Neo The World Ends With You
What does The World End With You mean to you?
You're looking at this review, so I have to assume it doesn't mean nothing. Maybe you had heard about it, and it seemed cool! Or maybe it is a game you have played all of the versions of, know all the pin evolutions by heart, and know all of the deep lore about the different planes of existence in TWEWY lore.
No matter where you are on that spectrum, you’re here now.
I suppose I should give where I am. It’s a game that I can thank for a lot of things. I, at one point, considered TWEWY one of my favorite games of all time. I still do, though it has progressively fallen out of my top 5. But it is a game that I consider a watershed moment for myself. When I was younger, I didn’t have many friends. It was hard for me to make them, and even harder to keep them. But I ended up making a friend from scouts when I was around 11, and he was quite a bit older than me. He was like a cool older brother who showed me all kinds of video games he downloaded onto his R4 card. I was always transfixed by what he is playing, but my memory has made it hard for me to really remember which games he was playing.
Such was not the case with The World Ends With You. I remember vividly where I was when I first saw the game. It was a summer camp out, and it was very hot. We were just relaxing as there was nothing going on, and he was playing his DS. This was not uncommon, so I looked over his shoulder and watched. It seemed so cool, and he kept hyping up how awesome it was. The gameplay, music, graphics, and overall style had me transfixed. I wanted to play it.
Problem is, I was 11, and had no money. I also didn’t know much about how to emulate stuff either. So, The World Ends With You remained a memory. About a year after that, my friend graduated high school and went to college. I haven’t seen him since.
Fast forward a couple years, and I am 14, not quite in high school. I happen to have some money, and randomly decide to see how much The World Ends With You is, and find it is somewhere in the ballpark of $20. I was shocked to see it so cheap (my friend assured me that it was going to get rare someday) and bought it right away. I played it through, and it surpassed every possible expectation. I loved it.
But I have to thank The World Ends With You for a lot more than just being a great game. At this point in my life, most of my video game consumption was western AAA games on the Xbox 360. I played them and had some amount of fun, but I wasn’t passionate about many of them. The World Ends With You was, for me, something new and different. I knew that I loved EarthBound (which has remained my favorite game of all time) but my video game preference at the time was basically exclusively Nintendo first party games and games not unlike Call of Duty. The World Ends With You was new and different for me. It taught me to try and seek out other Japanese video games. RPGs at first, because that’s what I love, but I ended up falling in love with so many games that I didn’t love before. Games like Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, and (some) Final Fantasy games are now some of my favorites of all time. Check the games I have listed at a 5, please. It is better than trying to continue explaining my taste in games.
So the short of it: I love The World Ends With You, and appreciate what it did for me as a person who was learning what she liked from video games.
And then they made a sequel.
I’m now 22. I’m not a teenager anymore. I was concerned if a new The World Ends With You could possibly live up to my expectations. I was scared that they would make a sequel and my opinion would just be “well, TWEWY was cool, this one wasn’t for me.” I saw they had a demo and was a mixture of excited and nervous to give it a try.
By the time the demo ended, I was happily surprised. It was fun! Not fantastic, and it has a lot to prove still, but my anxiety was eased, and I let myself get mildly excited for it.
Release day comes and I buy it. I’m excited to finally play more, and over the course of a few weeks, I finally finish. At the time of writing, I just saw credits. What I found left me bafflingly happy.
TWEWY is a game that was built for the DS, and every attempt to move it from the DS was folly. They ‘work’ but are no way to play the game. However, those versions at least had a touchscreen to mimic that gameplay. NTWEWY is an entirely controller-based game, so that was not an option. I don’t know how they did it, but they took an experimental action game with a focus on dual screen gameplay focused around on multitasking and were able to translate that faithfully to a controller. Pass the puck works. The gameplay is extremely fun and engaging. The story is extremely anime and kind of dumb, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have never had reactions to story moments as I have in this game.
I will never forget the cast of Neo The World Ends With You. Fret and Nagi are both caricatures at first, but they do not remain that way. They have thoughts and feelings I never expected. The party dynamic with the whole group is fantastic. I would love to play side story with all of the characters just hanging out and living in the world. I didn’t think a new game in the TWEWY franchise (and it’s very strange to think it’s a franchise now) would make me feel this way as my teenage years have passed me by.
I went in expecting Neo The World Ends With You to be a fun trip down memory lane, revisiting a game that I haven’t played through in full since launch. What I got was so much more, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
