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Trying not to gripe too much about NTWEWY and failing
Finished NTWEWY. There's no way I can talk (read: complain) about it without spoilers, so like, spoiler warning for the entire game. Tl;dr it was mid lol
NEO: The World Ends With You
I'm neutral-positive on the scale with the original TWEWY, leaning towards neutral. Actually, I flat out hated it when I first tried it in high school lol, it wasn't until I gave it another go a few years later that I mellowed out more on it. It's really got a great visual style and concept, but the character writing never fully clicked for me, and the localization's commitment to heavy slang use made so much of it feel corny and immediately dated to me. (Not playing tedious localization cop here. I think the loc decision made sense given the setting and vibe of the game, it's just that when you make everyone speak in such a hyperstylized way, it's always a gamble which phrases are going to feel clunky and cringe to some people, aka ME.)
I think on the whole with NTWEWY, I've ... landed at the exact same place on the scale as I did with the first game lol. There are parts of it that I found really engaging and interesting, but it had so many issues with pacing and tension that became apparent by the last arc, and fell apart so completely at the endgame, that I ended really mixed on it.
→ New Protags
I'll talk about the stuff I liked first! The first three main characters are cute. I had a great time with Fret and Nagi; Rindo, I enjoyed more in the first half of the story than the second, but overall I think he’s a good continuation of TWEWY’s themes without just recreating Neku 2.0. Ultimately these games are about learning to open yourself up to human connections, and they found a good angle to explore with Rindo — ostensibly, he's less prickly than Neku, but he's also completely caught up in his own thoughts and missing out on everyone around him as a result. It's a much softer open and slower reveal than Neku's aggressive loner persona right off the bat, and it's fun to watch him try to keep it together in the first week.
One of the best things about Rindo's writing was his relationship with Fret. This was a plot point I thought the game did super well in gradually rolling out. They know the audience is primed to assume these two guys are best friends right off the bat, especially when Rindo sees Fret "die" in the opening minutes of the game and is shocked enough to use his time travel powers for the first time. And then the game plays with that, dropping hints here and there that they're not close friends at all — the fact that Rindo never told Fret about Swallow until now, Rindo being inwardly surprised Fret knows Napoleon's name (Rindo ... come on) — until week 2 finally frustrates them enough that they start to lose patience with each other. By that point Rindo's opinion of Fret really becomes clear, especially in the way he's consistently caught off guard by Fret's knowledge of fashion and disregards it even as it's literally helping them in the moment. It's not that he doesn't like Fret as a friend at all — they are friends, just on a fairly shallow level — it's just very obvious that he's always held Fret at arm's length and has him boxed into a specific role in his mind. This guy would rather text an online gamer friend for advice because he doesn’t have any confidence in the one right in front of him. It's a fairly nuanced take on friendship that says a lot about both characters, and they did a great job.
That rolls right into Fret, who I was pleasantly surprised by. My One Media Fear is that stories will always keep this class clown type as ... well, the class clown, without ever fleshing them out further. Fret actually gets a lot more development and depth than I expected. My favorite part is at the very end of week 1, when Shiba resets the game and Minamimoto leaves, and you see Rindo just collapse under the mental pressure. Fret immediately pegs this and his reaction is to basically think "Ahhh, so he's out of commission now." It's an incredibly cold read, and I think it shows both that Fret is 1) far more observant and less frivolous than he'd like Rindo and the audience to believe, and 2) using Rindo's friendship in much the same way Rindo is using him. Now I'm not saying they're in some kind of twisted toxic yaoi (far from it lol), but until now they’ve been content to maintain the status quo because they get along reasonably well and won’t push the other too hard. I think Fret understands Rindo and their relationship extremely well, whereas it takes Rindo much longer — and for Fret to literally admit the truth about his friend's suicide — to fully understand Fret in turn. Kid is SO up in his own head.
Now, I was frustrated that Fret's capacity for meanness and cynicism wasn't played up more in the second half of the game, because I don't think his character growth feels fully earned otherwise, and on the flip side, I also wish they'd done more to show how his happy go lucky, friendly persona actually affects the people around him for the better (and maybe let him realize that too). They do a little with this using the social network links he has with some NPCs, but it would have been nice to see more of it on screen. But anyway.
Fret’s relationship with Nagi was another arc that I thought the game handled well. I was even more surprised at Nagi than Fret lol, I didn’t like her design or premise at all when I first saw it but she really grew on me. They don’t resort to cheap jokes about her hyperfocus (they do use it as a gag ofc, but it’s a good balance of humor to the more serious aspects of her personality), and the script successfully depicts her as empathetic and emotionally honest without becoming generic. I think she’s well-observed as a young female character who uses her observation skills to gauge the feelings and reactions of the people around her and then really think through how she can communicate with them to put everyone at ease. This is in direct contrast with Fret’s approach, which is just to blurt out whatever he thinks the other person wants to hear. Like I said, I loved the slow burn of their eventual friendship, it’s one of the best payoffs and dynamics in the game because it feels fairly unique as far as odd couples go, and I’m so glad they’re off playing EleStra together in the postcanon. And I really like the way the game takes time to show the toll her psych takes on her, even as she wholeheartedly commits herself to the task anyway because she wants to help.
→ Beat! Beat! Beat! Beat!
What can I say, he rules, he’s the best, I love him.
The thing is, I had extremely mixed feelings about Beat in the first game. Conceptually, he’s totally my type, I mean look at him. And when they gave him plot beats like deciding to join the Reapers, or being so mad at the unfairness of Neku’s situation that he fires himself from his job to be Neku’s partner, those were things I found conceptually interesting. But like a lot of my problems with this franchise, the actual execution left me cold. Also on a petty level, his combo mechanic was so deeply annoying to me and I couldn’t beat the final boss with him because I was so bad at using him LOL so I will always hold that grudge against him.
So the funniest thing about NTWEWY was when Beat finally showed up and I IMMEDIATELY LIKED HIM. At last. I can put this decades long internal torment to rest.
I think the biggest change is that he’s finally comfortable in his own skin now and consequently much more open with others. He joins the Twisters and immediately understands he needs to support them as the older, more experienced Player, and his singleminded focus, hotheaded personality, and just general loudness is a really great addition to the team dynamic. It’s so sweet when he admits to Nagi that he played up all these aspects of himself even more to be the team’s bedrock before Neku reappears. We know in TWEWY that Beat is actually very self-aware (to the point of self loathing), but the circumstances of the sequel really lets his emotional intelligence (and EFFORTLESS airheaded skill for comedy) shine through while still being a dumbass. I’m fully BeatBitopilled now.
Also not for nothing, the BeatNeku in this game was insane. Never beating the KH2 RikuSora “I looked everywhere for you” allegations. Love it when I’m being wailed on by a math furry and my partner who got zapped from existence three years ago suddenly reappears just to save me in a shower of golden light. Love to immediately start flirting with him in front of all the other Twisters without an iota of shame and then just never stop. They aren’t even dating yet. The other Twisters are in absolute disbelief. It rules.
→ Kanon
Her design is so cute. She’s great! I wish the game had done a little more with all the team leaders when it comes to the fact that they’ve been playing the same Game on loop for months. Like, did they talk it out between them? Did they ever try to collaborate before the Twisters entered the scene? How well does Kanon know Fuya and Motoi’s personalities? How has no one been erased before the story begins? (Or is the implication that there used to be even more teams, and now it’s just the three of them versus the Ruinbringers?) Anyway, Kanon’s a great support character regardless, and I love that Fret is somewhere between having a major crush on her, idolizing her, and also wanting to be her.
→ Shibuya Vendors
This was my favorite part of the first game, and I LOVE how they updated all the brands and expanded on the vendor NPCs in this one. The social network is such a great little skill tree feature, I got really into unlocking it just to read about everyone. Shy buzzcut Hog Fang store clerk who’s actually an underground street fighter is def my fave, but the three charas who make up the indie punk band The Dead Seatbelters, the convenience store auntie who listens to them for stress relief, the BBQ store old man who is def fucking the Asia Fantasia twink on his fishing boat, and the humor evident in some of the canon romantic relationships are all really good.
→ Uzuki (and Kariya)
Uzuki was one of my faves from TWEWY, and I looove her design update, she looks and sounds SO CUTE. They don’t do nearly enough with her and Kariya — they’re basically glorified cameos, and it drives me a little insane that they just never fully explain how Shiba wrests control of Shibuya’s Game from Uzuki, and what the hell the two of them have even been doing since then — but they still have such a great dynamic. Uzuki is such a lesbian who is also married to Kariya, to me. This is my vision.
→ Rhyme
Again, not nearly enough to do (this is a recurring problem with a lot of the old NPCs!) but AHHHHH RHYME’S NEW LOOK IS SO CUTE I LOVE HER I WAS JUST EXCITED TO SEE HER. You can just tell the Twisters’ reaction to meeting her was like “Beat’s sister …….. is normal AND smart????” and meanwhile Beat is beside her doing sick kicks and flips on his skateboard. Bito siblings remain unmatched tbh.
Okay, now for a very stream of consciousness list of things I had problems with lmao. I think most of it can basically be broken down into pacing and the usual sequel problems of trying to balance too much.
→ Pacing
Oh man. This game has so many issues with pacing and tension! I can think of four examples right off the bat. The first is between Fret and Rindo in week 2. I was honestly expecting all their snipes and passive aggressiveness to culminate in a big blowout fight, but nope! Now, I think you can make the case that these two are normally so conflict avoidant that they still held themselves back here, but I also think as a scenario writer, you’re clearly ramping them up for an ugly shouting match so they can ultimately take their friendship to the Next Level, and then it just ... never happens. Not in a way that felt satisfying, anyway. I feel like I blinked and missed it.
The second and third are both about Shoka. I got excited when it was revealed that she’d joined the Twisters as a mole, but then they immediately accept her back when they find out and don’t harbor a single shred of suspicion or ill will towards her after that. But why? She’s a Reaper! She’s done nothing but antagonize them every time she shows up! Sure, she secretly helped them one time, but that could just as easily have been chalked up to Shiba’s plan for the Twisters to trust her. Later Rindo finds out she's Swallow, but right now, he has no idea and no real connection to her, so why does he capitulate so quickly when he's been shown to be slow to trust? Why even write a twist like that if you’re going to blueball the audience on the emotional fallout and immediately resolve it?
Okay, then Shoka loses Ayano. But why should the audience care about this relationship when the game has barely even shown them interacting before in a way that actually conveyed their closeness? We get two flashbacks, and maybe like two or three brief conversations in the present. Of those present conversations, a large chunk of them are just Ayano vagueing about the plot, and instead the majority of their development is revealed through Shoka answering Rindo’s questions about Ayano five minutes before they have to go kill her. And then after Ayano dies, Shoka even fucking lampshades the fact that she hasn’t had time to properly mourn her. But I think if you can make time for 34316 random forced battles, you can make time for characters to mourn losing the people supposedly so important to them. Otherwise what’s the point of even writing it?
This last example drove me crazy: at the end of the game, Rindo learns the truth about his time travel abilities and then makes the call to reset time anyway as he loses all his friends to the Noise. It happens way too late in the game imo. This is like THE climatic moment for the hero to lose faith in his own journey but because we literally only have like an hour left before the main game wraps up, there’s no time for Rindo to do anything with this aside from just parrot it to all his friends in the new timelines (and again … and again…) and then speedrun towards the finish line. Why not set it earlier in the game so Rindo could actually have time to wallow in the realization that he’s the one who’s been making things worse, and then grow out of that experience? That could also have been a great opportunity for all his friends to try and talk him out of it, and it would have been interesting if he’d tried to resist turning back time anymore throughout the rest of the game but then is forced to do so at the end. More interesting than Neku just repeatedly and vaguely warning him about it, tbh. Like … why does this game keep creating potentially good story beats that really could have wrung some emotional drama out of the cast only to completely drop the ball every time u_u
And speaking of the ending, I think the game waits way too long to reveal what’s going on. You’ve played through three full weeks of the Reaper Game and you still don’t fully understand what’s Shiba’s deal, who’s really pulling the strings, what’s going on with the Shibuya and Shinjuku Games, who Swallow is, etc. Again, the result of revealing all of this at the very end is that there’s just no time for any of this to breathe. No one has time to really react to any of it before they’re immediately noscoped. The Twisters having to convince Shiba to work with them is, say it with me, something potentially really interesting! But it happens 30 minutes before the end of the game, so who gives a shit?? Kubo doesn’t even get a moment of shock as he’s instantly vaporized by Hazuki (I literally forgot that even happened to him and didn’t know what Hazuki meant at first when he said he’d taken care of his subordinate), and meanwhile Hazuki is arguably the most important background player in the story and he only shows up for three minutes as a plot device.
These story beats aren't unique to NTWEWY or particularly complex, and that just makes it even more of a headscratcher to play. Something like a Tales plot, for example, typically moves all of these exact same plot points way up in the story; they actually give time for the climaxes to feel, well, climatic. Once Raven or Alvin or Zelos reveal their true intentions, there’s still time for them to actually change. There’s space for the team to treat them differently, and for them to gradually repair friendships. There’s time for them to react and process the antagonist’s motivations, and to have conversations about it before getting ready for the final fight. By the time the audience arrives at the end, they fundamentally understand what’s going on with the plot — they’ve also had time to process it alongside the characters. You get absolutely none of this in NTWEWY. There is no payoff, there’s just endless vagueing and hinting interspersed between the weeks that leads to about five different reveals right before the game fucking ends. I have no idea why I should care about any of it.
→ Sequel Problems
The pacing issues tie right into this one imo. They try to do too much, and a lot of characters get kicked to the wayside as a result.
Neku and Shiki are two huge examples of this. Joshua is as well, but I’m not a Joshua fan so personally I thought waiting until the last five minutes of the game before finally dropping him in to effectively do nothing at all was the funniest possible move.
Neku, hmm … This game’s concept of Neku seems to be “now that he’s not emo anymore, he’s just the world’s most normalest guy”...? He is almost completely devoid of personality here and we should be so grateful that at least Beat is there to occasionally draw some humor or spark out of him. I’m baffled that they say absolutely nothing of real substance about the three years he was stuck in the void of Shinjuku. There’s no way he got out of there with no emotional/mental damage whatsoever, but the game doesn't explore this at all. He doesn’t even try describing the very basics of the experience to Beat, the partner who literally saw him get shot in front of him and has been looking for him ever since. Again: does this game understand payoffs? If you hadn’t played the previous games (and I didn’t play anything past the original base game, I just read up on this), would you have any idea why Neku is considered so legendary, and just what happened to him?
(I have a similar problem with Rindo’s writing in the second half of the game. Now that they’ve largely resolved his personality problems, and especially after Neku shows up, he just becomes some guy. He doesn't get to do anything beyond react to the plot, and I guess sometimes blush over Shoka.)
Considering how hugely important Shiki was in the first game, I really can’t believe how she barely features in this one. Aside from finally getting to see Neku face to face for one (1) second at the end, her most important act is to fix Mr. Mew to restore Tsugumi’s soul … WHICH HAPPENS OFF SCREEN. Like, not only is Shiki’s most important contribution to the plot not even shown, Tsugumi’s comeback, which suddenly is given way more weight because of her supposed importance to Shiba, is also not shown! Instead, we have to go talk to Hishima like five fucking times, and don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the very, very, very brief bit Hishima has, but surely we could have handwaved at least one of those conversations (they’re all the same! THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! They did not need to repeat so many times!) and moved over to Tsugumi and Shiki instead.
As for Tsugumi and the rest of the Shinjuku Reapers … like so many things about this game, I like the idea of them as a very separate and distinct group from the Shibuya crew, but they just don't get fleshed out enough. Susukichi probably gets the most screentime out of all of them and he does rule (and also has the best boss fight music). Tsugumi is mysteriously hyped when she first appears, but then she gets nothing to do until the game tells us like 40 hours later that she’s actually really important to Shiba. I don’t understand Hishima’s reasoning for avoiding Shiba at all; he literally says that he doesn’t want to see Shibuya erased and yet he’s so detached he won’t even make a move to help the Twisters until his hand is forced? So he was just going to stand around in the city he knows Shiba is destroying and … do what next exactly? It feels like they wanted to have a character who, like Tsugumi, is important enough to Shiba to sway him, but they also wanted to save that moment until the very end of the game, so they had nothing for Hishima to do for the rest of the story. We see no indication of Shiba’s closeness to either of them until after Shibuya is saved.
Shiba … first of all, kudos to his voice actor for managing to say gokigenyou at least 42 different ways. His performance really played a large part in endearing Shiba to me. The other part was discovering at the end that he just has huge divorced guy energy with Hishima, and the two of them are hilariously toxic together. But it’s at the end! We learned Hishima was close to him twenty minutes ago! And while Susukichi mentions that Shiba must be lonely because he stares out at Scramble Crossing by himself everyday, why weren’t his mental deterioration and abadonment issues ever hinted at in all his Game Master speeches? And why in the world was his boss fight so lackluster???
I feel like this game is so frustrating because it's very much a story that requires you to understand the events of the previous games, yet aside from Beat, it doesn’t give any of the original characters any real reason to be here. At the same time, it’s also trying to introduce all these new characters and a whole new Game, while being so stuck on the preexisting canon it knows fans want to see that it can’t give satisfying reasons for the new characters to be here either.
Like I wonder what the story could have been like if they’d either cut the og characters out altogether and started completely fresh, same universe but just completely new cast, or if they’d kept Beat and Neku as the main two guys learning about the Shinjuku Reapers’ Game and gradually introduced Rindo, Fret, Nagi and Shoka to their team instead. I also think maybe they should have moved the game out of Shibuya altogether and into Shinjuku (it feels like that was their original intent, given how the Shinjuku squad is just shoehorned into Shibuya) so there’s less pressure to have so many callbacks.
→ Other shit, I love to complain
I could go on and on about the bizarre direction they took the story in, but whatever lol. Anyway, it really bugged me how lackluster or half-assed the gameplay felt at times. They really could have injected a little more personality to the game by doing something small like play with the location title card animations. I really disliked using L2/R2 as the submenu nav controls rather than the D-pad, it felt bad all the way through and like, maybe don’t build in horizontal nav and subnav like that on a console game?? It baffled me that 1) there’s no way to sell off old clothes, and 2) there’s no way to sort by fucking clothing type in the equip menu, so you’re just endlessly scrolling through your ENTIRE catalogue when you’re just looking for like, a single hat. And the way they built the interactions on the pin equip menu was annoying too, I was constantly equipping pins on the wrong character, or swapping out pins on accident. I also think they wait way too long to let you unlock some major skills (using more Uber pins, equipping multiple pins on the same command), and with the latter skill, it sucks that you can only still multi-equip under a single command.
The combat, oh man … Somehow they managed to replicate the complete chaos of switching back and forth between the top and bottom DS screens from the original game and then make it even more chaotic because now there’s SIX PEOPLE on the field, and the camera and lock-on in this game are bonkers (derogatory). I … did not like it by the end! There’s a reason it’s mostly four people max in an RPG party, thanks. This maybe wouldn’t have been so bad if the game wasn’t constantly forcing you into battles in the second half and using combat to pad out the playtime. I really think they could have cut out a good chunk of the random encounters or minibosses and used that to actually, I dunno, write some more of the story!? If you're going to release a sequel over ten years later and expect it to be successful, it feels like the game should be fucking immaculate but instead you can just feel the huge development issues all over it.
Now overall, I'd say the localization is fairly solid, and really committed to vibing hard. My personal pickiness with slang hyperstylization aside, it gets some good lines in, and it's funny and has a lot of personality. HOWEVERRRR, I hate the nicknames lol, they are unknowably bad and corny. "Math Man"? "Priss-kid"? "Candyman"? "HATER SKATER"??????? Am I really supposed to believe that these people take any of these seriously and actually say them out loud? Am I supposed to take any of them seriously? Why is the script so obsessed with nicknames?? Idk, but I'm actively choosing to forget every single one of them except Phones, which is fine. It's inoffensive.
Finally, there’s not really anywhere else to put this, but the way character design works around Kubo is so fucking funny. He is the only actively ugly character in the game. (Look at his expression sprites and you’ll see what I mean. No one else pulls faces like this). Of course he’s also the real antagonist. You can say characters like Susukichi are exaggerated or that someone like Fuya is designed to look pathetic, but there is absolutely no one else who is flat out ugly the way Kubo is. Hazuki shows up and he’s technically the person who ordered Shinjuku’s Inversion in the first place, but because he plays a more ambiguous role in the story, ofc he’s a fucking beautiful twink.
Anyway … it was fine! Absolutely did not stick the landing so it ended on a sour note for me, but I love Beat now, so can I really complain? (I can. I can always complain more.)
NEO: The World Ends With You
I'm neutral-positive on the scale with the original TWEWY, leaning towards neutral. Actually, I flat out hated it when I first tried it in high school lol, it wasn't until I gave it another go a few years later that I mellowed out more on it. It's really got a great visual style and concept, but the character writing never fully clicked for me, and the localization's commitment to heavy slang use made so much of it feel corny and immediately dated to me. (Not playing tedious localization cop here. I think the loc decision made sense given the setting and vibe of the game, it's just that when you make everyone speak in such a hyperstylized way, it's always a gamble which phrases are going to feel clunky and cringe to some people, aka ME.)
I think on the whole with NTWEWY, I've ... landed at the exact same place on the scale as I did with the first game lol. There are parts of it that I found really engaging and interesting, but it had so many issues with pacing and tension that became apparent by the last arc, and fell apart so completely at the endgame, that I ended really mixed on it.
→ New Protags
I'll talk about the stuff I liked first! The first three main characters are cute. I had a great time with Fret and Nagi; Rindo, I enjoyed more in the first half of the story than the second, but overall I think he’s a good continuation of TWEWY’s themes without just recreating Neku 2.0. Ultimately these games are about learning to open yourself up to human connections, and they found a good angle to explore with Rindo — ostensibly, he's less prickly than Neku, but he's also completely caught up in his own thoughts and missing out on everyone around him as a result. It's a much softer open and slower reveal than Neku's aggressive loner persona right off the bat, and it's fun to watch him try to keep it together in the first week.
One of the best things about Rindo's writing was his relationship with Fret. This was a plot point I thought the game did super well in gradually rolling out. They know the audience is primed to assume these two guys are best friends right off the bat, especially when Rindo sees Fret "die" in the opening minutes of the game and is shocked enough to use his time travel powers for the first time. And then the game plays with that, dropping hints here and there that they're not close friends at all — the fact that Rindo never told Fret about Swallow until now, Rindo being inwardly surprised Fret knows Napoleon's name (Rindo ... come on) — until week 2 finally frustrates them enough that they start to lose patience with each other. By that point Rindo's opinion of Fret really becomes clear, especially in the way he's consistently caught off guard by Fret's knowledge of fashion and disregards it even as it's literally helping them in the moment. It's not that he doesn't like Fret as a friend at all — they are friends, just on a fairly shallow level — it's just very obvious that he's always held Fret at arm's length and has him boxed into a specific role in his mind. This guy would rather text an online gamer friend for advice because he doesn’t have any confidence in the one right in front of him. It's a fairly nuanced take on friendship that says a lot about both characters, and they did a great job.
That rolls right into Fret, who I was pleasantly surprised by. My One Media Fear is that stories will always keep this class clown type as ... well, the class clown, without ever fleshing them out further. Fret actually gets a lot more development and depth than I expected. My favorite part is at the very end of week 1, when Shiba resets the game and Minamimoto leaves, and you see Rindo just collapse under the mental pressure. Fret immediately pegs this and his reaction is to basically think "Ahhh, so he's out of commission now." It's an incredibly cold read, and I think it shows both that Fret is 1) far more observant and less frivolous than he'd like Rindo and the audience to believe, and 2) using Rindo's friendship in much the same way Rindo is using him. Now I'm not saying they're in some kind of twisted toxic yaoi (far from it lol), but until now they’ve been content to maintain the status quo because they get along reasonably well and won’t push the other too hard. I think Fret understands Rindo and their relationship extremely well, whereas it takes Rindo much longer — and for Fret to literally admit the truth about his friend's suicide — to fully understand Fret in turn. Kid is SO up in his own head.
Now, I was frustrated that Fret's capacity for meanness and cynicism wasn't played up more in the second half of the game, because I don't think his character growth feels fully earned otherwise, and on the flip side, I also wish they'd done more to show how his happy go lucky, friendly persona actually affects the people around him for the better (and maybe let him realize that too). They do a little with this using the social network links he has with some NPCs, but it would have been nice to see more of it on screen. But anyway.
Fret’s relationship with Nagi was another arc that I thought the game handled well. I was even more surprised at Nagi than Fret lol, I didn’t like her design or premise at all when I first saw it but she really grew on me. They don’t resort to cheap jokes about her hyperfocus (they do use it as a gag ofc, but it’s a good balance of humor to the more serious aspects of her personality), and the script successfully depicts her as empathetic and emotionally honest without becoming generic. I think she’s well-observed as a young female character who uses her observation skills to gauge the feelings and reactions of the people around her and then really think through how she can communicate with them to put everyone at ease. This is in direct contrast with Fret’s approach, which is just to blurt out whatever he thinks the other person wants to hear. Like I said, I loved the slow burn of their eventual friendship, it’s one of the best payoffs and dynamics in the game because it feels fairly unique as far as odd couples go, and I’m so glad they’re off playing EleStra together in the postcanon. And I really like the way the game takes time to show the toll her psych takes on her, even as she wholeheartedly commits herself to the task anyway because she wants to help.
→ Beat! Beat! Beat! Beat!
What can I say, he rules, he’s the best, I love him.
The thing is, I had extremely mixed feelings about Beat in the first game. Conceptually, he’s totally my type, I mean look at him. And when they gave him plot beats like deciding to join the Reapers, or being so mad at the unfairness of Neku’s situation that he fires himself from his job to be Neku’s partner, those were things I found conceptually interesting. But like a lot of my problems with this franchise, the actual execution left me cold. Also on a petty level, his combo mechanic was so deeply annoying to me and I couldn’t beat the final boss with him because I was so bad at using him LOL so I will always hold that grudge against him.
So the funniest thing about NTWEWY was when Beat finally showed up and I IMMEDIATELY LIKED HIM. At last. I can put this decades long internal torment to rest.
I think the biggest change is that he’s finally comfortable in his own skin now and consequently much more open with others. He joins the Twisters and immediately understands he needs to support them as the older, more experienced Player, and his singleminded focus, hotheaded personality, and just general loudness is a really great addition to the team dynamic. It’s so sweet when he admits to Nagi that he played up all these aspects of himself even more to be the team’s bedrock before Neku reappears. We know in TWEWY that Beat is actually very self-aware (to the point of self loathing), but the circumstances of the sequel really lets his emotional intelligence (and EFFORTLESS airheaded skill for comedy) shine through while still being a dumbass. I’m fully BeatBitopilled now.
Also not for nothing, the BeatNeku in this game was insane. Never beating the KH2 RikuSora “I looked everywhere for you” allegations. Love it when I’m being wailed on by a math furry and my partner who got zapped from existence three years ago suddenly reappears just to save me in a shower of golden light. Love to immediately start flirting with him in front of all the other Twisters without an iota of shame and then just never stop. They aren’t even dating yet. The other Twisters are in absolute disbelief. It rules.
→ Kanon
Her design is so cute. She’s great! I wish the game had done a little more with all the team leaders when it comes to the fact that they’ve been playing the same Game on loop for months. Like, did they talk it out between them? Did they ever try to collaborate before the Twisters entered the scene? How well does Kanon know Fuya and Motoi’s personalities? How has no one been erased before the story begins? (Or is the implication that there used to be even more teams, and now it’s just the three of them versus the Ruinbringers?) Anyway, Kanon’s a great support character regardless, and I love that Fret is somewhere between having a major crush on her, idolizing her, and also wanting to be her.
→ Shibuya Vendors
This was my favorite part of the first game, and I LOVE how they updated all the brands and expanded on the vendor NPCs in this one. The social network is such a great little skill tree feature, I got really into unlocking it just to read about everyone. Shy buzzcut Hog Fang store clerk who’s actually an underground street fighter is def my fave, but the three charas who make up the indie punk band The Dead Seatbelters, the convenience store auntie who listens to them for stress relief, the BBQ store old man who is def fucking the Asia Fantasia twink on his fishing boat, and the humor evident in some of the canon romantic relationships are all really good.
→ Uzuki (and Kariya)
Uzuki was one of my faves from TWEWY, and I looove her design update, she looks and sounds SO CUTE. They don’t do nearly enough with her and Kariya — they’re basically glorified cameos, and it drives me a little insane that they just never fully explain how Shiba wrests control of Shibuya’s Game from Uzuki, and what the hell the two of them have even been doing since then — but they still have such a great dynamic. Uzuki is such a lesbian who is also married to Kariya, to me. This is my vision.
→ Rhyme
Again, not nearly enough to do (this is a recurring problem with a lot of the old NPCs!) but AHHHHH RHYME’S NEW LOOK IS SO CUTE I LOVE HER I WAS JUST EXCITED TO SEE HER. You can just tell the Twisters’ reaction to meeting her was like “Beat’s sister …….. is normal AND smart????” and meanwhile Beat is beside her doing sick kicks and flips on his skateboard. Bito siblings remain unmatched tbh.
Okay, now for a very stream of consciousness list of things I had problems with lmao. I think most of it can basically be broken down into pacing and the usual sequel problems of trying to balance too much.
→ Pacing
Oh man. This game has so many issues with pacing and tension! I can think of four examples right off the bat. The first is between Fret and Rindo in week 2. I was honestly expecting all their snipes and passive aggressiveness to culminate in a big blowout fight, but nope! Now, I think you can make the case that these two are normally so conflict avoidant that they still held themselves back here, but I also think as a scenario writer, you’re clearly ramping them up for an ugly shouting match so they can ultimately take their friendship to the Next Level, and then it just ... never happens. Not in a way that felt satisfying, anyway. I feel like I blinked and missed it.
The second and third are both about Shoka. I got excited when it was revealed that she’d joined the Twisters as a mole, but then they immediately accept her back when they find out and don’t harbor a single shred of suspicion or ill will towards her after that. But why? She’s a Reaper! She’s done nothing but antagonize them every time she shows up! Sure, she secretly helped them one time, but that could just as easily have been chalked up to Shiba’s plan for the Twisters to trust her. Later Rindo finds out she's Swallow, but right now, he has no idea and no real connection to her, so why does he capitulate so quickly when he's been shown to be slow to trust? Why even write a twist like that if you’re going to blueball the audience on the emotional fallout and immediately resolve it?
Okay, then Shoka loses Ayano. But why should the audience care about this relationship when the game has barely even shown them interacting before in a way that actually conveyed their closeness? We get two flashbacks, and maybe like two or three brief conversations in the present. Of those present conversations, a large chunk of them are just Ayano vagueing about the plot, and instead the majority of their development is revealed through Shoka answering Rindo’s questions about Ayano five minutes before they have to go kill her. And then after Ayano dies, Shoka even fucking lampshades the fact that she hasn’t had time to properly mourn her. But I think if you can make time for 34316 random forced battles, you can make time for characters to mourn losing the people supposedly so important to them. Otherwise what’s the point of even writing it?
This last example drove me crazy: at the end of the game, Rindo learns the truth about his time travel abilities and then makes the call to reset time anyway as he loses all his friends to the Noise. It happens way too late in the game imo. This is like THE climatic moment for the hero to lose faith in his own journey but because we literally only have like an hour left before the main game wraps up, there’s no time for Rindo to do anything with this aside from just parrot it to all his friends in the new timelines (and again … and again…) and then speedrun towards the finish line. Why not set it earlier in the game so Rindo could actually have time to wallow in the realization that he’s the one who’s been making things worse, and then grow out of that experience? That could also have been a great opportunity for all his friends to try and talk him out of it, and it would have been interesting if he’d tried to resist turning back time anymore throughout the rest of the game but then is forced to do so at the end. More interesting than Neku just repeatedly and vaguely warning him about it, tbh. Like … why does this game keep creating potentially good story beats that really could have wrung some emotional drama out of the cast only to completely drop the ball every time u_u
And speaking of the ending, I think the game waits way too long to reveal what’s going on. You’ve played through three full weeks of the Reaper Game and you still don’t fully understand what’s Shiba’s deal, who’s really pulling the strings, what’s going on with the Shibuya and Shinjuku Games, who Swallow is, etc. Again, the result of revealing all of this at the very end is that there’s just no time for any of this to breathe. No one has time to really react to any of it before they’re immediately noscoped. The Twisters having to convince Shiba to work with them is, say it with me, something potentially really interesting! But it happens 30 minutes before the end of the game, so who gives a shit?? Kubo doesn’t even get a moment of shock as he’s instantly vaporized by Hazuki (I literally forgot that even happened to him and didn’t know what Hazuki meant at first when he said he’d taken care of his subordinate), and meanwhile Hazuki is arguably the most important background player in the story and he only shows up for three minutes as a plot device.
These story beats aren't unique to NTWEWY or particularly complex, and that just makes it even more of a headscratcher to play. Something like a Tales plot, for example, typically moves all of these exact same plot points way up in the story; they actually give time for the climaxes to feel, well, climatic. Once Raven or Alvin or Zelos reveal their true intentions, there’s still time for them to actually change. There’s space for the team to treat them differently, and for them to gradually repair friendships. There’s time for them to react and process the antagonist’s motivations, and to have conversations about it before getting ready for the final fight. By the time the audience arrives at the end, they fundamentally understand what’s going on with the plot — they’ve also had time to process it alongside the characters. You get absolutely none of this in NTWEWY. There is no payoff, there’s just endless vagueing and hinting interspersed between the weeks that leads to about five different reveals right before the game fucking ends. I have no idea why I should care about any of it.
→ Sequel Problems
The pacing issues tie right into this one imo. They try to do too much, and a lot of characters get kicked to the wayside as a result.
Neku and Shiki are two huge examples of this. Joshua is as well, but I’m not a Joshua fan so personally I thought waiting until the last five minutes of the game before finally dropping him in to effectively do nothing at all was the funniest possible move.
Neku, hmm … This game’s concept of Neku seems to be “now that he’s not emo anymore, he’s just the world’s most normalest guy”...? He is almost completely devoid of personality here and we should be so grateful that at least Beat is there to occasionally draw some humor or spark out of him. I’m baffled that they say absolutely nothing of real substance about the three years he was stuck in the void of Shinjuku. There’s no way he got out of there with no emotional/mental damage whatsoever, but the game doesn't explore this at all. He doesn’t even try describing the very basics of the experience to Beat, the partner who literally saw him get shot in front of him and has been looking for him ever since. Again: does this game understand payoffs? If you hadn’t played the previous games (and I didn’t play anything past the original base game, I just read up on this), would you have any idea why Neku is considered so legendary, and just what happened to him?
(I have a similar problem with Rindo’s writing in the second half of the game. Now that they’ve largely resolved his personality problems, and especially after Neku shows up, he just becomes some guy. He doesn't get to do anything beyond react to the plot, and I guess sometimes blush over Shoka.)
Considering how hugely important Shiki was in the first game, I really can’t believe how she barely features in this one. Aside from finally getting to see Neku face to face for one (1) second at the end, her most important act is to fix Mr. Mew to restore Tsugumi’s soul … WHICH HAPPENS OFF SCREEN. Like, not only is Shiki’s most important contribution to the plot not even shown, Tsugumi’s comeback, which suddenly is given way more weight because of her supposed importance to Shiba, is also not shown! Instead, we have to go talk to Hishima like five fucking times, and don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the very, very, very brief bit Hishima has, but surely we could have handwaved at least one of those conversations (they’re all the same! THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! They did not need to repeat so many times!) and moved over to Tsugumi and Shiki instead.
As for Tsugumi and the rest of the Shinjuku Reapers … like so many things about this game, I like the idea of them as a very separate and distinct group from the Shibuya crew, but they just don't get fleshed out enough. Susukichi probably gets the most screentime out of all of them and he does rule (and also has the best boss fight music). Tsugumi is mysteriously hyped when she first appears, but then she gets nothing to do until the game tells us like 40 hours later that she’s actually really important to Shiba. I don’t understand Hishima’s reasoning for avoiding Shiba at all; he literally says that he doesn’t want to see Shibuya erased and yet he’s so detached he won’t even make a move to help the Twisters until his hand is forced? So he was just going to stand around in the city he knows Shiba is destroying and … do what next exactly? It feels like they wanted to have a character who, like Tsugumi, is important enough to Shiba to sway him, but they also wanted to save that moment until the very end of the game, so they had nothing for Hishima to do for the rest of the story. We see no indication of Shiba’s closeness to either of them until after Shibuya is saved.
Shiba … first of all, kudos to his voice actor for managing to say gokigenyou at least 42 different ways. His performance really played a large part in endearing Shiba to me. The other part was discovering at the end that he just has huge divorced guy energy with Hishima, and the two of them are hilariously toxic together. But it’s at the end! We learned Hishima was close to him twenty minutes ago! And while Susukichi mentions that Shiba must be lonely because he stares out at Scramble Crossing by himself everyday, why weren’t his mental deterioration and abadonment issues ever hinted at in all his Game Master speeches? And why in the world was his boss fight so lackluster???
I feel like this game is so frustrating because it's very much a story that requires you to understand the events of the previous games, yet aside from Beat, it doesn’t give any of the original characters any real reason to be here. At the same time, it’s also trying to introduce all these new characters and a whole new Game, while being so stuck on the preexisting canon it knows fans want to see that it can’t give satisfying reasons for the new characters to be here either.
Like I wonder what the story could have been like if they’d either cut the og characters out altogether and started completely fresh, same universe but just completely new cast, or if they’d kept Beat and Neku as the main two guys learning about the Shinjuku Reapers’ Game and gradually introduced Rindo, Fret, Nagi and Shoka to their team instead. I also think maybe they should have moved the game out of Shibuya altogether and into Shinjuku (it feels like that was their original intent, given how the Shinjuku squad is just shoehorned into Shibuya) so there’s less pressure to have so many callbacks.
→ Other shit, I love to complain
I could go on and on about the bizarre direction they took the story in, but whatever lol. Anyway, it really bugged me how lackluster or half-assed the gameplay felt at times. They really could have injected a little more personality to the game by doing something small like play with the location title card animations. I really disliked using L2/R2 as the submenu nav controls rather than the D-pad, it felt bad all the way through and like, maybe don’t build in horizontal nav and subnav like that on a console game?? It baffled me that 1) there’s no way to sell off old clothes, and 2) there’s no way to sort by fucking clothing type in the equip menu, so you’re just endlessly scrolling through your ENTIRE catalogue when you’re just looking for like, a single hat. And the way they built the interactions on the pin equip menu was annoying too, I was constantly equipping pins on the wrong character, or swapping out pins on accident. I also think they wait way too long to let you unlock some major skills (using more Uber pins, equipping multiple pins on the same command), and with the latter skill, it sucks that you can only still multi-equip under a single command.
The combat, oh man … Somehow they managed to replicate the complete chaos of switching back and forth between the top and bottom DS screens from the original game and then make it even more chaotic because now there’s SIX PEOPLE on the field, and the camera and lock-on in this game are bonkers (derogatory). I … did not like it by the end! There’s a reason it’s mostly four people max in an RPG party, thanks. This maybe wouldn’t have been so bad if the game wasn’t constantly forcing you into battles in the second half and using combat to pad out the playtime. I really think they could have cut out a good chunk of the random encounters or minibosses and used that to actually, I dunno, write some more of the story!? If you're going to release a sequel over ten years later and expect it to be successful, it feels like the game should be fucking immaculate but instead you can just feel the huge development issues all over it.
Now overall, I'd say the localization is fairly solid, and really committed to vibing hard. My personal pickiness with slang hyperstylization aside, it gets some good lines in, and it's funny and has a lot of personality. HOWEVERRRR, I hate the nicknames lol, they are unknowably bad and corny. "Math Man"? "Priss-kid"? "Candyman"? "HATER SKATER"??????? Am I really supposed to believe that these people take any of these seriously and actually say them out loud? Am I supposed to take any of them seriously? Why is the script so obsessed with nicknames?? Idk, but I'm actively choosing to forget every single one of them except Phones, which is fine. It's inoffensive.
Finally, there’s not really anywhere else to put this, but the way character design works around Kubo is so fucking funny. He is the only actively ugly character in the game. (Look at his expression sprites and you’ll see what I mean. No one else pulls faces like this). Of course he’s also the real antagonist. You can say characters like Susukichi are exaggerated or that someone like Fuya is designed to look pathetic, but there is absolutely no one else who is flat out ugly the way Kubo is. Hazuki shows up and he’s technically the person who ordered Shinjuku’s Inversion in the first place, but because he plays a more ambiguous role in the story, ofc he’s a fucking beautiful twink.
Anyway … it was fine! Absolutely did not stick the landing so it ended on a sour note for me, but I love Beat now, so can I really complain? (I can. I can always complain more.)