So The World Ends with You was this pretty good DS game. I remember liking it. I remember exactly nothing about it though because it’s been so long since I’ve played it, and I never replayed it. It was 14 years ago, pretty long time to wait to make a direct sequel, but there you go.

So there was a big pause in-between posts because… this game is fucking long. And I wanted to finish it before I reviewed it, and… yeah I’m not happy about actually doing that.

Let’s talk about why I didn’t like this 😀

Developer and Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: July 27th 2021 (PC version later)
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4 (Switch version played)
Genre: Action RPG/talking simulator

So I guess I need to start with the story because there’s a bunch to say about it. I will try to avoid spoilers as much as possible. So if you played the original TWEWY 14 years ago and never replayed it, you may end up being a bit lost unless you have impeccable memory. Let’s say you skipped the Final Mix version of the game, that version apparently has setup for this game’s story… so even if you remember the original game from 14 years ago, there’s some plot that you’re missing unless you played the latest version of the game. Why? Stories should be as self-contained as possible. I will say, for me, there’s some parts at the end that I was wondering if I missed something, and yes, I missed a whole other version of the game with shittier controls than the DS original. And even then, there’s some things I’m pretty sure had no setup at all.

So you play as Rindo and his friend Fret. Despite not dying, they end up in the Reapers’ Game, which is a bit different than in the first game. It’s a bit different this time, as players can join teams and gain points, and after 7 days the winning team gets a wish granted while the last team gets erased. Rindo and Frey form the Wicked Twisters to participate in the game. So things are a bit different than in the first game. It still takes place in Shibuya, so some of the Reapers and even a couple Players are from the original game. But there’s obviously lots of new characters. Namely there’s a whole new group of Reapers, that seemingly come from Shinjuku, an area that was wiped out in a previous game. So 2/3rds of the game is spent with the Wicked Twisters trying to perform in the game to win against the top team, the Ruinbringers. They’re a team that wish every weak for the game to continue, so it just… keeps going. Without going too much into spoilers, it ends up being a lot about the Reapers that came from Shinjuku, and what they’re planning in Shibuya, with the game getting a huge somewhat darker tone shift for the last third-ish of the game. Questions about how players that didn’t die are in the Reapers’ Game, what these weird birds in the sky are, why Rindo can turn back time (actually all the main characters have some unique power) and such stuff.

There’s some big issues with the story here. I already mentioned the setup for some late-game things in the Final Mix version of the first game, which fans of the original would likely miss unless they double-dipped. But there’s way more. Specifically there’s stuff that just happens with no logical explanation. Specifically the end of week 2 is grade A bullshit. There’s also something really crazy and out of nowhere that happens just before the ending that has literally not a single bit of buildup, it just happens and resolves things for free, which is the biggest instance of at least 3 instances of deus ex machina (in a very literal sense here). If you start asking questions about how this story works, it starts breaking. Maybe some parts are a bit more explained if you play the Final Mix, but I gotta say… I doubt it. Also there’s this one just broken chapter where you time travel to save someone, but you don’t, do it again, and time travel again… really random, but it’s because the writers wanted that to happen. And one other issue is that this game has SO MUCH TALKING, where probably more than half the game is spent reading dialogue… but you could easily cut out, like, half the script and still have the exact same plot with the exact same events.

One quick thing I will note is that the localization is ass. In the few places where there’s voice acting (which I did put in japanese because it’s a japanese game that takes place in japan), the translation isn’t even close. So I have to assume all the game is badly translated trash. Yay!

So that’s the story, time to get to the gameplay! After all, a game with a bad story can still be amazing if the gameplay is solid. So you’d hope that was the case with NEO TWEWY. But it’s not! Oops.

One of the big problems is the game flow. The basics are very simple: read some dialogue, go to the exact spot the game is telling you to go, read more dialogue, sometimes fight, rinse and repeat. In-between dialogue segments, you can scan the area, so you’ll see icons in the area that represent noise, which are mostly what you fight in the game. You can gather these icons, and the more icons you gather, the longer the fight you’ll get (and the better drop rates, though a noise will never drop more than one pin). This ends up being really monotonous, really fast. This game is beyond linear, it hardly has anything even resembling exploration. It won’t even let you go to an area of the game if you’re not meant to be there… and there’s hardly any areas to go to anyways so it’s not like there’d be a point to exploration beyond going to stores you want.

To not help with the monotony, Rindo has the power of time travel. Basically, when you get to a certain point of the story in some chapters, things take a bad turn and Rindo goes back in time to fix things so they can do better. This sounds like it could be interesting. It’s not! How time travel works is that the game give you one time on during that chapter you can go to, in a menu. So you go to that time. Most of the time you talk to someone (sometimes you’ll get a fight), then you press Y, get to the time travel menu again, the time you went to greys out so you can’t go back to that, and a new one pops up for you to go to and read dialogue again in… keep going until you stop getting new times to go to, then click the final button to get to the dialogue reading of the rest of the chapter… Basically, time travel is nothing gameplay-wise. Good job devs.

So outside of battles, there’s a few very small things you can do. Some chapters have 2-3 sidequests. The “Thoughts” menu will tell you where those sidequests are. There’s stores. Some of them sell equipment, and some are restaurants. Most of the equipment is ass, you will see the stat changes though so you can determine if a piece of equipment will be good for you. Equipment does as you’d expect of course, though there is one stat that’s a bit weird, that being Style. Essentially every piece of equipment has a special ability to it (I think), and you only activate that ability if the character it’s equipped to has a high enough style stat. Those abilities can be extra stat boosts, or powering up equipment based on brand and such. I just went with the best stats (unless there was a “Jinxed” ability on the equip). Restaurants are actually how you level up. You actually get HP from normal level ups, but nothing for the other stats. Food gives you the other stats (and some more HP). Each meal has different stats they give, and each character has a preference of food. They’ll eat anything, but if they eat something they REALLY like they’ll have a chance for bonus stat boosts (including a rare boost to drop rate which is quite useful). Every piece of food fills up your fullness gauge. If you’re above 100% when you get into a restaurant you can’t eat there, if you’re below you can (and you can get well above 100%)… sort of. If you go above 100%, you’ll have to wait until the gauge is back down to 0% if you want to eat again.. Fullness goes down as you fight, so fighting is very useful. It takes a lot of battles to recover fullness, especially when you’re well above 100%. So you do want to fight a lot. Partly for levels, partly for cash (you main money-maker is selling duplicate pins), and for reducing

There’s a social link kinda thing here. You get this skill tree-ish thing of nodes. Using friendship points (which you get from doing sidequests or continuing the story normally), you can activate the nodes that you have a connection to, which will give you some bonus things. Sometimes it’s just items, sometimes it increases the menu at restaurants, some let you equip 2 pins of the same button (extremely useful) and other such things. There’s not really any strategy to this here, as the game will have nodes available at specific moments of the game, and some connections only happen at specific points as well. Some connections require certain conditions as well. Every shop employee, for example, requires you to get to VIP level 3 (you get more VIP levels, I think, through using equipment and pins of that store’s brand), and restaurants require you to order from them 3 times. And every sidequest is also a node. The sidequests are really boring, usually just talking to someone.

Combat is… not great. Basically the characters equip pins that allow them to use one attack, and that’s what they’ll do in battle. Each pin has a specific button it will work on, and at first each button can only be equipped once (so you won’t be able to use 2 Y button pins for most of the game). So in battle, you start by controlling Rindo. Pressing a button that you have a pin equipped to will switch to the character that pin is equipped to. This is real-time combat, where enemies kinda move around freely, and so do your characters. Individual characters don’t have HP, HP is fully shared as one HP meter for your whole party. You have minor control over the one you last press the button for, as well as the ones you have charging attacks on. You can dodge, which mostly just dodges with the character you’re currently controlling. Attacks from enemies CAN hit the characters you’re not currently controlling, but the damage will generally not be as high. After a few uses, a pin will stop working and you’ll have to wait a good 5-10 seconds for it to reload. This is a really ass element in this case because you spend most of combat just waiting for your pins to refresh, which is anti-fun. Getting to specific parts of an attack/combo initiates a beatdrop. This puts a round meter on the enemy, so a character other than the one that initiated it hitting the enemy will give you some percentage of Groove meter. Groove meter, at first, gives you a super attack (based on whoever did a beatdrop combo last) if you get it to 100%. At some point it becomes able to get to 200%, which just does an even stronger super attack. Then at some point it goes up to 300%, which launches an attack where your characters fly up and shoot missiles at the enemies from above, and then your party fully heals.

So the problem with the combat is that it’s button-mashing. Oops. So it seems like there’d be strategy, right? With timing beatdrop combos and dodging and stuff… Nah. When you start battle, you’ll generally start charging your characters with L and R pins, and almost immediately start mashing the X and Y pins. Let go of your charges kinda whenever, and you’ll kinda automatically get Groove from mashing and randomly launching your charges. After 2 battles I realized how easy this was so I went on hard mode, and mashing continued working… up until around chapter 20 (there’s basically 21 chapters, though the last one repeats a few times). There’s other issues in combat, like the camera angle being shit, the camera moving around wildly when you kill a target and it auto-targets someone else, or when you’re targeting something that’s moving fast. There’s some cases where you can’t see shit. And when you get more characters and the ability to equip more than one pin from one button, combat gets EVEN EASIER. I mean, a new character means a ton more HP and an extra pin doing even more attacks. It’s almost unfair to the enemies that you have so much shit flying about.

There’s one specific battle near the end where… I mean, you still have to mash buttons, and dodge decently, but it’s just broken as hell. It has this one wide-swinging punch that sucks and is easy to dodge when you know how ridiculous its area of effect is. It’s an attack that hits you once, but the hitbox is broken to shit where a hit may randomly hit you twice and kill you in one shot. And since it’s a 2-stage boss, if you die in the second stage you have to redo it, and the second stage is even worse than the first with a specific attack that’s just broken to all hell. There’s a moment where you need to go to specific spots of the battlefield to dodge an attack, but if you’re locked on to the boss (which you usually should be) you can’t see the objects you need to hide behind and very easily get stuck on them trying to move back. This battle is what broke the camel’s back for me. My impressions of the game went from “this is okay-ish but it needs something to improve the combat at least” to “this game is shit” from this one boss battle. To me it kinda highlighted everything that wasn’t good about the combat.

This game is long as shit. They could’ve easily cut a lot of the days and the story would be largely unchanged. A lot of it feels like filler. I was just TIRED of this game like halfway through, but it just kept going. If the combat and game flow wasn’t so monotonous, I’d be okay with the length… but it is, so… eh.

I don’t really have much else to say about this game. The combat is so simplistic, the game flow is just… nothing… And there’s not much to do outside of reading dialogue and fighting if you feel like it. If you’re okay with the story itself being broken to shit, you can at least enjoy that part, and that might be what people like about the game, specifically the characters. I do wish more characters than Shoka and Fret got any kind of development, but if it removed the filler-y-ness of so much of the game, and actually built up to certain things instead of just doing straight Deus Ex Machina, there’s definitely something here.

Overall

This game… I really wanted to like it, because I remember really liking the first one. I finished this game, did all the “main game” sidequests (there’s some extra content after) and I was not happy about this game at all.

For most of the game my impression of this stupid game was “this is okay, I wish there was a bit more to it”, but there never really is more to it. Then there’s a single boss fight (one of the final-ish ones) that just tanked this game for me. There’s something fucky about this battle system when you get a more “designed” boss fight where, say, hitboxes that might work okay-ish normally just don’t and you get double-hit by single-hit attacks and die instantly because lol, and that’s not to mention how boring the combat is most of the time anyways.

The time travel element is just “press Y, press A where the game tells you, then talk to someone, rinse and repeat until chapter done”, it’s not fun. There’s not even decisions to take at all, just talk to someone, sometimes get a battle, and that’s that. And considering most of the game is just reading conversations, it gets pretty boring when the main interesting thing story-wise is linearly clicking through menus and reading more conversations.

The story is filled with really heavy contrivances and, eventually, really massive literal deus ex machina. Most things seem to happen just… because the writers wanted them to happen, with not really any mechanical reason why it should. I like some of the characters, which is one of this game’s few saving graces, Shoka is fun, as is Nagi sometimes (though she gets not development which kinda sucks). The weird need to both have played the previous 14 year-old game (specifically the Final Mix version because that has setup for this game) to properly follow some part of the plot (mostly near the end of the game) is pretty ass as well.

The game does look good, no problem with the graphics at all, it’s colorful and there’s some cool designs both for monsters and characters. So there’s some positive! Also not a big fan of the soundtrack but I know people do like it a lot. I dunno, game music that has lyrics during gameplay and dialogue kinda bothers me unless it’s a turn-based RPG.

Unfortunately I can’t recommend this game. At all. Better RPGs came out this year, just buy Monster Hunter Stories 2 and be happy.