things about the way this game plays. there was just an extremely fun loop i found myself in where i'd get urges to stop the plot entirely and just spend my time grinding because i was having fun in the random encounters. the game gives you a gigantic assortment of pins to try out, and while some are less impressive than others, i consistently wanted to see what would happen if i tried out new party compositions and builds. with over 300 pins, this game delivers plenty of unique pins to try out that each have strengths and weaknesses that make them stand out from each other. when you compare two different shockwave pins, for example, you're not only comparing damage outputs, but also elemental damage, reboot time, potential for growth, etc. etc. the game gives you so much room for self-expression and experimentation that the lion's share of my fun was exploring the depths of this ocean of content.

the cherry on top of gameplay is that the OST for this game is stellar. it's not just serviceable, it's not just good, it's not even just great, it's stellar. i'll admit, in the first week, i wasn't quite on board with the OST because a lot of the weaker tracks are front-loaded. but even then, you get superb tracks like "bird in the hand", which i lovingly describe as an intrusive thought because of how i feel compelled to chant-sing the hook any time i hear it. there's a lot of variety in this OST, going from an acoustic driving rhythm type song like "CHASE" to a cathartic shout-the-chorus type song like "breaking free". and that's only touching on the new songs they brought to the table; this game ended up remixing/rerecording a lot of the predecessor's songs and they're all great with only a few exceptions ("someday" sounds outright terrible compared to the original recording, and "twister" here is just. . . not quite as good as it was). idc how lame this makes me sound, hearing the version of "Calling" that they made for this game put a gigantic stupid dopey grin on my face. it's not just paying homage to the first game's OST, it's adding its own flavor. i love it.

okay, enough unmitigated gushing, we need to talk about the plot. i will just come out and say it: i do not like this game's plot and a lot of the new characters either fall flat entirely or just do not compare to the first game's characters (which does not help when SO many of them return in this game). i think my biggest problem is that the main trio in rindo, fret, and nagi, all annoy me in some way. rindo's whole thing is that he's a dumb indecisive teenager, and i get that, but good FUCK is it frustrating to see the game dangle "should i ask swallow who they are?" for the near entirety of the game. you really mean to tell me you've known this person for 3 years and you don't know their real name, what they look like, or basically anything about them? meanwhile with fret, you get "he likes memes! and he's the class clown type But He's Actually Really Sad Sometimes" and that just feels like a trope that's been done to death. NEO doesn't do anything creative or interesting with fret; you will already know exactly the type of character that he is after hearing him for five minutes and the game does nothing to challenge or change that. all of that would be fine if i didn't find him so incredibly annoying.

and nagi's got this whole "chunnibyou meets autistic girl" thing going on, but the game doesn't mention either of those terms so it ends up going unexplored. nagi is like, pretty textbook autistic, but the game doesn't want to name it, and instead just wants to make her the butt of jokes. forgive the shit out of me for invoking this comparison, but we had futaba in persona 5 explore these issues and give depth + humanity to what it means to be autistic. why should we accept something lesser than when it came out years after that? nagi had so much potential, but the game does nothing with her, and she remains a largely static character. at least rindo and fret, for all my annoyance with them, have arcs. nagi is just a flat character with largely nothing to do and nothing to overcome. she is arguably the worst character in the game because she is wasted.

ultimately, i'd probably have loved this game without any qualms if i could attach myself to any of the main trio, but i regularly found myself going "oh christ i have to read their dialogue now" any time they talked. this is a JRPG! dialogue should be one of the things i look forward to! but there's just so much here, and it's not paced well at all. pacing is an element of this game that is belabored and haunts it at every turn. so often it feels as though characters stop to repeat things we already know or cover things that they just talked about. a lot of this could've been edited to have either more character moments or just cut entirely. this problem unquestionably reaches its zenith at the final day, where you not only have to redo the same events three times, but you go through fucking mountains of dialogue just to get characters up to speed with what the audience knows. this script needed to be edited desperately, and i suspect that a lot of it feels unpolished because of either a rushed release date or lack of budget. square letting this game basically die wrt advertising is what makes me suspect either of those, but i don't have any concrete facts on the matter.

regardless of what the cause is, the plot consistently ends up being the worst part of the game. a lot of character motivations just do not make sense or are unexplored. why does susukichi fight us to the death on w3d6 despite us having the same goal of stopping shiba? well, the game needed to end that day with a boss, so we have to fight susukichi even though he was literally trying to save us minutes before that. why does shiba want to destroy shibuya? and why did he want to destroy shinjuku? well, he was being manipulated by the Plot Twist Villain (PTV) and we never find out how he was able to convince shiba to do any of what he does in the game. and, of course, shiba isn't anything special himself, just being xemnas in battle and having an extremely generic personality. with PTV, at least i can describe him in some capacity. shiba is a nonentity as antagonists go.

speaking of PTV, why did he want to do any of what he does? and why do angels want to "purify" shibuya? how is shibuya impure? how was shinjuku impure? none of this goes answered, and it feels like a shin megami tensei game law ending in that the angels are appealed to for solving everything and then their power and authority go unquestioned despite them trying to invoke genocide. the difference is that SMT games acknowledge that law endings are hierarchical appeals to authority with pros and cons, sometimes often not even having the pros. this game. . . just paints that hierarchical authority as inherently moral and just. haz and joshua are complicit in the destruction of an entire city + want to destroy ANOTHER entire city, and i'm supposed to think that they're the good guys? the game doesn't answer so many important questions, and the secret reports don't even provide any important context for the angels or character motivations like they did in TWEWY. again, i don't care what caused the plot of this game to end up in the shape that it's in, this is just not a good story. and i know good characters save a bad story, but, as mentioned, i don't particularly like the main characters of the game.

the best parts of this game's story come entirely from moments that the first game earned. "neku" being a fake out for beat? all while "calling" plays? that's a great moment, maybe even one of my favorite ones in the entire game! the part where neku reunites with shiki and she starts crying because it's been years since she's seen him? again, fantastic moment that made me feel things, and it's all built on the backs of characters from the first game. so many of the first game's characters steal the spotlight here because the original characters just do not provide anything to work with. who is ayano and why am i supposed to feel sad that she dies? i barely got to see her prior to her death! i could not describe her with more than four adjectives if you put a gun to my head. the only new character that garners even a fraction of as much affection from me is shoka. was her joining the team and ultimately being swallow incredibly, extremely obvious from the getgo? yes, but the game gives her a lot of development and intrigue to work with. i can't say the same about any other NEO character, and that makes me sad.

as far as other nitpicks go, they're few and far between. i really strongly dislike the design of iris cantus alpha, because you basically have to use a specific build or you're just eating shit. i also really dislike how the superboss of this game is just leo cantus armo with 50% more HP and a shitload more damage resistance. considering that you'll see all that fight has to offer by the three minute mark, making it go on for 10-15 minutes is extremely tedious, even by square enix superboss standards. it'd also have been nice if the game gave you a way to have different decks for threads like it does with pins.

i think i've ultimately hammered all the points i really have to hit with this review. i so wanted to love this game, and, in some ways, i did. but it'd be extremely dishonest of me to omit how often in a first playthrough i was either frustrated or bored. pacing is a genuine problem in this game and the writing is undercooked. i adore this game in a "turn off your brain and listen to the music while you play this great combat engine" sort of way. the fact that i'm calling the plot of this game the worst part of the experience really is a shame, because, had it been better, i could see this being one of my favorite games of all time. this was a 5.0/5.0 OST combined with 5.0/5.0 gameplay dragged down by a 1.0/5.0 plot.