i feel like it's more of a 3.25 but i bumped it up. i really liked its atmosphere, art, and music but i feel like its short length and buggy gameplay holds it back A LOT. i played this with my friends so it made everything a bit more fun. the fandom is pretty cool and the fanart is nice. i was confused on why vince and rody didnt make out because that's all i saw in the fanart

gameplay:
- the lack of a back-facing sprite for rody was really confusing for me and the fact that you had to go to the bottom-right corner to clean up the plates was pretty annoying. the hitboxes for customers are odd as well. you can only give them their meals when you're right next to them instead of just.. the table..? and for tables of 4 you can take their orders all at once but not for tables of 2??
- getting nitpicky (or maybe a skill issue on my part), the highlighting of options sometimes wasn't very obvious and when i'm very quickly spamming z and trying to move immediately i didn't know if i took a table/order or not.
- (continuing nitpicky stuff from here on out) in my first playthrough i accidentally skipped over the first screen explaining the controls and had no idea you could sprint, which resulted in me losing a couple tables, not being able to afford the matches, and get ed1. but in game, there's literally no reason why you SHOULDN'T sprint so like ???? was there a point in making a sprint button?
- i only ever used the cologne and matches for ed3/4 and since you can only equip one item at a time, i didn't see a use for the other ones except for completion purposes. i feel like there should have been items or upgrades that, for example, let rody carry more than 1 dish or the kitchen process more dishes at once.
- i feel like rody's house or the back alley dumpster area could have been utilized more than just what they were designed for (saving, buying, dumping).
- there's a figure that appears outside rody's/vince's window but it's never explained.
- the fact that stealing from the cash register doesn't result in any consequences, or even getting mentioned is kinda weird.
- it's hard to tell if talking to vince or exiting the bistro to dump the trash takes up time, and overall the timer on the top right was just confusing and didn't really help since it was never explained.
- sometimes it was hard to tell who was talking because of the lack of names and/or colour coding (which they did in cold front).
- there are a... considerable amount of capitalization/punctuation errors but they didn't distract me TOO much. but since my friends and i were reading the dialogues out loud they were pretty hard to read at times.

story/characters:
it's.. okay for what it is. that infodump at the end of the "canon" 3rd ending was kinda overwhelming and left my friends and i just ????????? so yeah again, it would have benefitted from being longer. i also think the characters could have been fleshed out some more, i honestly wouldn't have minded any romantic development/ending branches based on dialog choices.
the endings aside from 3 end pretty abruptly and i was expecting an extra cg or two. it kind of left me wanting more than the credits rolling. <- another part that holds a ton of potential to be good but fell flat.
it felt like everything just started getting good, and then it ended.

tl;dr i think it's worth your time. a couple hours for a free game, some cool art, and nice music. watching someone play is reasonable too if you'd like a stress-free experience. gameplay and length/pacing are lackluster, but i'm looking forward to what they make next.

(TWEWY spoilers too)
There are some things I loved about this game and some things that kinda put me off. But all in all this is a solid game!

One thing I see a lot of people complain about are the new characters. I definitely think their "true" character is shown a lot more subtly than TWEWY and it never really centralizes on their development (or it's not really talked about for that long) because of the amount of characters in the game. For example, TWEWY focused on each partner each week, which probably made the player more attached to them and their development. But in NEO, there are teams bigger than just 2 so I think that was the main reason for the lack of focus on characters. However, I don't think that they are poorly written at all. I think this thread does a really good job of explaining the friendships in TWEWY vs. NEO

Art
I love you Tetsuya Nomura / Gen Kobayashi
I wasn't the biggest fan of the 3D models since the outlines look kind of sharp (in a bad way, not stylistically) but I guess it grew on me a little.
I don't care what anybody says Neku's NEO design is my favourite. He is a cutie patootie

The new music is amazing, one of my favourites being Insomnia <3
(I'm kinda pissed that not all TWEWY music carried over, especially Deja Vu which is my favourite song...)

I prefer the gameplay in this one over TWEWY. In general I think it's a lot more satisfying and fun. (the frame drops are crazy though on the switch)
One thing I vastly like over the original is the removal of the quests that use special pins (1/5/100/10000 yen pins, scarletite, dark matter, etc,) because it was really hard to keep track of them in the original.

The story... uhhh...
I felt like the last bit of the game went from 0-100 quick. It felt way too slow during the first half of the game and then shit goes down.

TWEWY characters: except for Sho, I really didn't like how they appeared so late into the game/too short of a time for any actual big impact. I did get a little emotional during Beat and Neku's reunion but dang was that pretty late into the game. I really wanted more story content for Neku, Beat, and Josh but that's just me being nitpicky.

closing:
fuck you square enix for not advertising neo enough btw. "wahhh we didn't reach sales expectations" THAT'S ON YOU MF!! this is why we're not going to get another game. squeenix kills its own games