Neo: The World Ends With You
A JRPG that’s psyched to be here
Fourteen years after a handheld classic was released, a true sequel finally hits the town. However, for PlayStation fans joining in the Reaper’s game for the first time, the onboarding process is less than smooth.
Wait, let us rewind a bit. The first The World Ends With You (or TWEWY) is a JRPG that brings an urban fantasy twist to being a teenager tearing around town at the weekend. Sequel Neo picks up some years later with a new cast of teens cordoned off on their own plane of reality and trapped in the same mysterious Reaper’s game. The price of entry is your life and the stakes only get higher from there. Win the game and you’ll have one wish – any wish – granted. Lose and you’ll be erased from existence. It’s not all bad, though, as entry grants you psychic powers to aid you in solving cryptic daily missions. As you might suspect, being cut off from the real world is the least of these teens’ troubles; when playing with any psychopomp, chances are good that the game is rigged.
To survive the week and claw your way back to a plane of reality you recognise, you’ll do all the things a typical teen might do with their chums in Shibuya. Going shopping, stuffing your face, vibing to your own playlist – these activities don’t just sell the fantasy but also offer mechanical benefits as you fight against other Players of the Reaper’s game, and your common enemy, the Noise.
PSYCHIC DAMAGE
While the urban fantasy stylings are distinctive, TWEWY also stands out in the crowded JRPG genre thanks to its battle systems. After the lauded double-screen action of the first game (and the Nintendo Switch port’s flattening of that beloved system), Neo reinvents the formula for the big screen to wonderful effect. This time teamplay is
A new cast of teens cordoned off on their own plane of reality.
strongly encouraged, with your active party growing big enough to annoy restaurants as you progress, ushering in a new, rather hectic, battle system that makes use of all of them at once.
For starters, there are no random encounters. Instead you can scan an area with u and invite the Noise to attack. You can chain them together for bigger rewards and a tougher challenge. As you battle through Shibuya, you pick up a veritable corkboard of power-bestowing pins. The more you fight, the stronger the pins get. Equip one to a party member and its powers are mapped to a face or shoulder button, ready for plenty of tactical tapping all over the DualShock. Strategy takes the form of managing ability cooldowns against timing your attacks to charge up a super meter. Every pin has particular conditions for triggering a beat drop – a window of opportunity during which, if another party member strikes an enemy, you gain Groove to put towards triggering a variety of heavy-hitting area-of-effect attacks.
Battles can go from breezy encounters to drag-out fights if you don’t pay attention, though upon defeat you can quickly rearrange your pin board before giving it another go. You’re constantly levelling up pins and switching up your loadout, making for dynamic bust-ups against a slew of colourful creatures. As you learn new tricks, so too do enemies, keeping you on your toes.
Combat remains fresh throughout many hours of hurtling around Shibuya because of how often you’re encouraged to switch things up – not just in terms of your pin loadout but difficulty too, which you’re encouraged to tweak. Having a hard time? There’s no shame in popping onto easy mode to batter that one boss. Up for a challenge? Bump things up to hard mode, lower your party’s level, and net that loot.
INSTA-WORTHY
The battle system’s flexibility is a large part of the appeal. As levelling up only increases your health, between bust-ups you need to scarf down food from Shibuya’s eateries to bolster your other stats. What you wear matters too, with garments bestowing abilities from health regeneration to extending the duration of status effects – but you’ll need heaps of Style to pull that look off. All right then, it’s back to that cute little veggie place that just opened up near Tower Records!
There are far more wrinkles to the loop than we have room to cover that, much like Shibuya’s best attractions, are well worth investigating for yourself. For instance, tying neatly into the game’s themes, your friends are your power in and out of battle. What would be the same boring old skill tree anywhere else is here recontextualised as your expansive ‘Social Network,’ where connecting with chums grants you even more ways to switch up the action.
The connections you make and how those friendships expand your inner life is literally the name of the game, so it only makes sense for Neo to introduce plenty of new faces. Relatably indecisive protagonist
This time teamplay is strongly encouraged, ushering in a new, rather hectic, battle system.
Rindo and his bestie Fret begin as a lovable pair of idiots fumbling through the initial heats of the Reaper’s game. They are joined by Nagi, a young woman with an overwhelming obsession and an endearingly ostentatious manner of speech (you can probably guess which character is this reviewer’s favourite). Each quickly endears themselves despite archetypal characterisation. This is in part due to expressive character art, but also to dialogue that boasts all the pop and verve of how we thought the really cool kids spoke in our youth.
OPEN YOUR MIND
And then there’s the endgame where this new party takes a backseat to the returning cast and their loose threads. Don’t get us wrong, tension does flare between the initial trio, and Rindo eventually makes his mind up, but the beginnings of appealing arcs are starved of oxygen in later acts. What’s worse is just how disparate the threads that Neo tasks itself with tying off are: some originate from the Switch port and don’t appear in the original DS release or the anime adaptation (which we’d encourage you to watch if this is your first TWEWY rodeo). Sounds confusing? It is! There’s no easily accessible recap, despite there being a handy chapter select after you clear the game for all the stuff you’ve missed just in Neo. It’s still worth playing if you’re not already familiar with TWEWY as a series but there’s no getting away from its status as a sequel as the week winds down.