Neo: The World Ends with You Coming to PS4/5 and Switch | July 27th 2021

[Salamander]

9 hours ago, Son-icka said:

And Despite squares usual off the cuff naming conventions, I am surprised they didn’t slap the game with a number 2 on it. But what does NEO stand for with this games title exactly? Next. Evolution. Of?

I can't stop thinking about how it's basically just a classier version of "New!  The World Ends With You".

[Sonicka]

This is one of those really annoying cases where this feels like the game is for the switch platform… but ultimately it will obviously just run better on higher spec hardware.

…That being said having looked at both versions there isn’t actually that much of a difference. Either it’s optimised very well on Switch, or it was designed with that platform in mind first then upscaled/ported to the other consoles. 

The PS4 version runs at a better frame rate for sure, but visually there isn’t really much in it due to the graphical stylings of the game. The aliasing is oddly a lot more jaggy and noticeable on PS4 compared to the softer look on switch - but it certainly wins out in handheld mode - the game just seems designed to be played like this. 

However…  the FPS is uncapped on switch so it does run above 30FPS… but it appears to hit 60FPS more often on PS4. But then the cutscenes also have that low frame rate animation styling as well so…

Agh, decisions. 

 

[Nix]

Alright, so thanks to SE shitting the bed with their pre-orders, I managed to get the game 10 days early. I've made some pretty good headway into the game's main story, so I thought I'd talk about the game for a bit. I'll try not to spoil too much story-wise.

The short of it is that I'm really liking the game. Was it worth the 14 year wait? Probably not, but this game is basically the best we could've hoped for I think.

I think so far the best quality that this game has is its writing. In that regard, this game really hasn't skipped a beat. All the characters, both new and returning are quirky and endearing, and the way they bounce of eachother in conversations has me grinning ear to ear constantly. Rindo certainly makes a better first impression than Neku, but ultimately what made Neku endearing by the end was the dramatic character development he underwent. Rindo is a bit more static so far; he has his own problems to work through sure, but there really hasn't been much for him in terms of personal growth yet.

Gameplay wise, this game is honestly a fairly standard action RPG? You control multiple characters at once with each character being assigned to a different button depending on which Pin you have equipped. So far I've only had 4, but some official screenshots show up to 6 Pins at a time, so I suspect the party is gonna get bigger soon? Maybe multiple pins on each character? I dunno. Your party members can be damaged when you're not controlling them, but they've done a fairly decent job at dodging attacks on their own so it really isn't that big of a deal. The main gimmick of the gameplay is the groove meter where you have to switch between different characters' attacks to build it up. It captures the addictive nature of passing the Light Puck from the first game fairly well; setting up combos and experimenting with different Pins to build even bigger combos is still a lot of fun. The game steadily introduces new features to the groove meter as well, giving you the chance to build meter even faster with better timing and the ability to build up even more meter for bigger attacks.

There's also this giant fucking social board where you spend friendship points to unlock bonuses and stuff. It's where you get your easy and hard modes, unique clothes and food from certain vendors, and some new minor abilities like being able to jump over fences and small ledges.

The game's performance is super uneven on the Switch though. In handheld mode it isn't too bad; it's rough at times but managable overall. Docked has been a significantly worse experience.

Also, the soundtrack is fire; can't wait to get it in the mail.

[KHCast]

edit: Nevermind. Turns out the Sora leak was fake lol

 

[KHCast]

 I did a 12 hour stream yesterday playing the game, and am only apparently 5% done. Damn this is gonna be a meaty game lol. As for a quick early impressions, I’m fucking loving it. Doing Combo’s feels so satisfying and seamless, I’m really enjoying all the characters and their interactions, and everything is so stylish! 

[Salamander]

It took me over a month, but I got 100% completion.  This is a meaty, meaty game.  A lot of the meat is on the side, though - if you wanted to just beat the game without bothering with anything optional, I suspect the game wouldn't take you all that long at all.  But when you're going for every drop on every difficulty, every book, pin, thread, and food, every sidequest, every social network unlock...  And that's not even starting on the fact that, as a veteran of the first game, I felt obliged to play practically the entire game at Hard difficulty, Level 1.

My relationship to the first game is probably pretty typical.  I was absorbed by that game.  I beat that to 100% too, I'm pretty sure.  Thing is: That was over a decade ago.  I remember the broad beats of the plot and style, but when I've gone looking back over footage of the original it's been essentially unrecognisable.  As such, it's a little difficult for me to judge NEO as a sequel, in some respects.  I can't really say how well it measures up on gameplay and story, objectively; only how well it measures up to what I remember the first game being.  Measuring up to nostalgia is pretty tough!  And so it's a mark of distinction that NEO more or less achieves this.

Aesthetically, at least, there's no doubting that the game carries the day.  NEO looks amazing - to be clear, I'm not talking about performance, if I cared about that I wouldn't be playing on the Switch.  But this game has style in spades.  I struggle to think of any other contemporary RPG that's so colourful, so funky, so original in its character designs, so modern.  I'd say that the world of TWEWY overall really embraces the postmodern side of modernity, brimming with different fashion aesthetics and musical genres, bursting with advertisements and individual voices and expression.  The original TWEWY was an electric shock to RPGs at the time; and it doesn't really feel like there's been anything like it again until NEO.  This sense of the modern is helped out by a phenomenal localisation in which characters talk casually, in slang, ebonics, memes, irony, everyone their own person - but unlike other self-reflexive modern works, it's so sincere.  I wouldn't say every character is perfectly-realised, but the game tries to give them all soul.

Moving onto the story: This is the part of the game I was most cautious about, and while in general I would say it comes through - the finale is excellent - then I also think it's the part of the game with the most failings.  The characters spend the first third, maybe two-thirds of the game not really seeming to take their situation seriously - it's something of a contrast to the high emotional drama I remember from the original game, right from the start (though perhaps I'm being unfair, as that's just a decade-old impression).  Speaking of the original, I think NEO's relationship to the original game is also something of a failing; I don't think it's really a spoiler to say that a number of characters from the previous game return, and this I think is the game's biggest misstep, as I just don't feel that what it brings to the table feels like a worthy addition to these characters' completed story.  By the end I could tell that the developers really wanted to tie deeply into the original and revisit its characters, as much for themselves as for cheap appeals to nostalgia, and that helped somewhat; but overall, I would have been quite happy to have left the past characters out.  This is especially the case given that the teasers to this game that have been included in various new versions of the original TWEWY over the years end up not really amounting to much - probably because NEO's plot hadn't actually been written at the time, and a lot of what had been anticipated by the devs of, say, Final Remix ended up being changed.

However...  That aside, I'm satisfied with the game's plot.  I think it's a little too in love with the idea of expanding the world's lore rather than telling a story driven by character and theme, but it's not like there's no character and theme there; the game's characters are great, they're all multidimensional, and often quite refreshing.  What I mean by that is that I have to give credit to a game where your sole female party member for much of the game is frankly weird; it's really unusual and rather cheering as a result.  There are a few scenes where characters basically just exposit their whole backstory at us, and it's not a great success.  But the game's finale is solidly character-driven and theme-driven, and, without wanting to give too much away, the final boss manages to feel like a period mark to the game's themes rather than, say, a cackling baddie (which it could so easily have been).

Anyway, onto the thing you'll be doing for most of the game, gameplay.  Yeah, that.  The big idea the developers had is that, since they couldn't really give you a line-up of six different attacks to be chosen via the touch-screen, instead they assign each attack to a button.  Combat is a mixture of dodging enemies whilst switching from button to button, exchanging attacks whilst minding your cooldown.  Each pair of buttons is tied to a particular type of button-press (X and Y are rapid-tap, R and L are charge-and-release, ZR and ZL are hold), and each pin you get is bound to a particular button, limiting your options at any one time but also making it easier to remember and manage what you can do.  Each attack has a certain effect which can trigger a beat-drop, which put simply gives you a window to follow up with a different attack to build up a meter; build your meter high enough, and you can unleash even more powerful attacks on the battlefield.  It's super-chaotic at first, but once it clicks, battle becomes an elegant ballet of moving from combo to combo to combo to super attack.  ...Most of the time, anyway.  There are a few missteps - a chameleon enemy which is a right pain to target, and the final boss really is just chaotic - but for the most part, once you get how it works, you can develop extraordinary skill.  Like I said, I played as much of the game as I was allowed on Hard difficulty with my level turned down to 1 - and most of it felt easy.  Even the superboss, on the highest difficulty and at the lowest level, feels surprisingly manageable once you understand how it works.  On that note, enemy variety isn't quite as high as in the first game, I think, but there are a number of new types with new gimmicks which require special treatment and keep battles interesting.

Other technical stuff: I did start getting glitches towards the end of the game.  Characters sometimes loaded in the wrong position, or with their models bent in half, at the start of battle; I once had an enemy get stuck, possibly partly in a wall, in a state in which it could neither attack, die, nor build my meter, forcing me to restart; a couple of perfectly ordinary lategame battles took an absurdly long time to load - say a minute or two compared to the usual few seconds; and I also encountered a glitch where, during a series of battles I was continually losing and retrying in, a certain attack's effects started getting bigger and bigger with each restart until they more or less filled the screen.  Apparently the superboss is super-buggy, too, though I didn't encounter that.  Lastly, right after I beat the game on 100%, right after I got the secret ending, right after I saved for the final time, never to play again - the game crashed and closed itself on me.  Poetic, in a way.

In conclusion, this game is amazing and essentially the sequel I was waiting for.  If you're on the fence: Get it.

[KHCast]

Spoiler

Can I just say, I appreciate how this games story actually gives a focus on the alternate universes and what happens to those versions of the characters when Ren leaves? It always annoyed me how time travel stories often times never acknowledged that story aspect of them. Like to have even the current versions of the characters outside Ren trip out and be “wait, so am I not the primary version of me?” Or “what happens to us when you go ren?” Was satisfying to see. It’s a theme I wish was explored in more of these time travel plots