Neo: The World Ends With You
We admit that stepping back onto Shibuya’s iconic scramble crossing is underwhelming at first. Given the presentational shift from 2D to 3D, you might reasonably assume you could roam Tokyo’s hippest district with a greater level of freedom, without fixed cameras or loading screens. But then as a followup to one of the most innovative JRPGs in recent generations, doing the expected isn’t really Neo: The World Ends With You’s style. Instead, developers Square Enix and HAND employ both 2D and 3D elements to ensure the unique look and feel from TWEWY’s 2007 handheld iteration remain intact on the big screen. Most striking are the wide-angle perspective of the city on the ground and the fish-eye interpretation of the towering buildings bending over you, giving the impression you’re looking up at the sky even though you don’t have control of the camera. It’s actually a style carried over from the top screen of the DS game, a small detail showing how Neo has a better understanding of its predecessor than its compromised single-screen Switch remix.
Despite lacking a numbered title – as a fresh chapter with a brand-new cast, this is comparable to Yakuza: Like A Dragon – Neo has a similar structure to the first game. Suddenly finding themselves trapped in the Underground (UG), a limbo plane of existence separate from the physical Realground (RG), Shibuya teens Rindo and Fret are forced to play a deadly game by its moody overseers the Reapers. Competing against rival players, the winning team at the end of the week has the chance to return to the RG – or to continue the cycle, as the unstoppable Ruinbringers would prefer – while permanent erasure hangs over the team at the bottom of the table. Survival mainly consists of eradicating hostile shapeshifting entities called Noise that populate the UG, which requires amassing an assortment of pin badges that are capable of unleashing various psychic powers.
It’s not all geared towards combat. Indeed, your team (called the Wicked Twisters) also starts with badges that awaken individual abilities; these can be used on the RG citizens of Shibuya, who are oblivious to your spectre. Eavesdropping on idle chatter, Rindo might pick up keywords that can be imprinted into someone’s else’s thoughts – for instance, to persuade the fellow blocking the gate you’re trying to get through to go for lunch. Fret has the power to remind people, literally jogging their memories back into focus. Later you team up with Nagi, a college student whose appearance has her often mistaken for a middle-schooler (she’d doubtless get along famously with Persona 5’s Futaba). Besides adding to your team’s firepower, she’s able to dive into people’s minds and cleanse the Noise that is plaguing them with toxic thoughts. Bearing the most weight on the narrative is Rindo’s ability to time-travel, which often leads to bemusement for his companions in the past. It’s not as nonlinear as it sounds, restricting you to a single location at specific times on the same day; not to mention that it’s only triggered by the plot as a kind of emergency override. While it would be generous to call any of these puzzles, apart from perhaps Fret’s fiddly stick-twiddling minigame, it nonetheless adds variety to the Reaper’s Game, which raises its own stakes as the player count is ruthlessly whittled down week after week.
Mechanically, the combat’s still where our minds are kept on highest alert, if only to make sense of it. Battles set TWEWY apart from other RPGs, with bespoke touchscreen actions activating a suite of psych powers. This USP has had to be rethought for Neo and the move to traditional controls: pins are simply assigned to button inputs, though there’s still variation, such as rapidly tapping face buttons or charging attacks with shoulder buttons and triggers. But where in the previous game multiple pins could be equipped by one character – not incidentally, an antisocial protagonist reluctant to cooperate with others – there’s a more explicit partybased approach here. Each Twister equips just one pin, to the extent that each input represents a party member, or perhaps a limb, since you’re controlling everyone’s movement and attacks at the same time, with everyone sharing the same health bar.
Initially, it’s as overwhelming as it sounds, and it’s easy to lose sight of party members amid the Noise (not helped by an occasionally erratic lock-on camera), yet it also makes combat more engaging than in action RPGs that are all too happy to leave it to the AI. It becomes a blessing when more party members join your ranks, each addition allowing for another input, and more options: you might opt to use a support pin instead of simply adding more firepower. While it’s tempting to mash all the buttons mindlessly or else conservatively deplete one pin’s gauge before moving on to the next, you’d be ignoring the Groove mechanic, which adds a sense of flow to the chaos similar to the original’s light-puck mechanic. Keeping up the same attack triggers an opportunity to perform a Beatdown by switching to a different pin. Connect this attack in time and it raises your Groove percentage, a super meter for activating powerful buffs and attacks, the more intense abilities reserved for those who can raise that percentage even higher. While rashly timed inputs risk leaving you vulnerable to dead air as you wait for the end of a cooldown, we soon find ourselves syncing to Neo’s rhythm: as Rindo mashes lightning bolts at Noise, we’ve been charging Nagi’s rocket barrage, ready to let loose for a Beatdown before letting Fret charge into the scrum.
For players struggling to parse the cacophony, there’s the option to dial down the difficulty, but there are greater incentives to crank things up a notch or two, such as choosing to take on Noise in waves, or reductions as they’re called here. It’s an efficient way to level up, and
It makes combat more engaging than in action RPGs that are all too happy to leave it to the AI
while Noise get stronger with each reduction, so does the multiplier for rarer drops. Pins can level up or even evolve based on how frequently they’re used, while you also need to consider the balance between different elements, cooldown times, and input types. But with hundreds of pins in the game, it’s best not to get too attached – particularly when a new pin has a vastly superior attack stat. And if you’re in the habit of eviscerating lots of Noise, you’ll amass a surplus that can be sold for money.
Disposable income is vital on Shibuya’s hyper-trendy streets, where all transactions are, of course, contactless. You’ll find all sorts of tasty cuisines to chow down, records to collect, and an eclectic selection of threads and pins. Even the most ostensibly frivolous activities have value, whether it’s raising stats or deepening your relationships with the locals (see ‘All connected’). By ditching the Bravery stat from the previous game, mostly a restriction on gender-specific clothing, there’s more freedom to mix and match threads for each character. That said, wardrobe changes don’t alter the character models, so it’s left to your imagination how Rindo might rock a maid outfit and knee-high boots. But given how eye-catching the individual get-ups are (we can’t help but admire the audacity of whoever gave one character a bodice to go over her suit-jacket-and-tie combo), far be it from us to mess with the designs.
While it takes time to unlock every part of the city, with some areas gated until you fulfil certain conditions from the Reaper standing guard and some days limited to specific areas of the map, the UG has also extended its reach. This Shibuya encompasses Harajuku to the north, including the shopping strip Takeshita Street and the kaleidoscopic Tokyu Plaza off the corner of Omotesando. Neo may take place three years after TWEWY, but it’s captured the city at its most contemporary, including new shopping locales such as the Parco building (home to Japan’s first official Nintendo store) at the top of Spain Hill and the Modi mall opposite Tower Records. It’s far from a 1:1 recreation, but each area’s layout and styles are gradually etched into memory the more we pass through the same streets as the game plays out. Like Kamurocho, Shibuya steadily feels less like a tourist spot and becomes closer to a second home – such that we begin to keep mental tabs for a real trip as soon as it’s feasible.
But Neo’s biggest strength is not virtual tourism but the depth of its characters and story. Both are brilliantly conveyed through dynamic manga-style panels, bolstered by stellar localisation that captures each personality, such as Nagi’s archaic otaku manner of speech. It’s not just the Twisters’ banter that is easy to warm to, either: the leaders of rival teams also leave a strong impression, even when you inevitably find yourselves fighting to the death. Even individual Reapers become relatable: not all are as antagonistic as their leader, who has an exasperating fondness for that most irritating of portmanteaus, “sheeple”. While the original Japanese title, Subarashiki Kono Sekai, translates as ‘It’s a Wonderful World’, the English name ultimately aligns better with the overriding message that a place is nothing without the people in it, so it’s only fitting that character designers Tetsuya Nomura, Gen Kobayashi and Miki Yamashita should get the honour of being credited on the title screen. Neo may not have the game-changing novelty of the original, but what a thrill it is to discover that, 14 years on,
TWEWY continues to march to its own beat.