malvasia bianca

When NEO: The World Ends with You was released, I was surprised at its existence and not particularly interested in the game. I’d played the original The World Ends with You back when it came out almost a decade and a half ago; my memory was that it was a stylish game, with an odd control scheme that wasn’t completely unworkable but also wasn’t anything you’d want to build on, and that the control scheme depended on the specifics of how input worked on the DS. So I wasn’t unhappy to have played through the original and was glad that weird games like that exist, but it certainly wasn’t the sort of game that I would expect to get a sequel. And even when it did get a sequel, I didn’t have fond enough memories of the original game to make me actually want to play the sequel.

Occasionally, though, I would hear the sequel come up in podcasts in a way that made me pay attention. Not in a way that made me think that everybody would want to play the game; but, for some people, it seemed like it could be a pretty important game for them? So there was something there; it still wasn’t clear to me if I was the sort of person that the sequel would really click with, but at least it seemed like a worthwhile experiment, a game that was poking at an unusual bit of the design space and doing a good job of that.

I still didn’t rush out and play NEO TWEWY immediately, but I did at least add it to my backlog. It stayed there for a while, and actually didn’t sink out of sight as quickly as I expected it to: something about it was tickling away at me. But then I was in a gaming funk after bouncing off of Elden Ring; as I’d go down my backlog, and see game after game that I was afraid would remind me of Elden Ring in one way or another. But then I came down to NEO TWEWY, and it seemed like a good antidote: it seemed like it would have a plausible chance of being joyful in a way that would make me feel better, I’d enjoy the style, and wandering around a fictionalized Shibuya has been known to make me very happy.

And, indeed, it was a pleasant change of place. Good style, good music, pleasant story, yay Shibuya, and it didn’t require too much brainpower. Though, having said that, there was enough to its combat that I didn’t mind playing through it, and in fact I did a decent amount of optional battling.

The combat in the sequel is quite a bit more normal than the combat in the original game, but it was still odd enough to make me feel like it belonged in the same series. You’re constantly coming across pins, and you equip each party member with a pin that determines the character’s combat capabilities.

The pins also determine the button assignment for combat: each pin is associated with a button (square, triangle, R1, etc.). So the details of what each button does is constantly changing, and in fact which buttons you’re using at all is constantly changing. I’d find myself, for example, occasionally mashing away at the triangle button before remembering that I didn’t actually have any triangle pins equipped and that I’d been completely ignoring my R2 pin.

Also, some pins respond to single button presses while others want you to press and hold a button; and each pin can only be used a certain number of times before needing to take a few seconds to recharge. That, combined with a combo mechanic, means that you have to think a bit about when you want to be pressing a button and when to hold off. And each pin levels up for a bit but then maxes out, so you’re contantly swapping out pins, meaning that the rhythm of what you’re doing changes.

None of this is rocket science, and honestly I was just mashing away at buttons a lot of the time. (Well, mashing away until my pins needed to recharge, and then I’d wander around dodging for a while, and then when my pins came back online, I’d resume my mashing.) But still, the combat definitely was a change of pace, there were some enemy types that required a bit more thought (and attention paid to dodging), and the pin collection and leveling up was a sort of low-pressure collectathon that I enjoy.

So: definitely a good choice of game for me to play. A quite pleasant game on its own merits, and it also worked quite well to help me create some distance from Elden Ring, the two games really don’t have very much in common.

And then, somewhat to my surprise, the plot started to grow on me. In the beginning, it was just a set of relatively undistinguished JRPG protagonists; maybe if I’d actually remembered the people from the original TWEWY, I might have cared a bit more about one or two of them, but probably not? And they were placed in pleasant but unremarkable plot about forming a team to rack up points in a game where, at the end of the week, the team with the lowest number of points was killed.

While I didn’t care much about the characters, I will say that, right from the beginning, I was glad that the game was located in Shibuya. Familiar locations, and then a little bit of a surprise when I went to areas of Shibuya that weren’t in Tokyo Mirage Sessions or Persona 5. (I hope that I make it back to Tokyo soon enough that I’ll still have some memories of the geography as presented in this game!)

And that, I think, provided a hook for me to start caring about the plot of the game. Because it turns out that it’s not just your protagonist and their team that are fighting for their lives: the people in charge of the game are in fact trying to destroy all of Shibuya. And that gets the protagonist and their team fighting for something larger than themselves; and it turns out that some, and then a lot, of the people who are running the game aren’t super comfortable with what’s going on either.

So, in the second and especially the third week, the plot morphs from focusing on localized concerns to unfolding and developing a growing web of social interconnections. Social interconnections between people who had been fighting each other, and who are still trying to figure out if they can trust each other, but who are starting to realize that, yes, they can and should be fighting together for something larger than themselves. And also they’re realizing that they care about each other quite a bit as well.

On that note, I like how the way the city is represented as a web of connections, and that all the people you meet and have significant encounters with also get represented as a network on a level up screen: this reinforcing of that metaphor worked well for me.

It all came together in a quite satisfying way in the end. Over the top battles in a way that is entirely traditional in a JRPG, but the stakes felt like they were earned. There’s a second ending that I didn’t feel like grinding to reach, because, reading through a guide, it really did seem like a lot of grinding, but I was tempted; heck, as they kept on talking about bits from the original, I was even tempted to replay remake of the first TWEWY. (I haven’t, and I don’t think I will, but maybe?)

And: yay for joy, yay for art, yay for caring. These are important parts of my life; it makes me happy to play a game that they are important parts of as well.