Neo: The World Ends With You was a welcomed surprise to play for the 10 hours I was able to run through, as it was a surprising experience of combo based combat, mystery/puzzle solving, and a story that threw more curve balls than imagined. The gameplay can best be understood as an action JRPG, Japanese role playing game, with a strong focus on character interaction and customization of the player’s attacks while painting this full picture in heavy black lines and punk aesthetics.
Taking place in an alternative version of Shibuya, a place in central tokyo where fashionistas, party animals, and the coolest of kids can be found. The player will be playing as Rindo Kanade, a high school student who is often glued to his phone as he where’s what may be described as the craziest looking jacket in the world. One day his friend Fret gave him a reaper pin, and after a strange encounter with massive monsters, Fret and Rindo show up in the Underground. The underworld where reapers force people to compete in the Reapers’ Game, a competition where teams of people must fight and complete puzzles. This lasts for 7 days and the winner of the competition may ask anything they wish from the reapers. Rindo with the help of not only Fret but also some friends made along the way create the Wicked Twisters and begin to play the game in hopes of wishing their way out of the underworld. But first they have to defeat monsters of the Underground known as Noise, and defeat the other teams playing: Ruinbringers, Deep Rivers Society, Variabeauties, and Purehearts.
Punk Kids, Psychic Powers, and Goth Demons
The story that has unfurled in only 10 hours of gameplay is a dense forest of character interactions, deception, mystery, and casual flirtation. While exploring Shibuya and interacting with other characters the strength of the story can be found in how Rindo bounces off his teammates and opponents in cut scenes containing visual novel style storytelling with voice over provided during crucial scenes. Players will slowly gain and lose teammates as they play through the story and each of the team members that were presented in the first leg of the game are interesting, colorful, and unique in their personality. Such as Nagi Usui who is a college student with an obsession with a video game called Elegant Strategy and all its memorabilia. Beginning with this more simplistic characterization they then expand her character through interacting with her teammates such as Sho Minamimoto, the mathematical genius with a streak of good old fashioned egoism on top. Speaking in mathematical insults such as zeptogram (a number that is so small it might as well be zero). Aggressive and confident, he retorts the enemies of the Wicked Twisters with no fear. All of this is undercut by Nagi swooning over him with big, sparkly eyes.
The story is driven by the characters and as such the mystery behind the Reapers’ Game and the on coming weeks of riddles and monster fights slowly uncovers details behind the scenes as both Rindo and the player begin to understand the rules and guidelines for the games. Each game lasts 7 days. Each day every team is tasked with a series of riddles and fights that will accrue a team points based on if they are the first to complete the challenge. These points are totaled on the 7th day and the winner of the Reapers’ Game is the team with the most amount of points that week and are able to ask the reapers for anything.
Rindo is dropped into the Underground and is stuck in a predicament. One team, The Ruinbringers, continues to win every week and their lead man Kaichi Susuki always asks for the same thing, another week of games. Rindo in turn realizes that in order to get out of the Underground / underworld and back to the land of the living he must beat all the other teams and win the Reapers’ Game to wish to be alive once again. Rindo and his teammates soon learn that they have Psychic abilities that are able to affect the minds of the living and other players and using these powers. From Fret being able to remind people of an event, person, or object to Nagi being able to dive into the kinds of people to fight their psychological Demons. Rindo soon learns that he is able to go back in time and change the past to meet his expectations. These powers work in tandem with one another to uncover what is happening in the Reapers’ Game and how to end it.
Reapers are devils that run the Reapers’ Game and set up all the challenges and puzzles, but they have a more direct presence as many reapers will help the Wicked Twisters and Rindo by giving tips or advice. Reapers don’t occupy a more traditional bad guys and gals role but instead are seemingly interested in the games and their outcomes for more personal or selfish ends. Such as Shoka Sakurane who is a young reaper only interested in the games insofar as they quench her appetite not to be bored. The Reapers’ Game is not a job or especially important task to her, it’s just good fun. So when she appears in her cat eared hoodie it’s never a dull or drab scrap of standard evil dialogue but instead a light hearted razzing.
The story is best understood as an episodic story with each day completing an episode or chapter, while each 7 day week acts as a part. Every day has its own short story involving the crew while the bigger problem of the Reapers, the Reapers’ Game, and why the game exists is slowly expunged each day. It brings with it a feeling of a serialized television show where each day ends with a completion of a challenge while more hints are dropped about the setting of the story. It works remarkably well with the pacing of the game and story being well rounded and well spaced with plenty of breathing room for fun interactions and serious dialogue.
Meet Me At The 104
Players will interact with the world of Neo: The World Ends With You through a third person perspective as they explore the city of Shibuya, buy new threads, and eat the best food the Underground can provide. Players will find that there are two states of play with this game, the overworld that the player will explore, solve riddles, and talk to their team, and the combat phase where players will fight the Noise. First, the overworld.
The city of Shibuya is separated into different districts, and within each district there will be different clothing stores and restaurants that are available to the player. The world is open, and thus each district acts as its own little level by which the player will be able to explore it. These areas are where the player will be able to solve puzzles and riddles through interacting with objects and living people.
The living people of Shibuya are important, though you can’t directly interact with them you can still glady mess with their heads. Members of your team will be able to manipulate the living into giving up information. Often the living will hold answers for puzzles and become another clue to figure out the answer. The Reapers will often take the events of the living and use them in their game, such as using fashion celebrities as pieces of a riddle, and in order to solve the problem the player will need to manipulate them.
Characters in the player’s team will have access to psychic abilities given to them when they arrived in the Underground. Powers such as Remind, Suggest, and Dive. With Remind the player will be able to make the surrounding living beings remember specific events or people, while Suggest allows the player to suggest an individual living or dead to a course of action; such as suggesting a character looks into an alley to find their wallet. Dive in turn allows the player to hop into a person’s psyche and fight their inner demons like their insecurities, fears, or anger the same way that the player fights the noise in regular combat.
The most interesting of the psychic powers would be Rindo’s ability to manipulate time. Rindo is able to look into the future and in turn able to manipulate his placement in time, in essence allowing him to time travel. This plays a crucial role in some of the puzzles of the game. In particular the player may need to unravel a problem by using a litany of these different psychic powers in different times of the day. Revealing different clues in the future and then using that information in the past to manipulate the outcome of that future was a fun experience. It must be said that often the game doesn’t coddle the player by placing intrusive markers everywhere for the player to follow, and often the objective description leaves it up to the player to find what they’re looking for. In turn, the player is forced to play detective and often is given minimal help and won’t have an annoying little compatriot interrupting the flow of the game to give you hints.
The combination of these different powers makes running around doing rpg puzzles so much more enjoyable for the player. Most RPGs make puzzles a series of dialogue choices and or a game of matching colors, bring the blue totem to the blue hole and bring the red totem to the red hole kind of puzzles. With the combination of these psychic powers that are given to the player, the puzzles are much more engaging and makes solving them more rewarding as the answer is not always so easy to find, but with some intuition from the player and proper uses of the psychic abilities they are challenging but not mind breaking in nature.
It’s Not About Beating Your Enemy, It’s About Looking Good While Doing It
There are two distinct sections of gameplay. One is walking around Shibuya and solving puzzles and talking to different characters, and the other section is combat where the player controls every person in their party. Combat is done by scanning the area for monsters and going into an instance of combat, or combat is sprung on the player by other characters or reapers. Players often choose to engage in combat by scanning the area around them. When scanning it reveals red icons representing each kind of noise around the area, and the player needs to run by these icons to engage that noise in combat. There can be dozens of different types of Noise that can appear in an area and often when scanning you are surrounded by such monsters. The player can counter this by chaining instances of combat together. Where instead of doing one fight, you could do 5 in a row for better rewards, money, and XP.
Fighting in Neo can best be described as a spectacle fighter, the kind of brawler game where the objective is to not only whip every enemy into submission but also do it in one continuous combo. In other words, throw punches but make it look pretty. And, what makes this game quite unique is that the player is able to make their whole team look pretty while carving through all the monsters in Shibuya.
The player will control all the different party members at the same time and while that sounds confusing it’s hum drum easy, as each character is simply assigned a button that corresponds to their attack. Thus the player may have 4 different attacks for each party member on their team. The player will then jump in perspective between each different party member as they attack an enemy. Attacks by each of the characters can be controlled by the button assigned to them, for example some attacks may require the player to mash a button to unleash a flurry of blows, or hold the button down to charge a singular powerful attack. Thus a player is able to pummel an enemy with Rindo while also charging a big kick from Sho so that they can work in tandem with one another instead of simply going one after the other. All characters in the fight are able to be accessed at any time, enabling the player to string moves from different characters fluidly with each other in real time.
Combos in this game function with a focus upon the interplay between each of your different party members. Combos are not dependent upon the raw hits given to a creature like in traditional fighting and brawling games. Instead there is a groov meter at the top of the screen that goes from 0 to 100 percent. This percentage increases for everytime that you drop the beat on an opponent, an instance where after completing an attack from a singular party member or by fulfilling a certain condition an enemy will have a timer placed above them and when attacked by another party member the player’s groove percentage will increase. Once the player’s groove meter reaches 100 percent they will be able to do an ultimate attack upon the enemies. These ultimate attacks change depending upon the character that is in focus while fighting. Thus if a player uses their ultimate ability with Rindo and Rindo’s attack is an electric attack, the ultimate move will be massive streaks of electricity that goes 2 stories up.
The player’s objective in fights then is to manage the large amounts of enemies on the board and connect numerous beat drops together smoothly to build groove as fast as possible and clear the stage with one continuous series of attacks and ultimates. While confusing to control at first, it does become more natural with time, and players can expect to do some ridiculous combos that are reminiscent of an action movie or anime scene in no time. The combat begins to feel very fluid as the player learns how each different kinds of attacks interact with one another and what string of moves creates the most groove and the most damage while taking the least amount of time possible.
I Got This Cool Pin And Now Burgers Give Me Permanent Health Points
As with every good RPG game the progression system in this game is an interplay between 4 different systems that the player will have to keep track of as they progress through the story of the game. There is the food system, the social network, the pins collected, and the clothes system.
First, the food system operates as a meter that needs to be refilled after fighting with your team for a while. While they are indeed dead, that doesn’t mean they can’t eat. While exploring the world out of combat there will be a battery icon at the top right that lowers with each fight that the player’s team completes. Once this drops to 0 percent the player will need to get their team some grub. Food is found in the restaurants scattered around the map and the food that the player orders will fill the battery gauge based on how many calories they have in each meal. Food also acts as a way to permanently increase the states of each character on a team. The main 4 stats that players will keep up with are attack, defense, health points, and style. Attack increases damage, defense decreases how much damage you take, health points increase how many points of damage that you can take before dying, and style allows characters to access the special abilities in the clothes that they wear. Food is the way in which the player permanently increases the stats of their characters and with the variety of restaurants available the player is able to customise their characters to better suit their roles or to focus on a particular stat that a character is lacking in.
Second, the social network enables the player to access different things around the world or access new abilities to use in combat. These upgrades are unlocked by doing side quests with particular people marked around the map. After doing these side quests you are able to get Friend Points that are used to unlock different things. The social network can unlock new items in restaurants, higher or lower difficulty levels, new combat abilities, or even get better rewards after fights. These are upgrades that are unlocked gradually as the player finishes side quests and helps side characters across Shibuya including the living, the dead, and reapers. In order to unlock a certain bonus, they will need to complete that specific person’s side quest to be able to unlock said bonus.
Third, as players complete fights pins will drop for the player to collect. Pins in Neo are the player’s attacks. There are a wide variety of different attacks that the player can find in the world not only from fights but also in shops. These pins have a wide variety of different kinds of attacks that differ in the elemental damage they do, what type of attack it is (mash the button vs. holding it down), what brand makes the pin, and how they enable a beat drop. Diversifying the kinds of pins that each character within a team possesses is best practice for better combos, and workshopping the kinds of pins used is a rewarding experience of experimentation. Pins also become more powerful with use, as with each battle the pin will gain pin points and with enough of these said points they can level up to deal more damage or even evolve into a similar attack but with better effects. Players will collect a lot of pins as they play and often they are the item that is most often used to sell for money.
Finally, there are clothing shops that are also scattered across Shibuya. These clothes can then increase a character’s stats, and with an appropriate level of style the character can use the additional ability that the clothing item can provide. These clothes can be interchanged and often are replaced as the player levels up and begins to become more powerful requiring better clothes. Clothes do not give permanent bonuses though, they only add stats to a character when wearing them. Style points are important to gain for characters and players would be best served to make sure that their clothing and style points are up to par at all times as they give a good boost in their team’s performance.
A Sticker Bombed Game
In conclusion, Neo: The World Ends With You was a wonderful experience to play, and while it has a lot going on within the game, it teaches these different mechanics slowly and expertly. With the combination of a good story, great dialogue, complex puzzles, and flashy combat, Neo was a welcomed surprise and is a truly unique game. Comparisons would not be worthwhile for the most part. The closest comparison that could be made would be to Kingdom Hearts, but that might be an insult to Neo. It is an action RPG with many complex mechanics going on, but it won’t leave players confused and the combat isn’t as finicky. There are a lot of things that are packed into this long game, but they are done very well and are able to work in tandem with one another smoothly. This game is truly unique and would be worthwhile to buy to experience how this sticker bomb of a game manages to keep its punk aesthetic and be a game that is difficult to describe but not hard to recommend in any capacity.
