Newcomers might get lost in Square Enix’s follow-up to a 14-year-old game
What do the games in a series or genre owe to each other? How do they inform and build on each other? After playing Neo: The World Ends with You, a reboot-cum-sequel to a critically-acclaimed 14-year-old Nintendo DS game, this question sits at the forefront for me. Especially since, at least according to the series’ creative producer Tetsuya Nomura, Neo: TWEWY isn’t actually a sequel to its video game predecessor.
Back in April, Funimation began simulcasting a The World Ends with You anime season, 12 episodes designed to tell the first game’s story and eliminate the need to play the game itself entirely. Within the space of nearly five hours, viewers can get all caught up with the story of Neku Sakuraba and his friends, Shiki, Beat, Rhyme and Joshua, as they all get transported to an alternate, afterlife version of Shibuya, Tokyo called the Underground. Trapped in the Underground with no way to reach anyone in reality, Neku and his friends fight a group of supernatural executioners called Reapers for control of their lives and the fate of Shibuya.
I didn’t play The World Ends with You when it was originally released on the DS, but it’s currently available as both a mobile phone game (which I did play) and as a 2018 Nintendo Switch port. There are elements of the game that are definitely dated — seeing flip phones everywhere is wild, and Neku wears a pair of Bluetooth headphones connected to a marker-shaped MP3 player around his neck — and these elements are what the anime attempts to modernize, while maintaining the original game’s story and bringing its emotional beats to new audiences without all the systems and lore.
As the final episode aired in June, gamers got a chance to play the new game’s demo on PlayStation 4 and Switch — the ultimate marketing move. That demo rules, by the way — it’s a free, almost-feature-complete taste of Neo: TWEWY from the prologue to the end of in-game Day 2. You can level your party up to level 15, and your save carries over to the main game.
Image: Square Enix
Is watching the anime necessary to enjoy Neo: TWEWY? No, but it does provide some vital context for a lot of the proper nouns the game throws at you basically from the start. Otherwise, the beginning of the game focuses on new people in a new situation with new stakes. It doesn’t really hold players’ hands throughout its course, even though there is a big glossary of terms tucked away inside one of the menus. This means the game can be confusing, but there isn’t much time to dwell on that at first — because Neo: The World Ends with You is an incredibly busy game.