Shiuster
4 reviews liked by Shiuster
After 100%ing the game and getting absolutely everything it had to offer, I can safely say that it is by far one of the best sequels I’ve had the pleasure of playing. Whether or not it surpasses the original is something that can be debated on but I find it to be easily on par.
The storytelling and characterization this time around goes for a more subtler approach compared to the original and relies on character interactions and the way these evolve throughout the game, which ties into its main theme: identity. If OG TWEWY was about how relationships can change and affect the individual, then NEO TWEWY is the opposite in that it’s about how individual change affects that person's relationships. On the surface, they might seem like the same thing, but they’re really not because it’s through this lens that you’re able to see how the characters evolve and change, with our main character Rindo being the perfect examples of this.
Rindo’s an almost painfully realistic depiction of your average teenager: a guy that has no confidence in himself and the decisions he makes and tries to pass off his responsibilities onto other people whenever he gets the chance to. He’s quiet, reserved, and very closed off, only ever truly opening up to his friend Swallow, and you can see this constantly when you peer into his head and observe how he neurotically commentates on every move he or someone else does. He also has the tendency to take the people around him for granted. In some ways, he’s lot like Neku in the sense that he’s cut himself off from other people but whereas Neku actively rejected other people, Rindo just doesn’t care to get close to them. Even when their team needed more people so they could survive just one week, Rindo preferred relying on the skills Sho had already shown them rather than even trying to meet Nagi, and he might not’ve recruited her if not for him trying to avoid having her Dive into his head again. There’s also how he didn’t confide into his teammates about his time travel abilities until Sho dragged it out in the open for the others to know about. To Rindo, following along with who he already knew while not confiding in them kept him safe and able to just slip through life without having to worry. In that sense, I honestly feel that his arc is more organic and fluid compared to Neku’s and I say this as someone who loves Neku’s character arc. As the game goes on, he learns to takes charge, listens to his teammates fully, seeks and reaches out to people, and overpasses his aversion of going towards people to make the first connection. He’s actually the one willing to do the first step and remind people of what’s at stake, instead of being lead around on a whim by others.
Over the course of the game/Game, Rindo grows from someone not deciding anything to avoid the responsibility of a bad outcome and bristling when called out on that, to someone becoming brave enough to fully undertake the weight of such decisions, willing to risk himself in a bit more and as a leader, and fully expressing his opinion about things and plans instead of just poking holes into others’ ideas and appropriating their advices as his like he did with certain influences in his life.
You get to see this progression for most of the other characters in the game, with Shoka in particular being one of the best written characters across both TWEWY games in my opinion thanks to her characterization and the subtleties in her actions. That’s not to say this approach is perfect as the pacing can be pretty slow at times and some characters could’ve definitely benefitted by having more screentime but overall, I still found that NEO had a valuable message and theme to deliver in spite of it all.
Next up is the combat and hoo boy do I have a lot to say about it. It most definitely isn’t perfect, with its issues mostly boiling down to the lower enemy variety compared to the original (which had its fair share of recolors as well, mind you) and the camera being an annoyance at some points but by God, they somehow nailed the combat and it’s honestly tied with the original as one of my favorite JRPG battle systems. This time around, each character is mapped to a button to the controller (you can switch around which characters has what pin so it isn’t set in stone for which character can use a certain pin). Each attack type in the game has a condition that requires you to “Drop the Beat”, basically a combo finisher that’s tacked onto each pin and they each have their own variations. For example, some will have you inflicting status ailments on enemies, others will have you launching enemies in the air or into walls and some will have you piledriving them into the ground and so on and so forth. You do this in order to gradually build your Groove meter and unleash Mashups, which are 15 different elemental attacks that each have their own unique effect and can be activated and used on the battle field while you’re doing combos, such as summoning a giant gravitational ball of energy to suck enemies in, covering the ground with ice spikes that freeze enemies on contact and can have you bounce them around on the spikes for additional damage, stopping time to freeze absolutely everything to place, and more. There are pins with special abilities that reward you greatly when you set certain combos up right, whether it’s using knockdown pins to activate Grave Marker’s finisher, using launcher pins to increase the power of aerial pins such as Leo Armo or Meteor Strike, using chain pins to entangle enemies and increase the power of Drift Tackle or Swift Strike pins and more.
You have a wide variety of options that range from straight attacks, wide attacks, knockbacks, launchers (and following launchers), knockdowns, quick safe attacks, slow high investment attacks in exchange for higher damage/combo opportunities, repositioning attacks, crowd AoEs and more. You also have options for ranged attacks (with bullets, lasers, sweeping shockwaves, rockets for differing effects), charge attacks, staggering enemies and dispersing crowds, repositioning (enemies and yourself), multi-hit and freezing enemies, planting mines, and more.
On top of all of this, each pin has different attack speeds, damage outputs, ranges, and special utilities, which encourages you to mix and match in order to find the best possible combination for you and equip a deck that is highly synergized. Even low-powered pins end up being useful in the lategame thanks to quick reboot time compared to the higher damaging types, which is also great for building up Groove faster and getting those 6x Mashups, making for an incredibly balanced system for the most part.
Any good action game worth its salt rewards good positioning and NEO does that and then some and even expands on it compared to the original in multiple ways, both in regard to how you can lay down traps to catch Noise off guard and how you can utilize Mashups in extending your combos or take down enemies quickly. This also applies to how pins work as well.
Take how Massive Hit targets enemies for example. If you line it up just right, you can catch multiple enemies in your line of fire while you're on your way to kick the target into next week or up into the sky. Same thing also applies to Assassin Strike and I actually used this trick to stun multiple enemies at the same time. There's also some cool stuff that you can pull off with Patrol Rounds. The thing about them is how they ALWAYS come back to you after you launch them and if you position yourself to have the Patrol Round come back at you in a specific way by running to a spot, you can catch multiple enemies in the arc as the rounds makes their way towards you. This method also makes taking down Chameleon Noise a breeze since they're usually right by enemies and when you target the Noise next to them, they tend to get caught in the crossfire, which makes them easy to spot. Grenade Launcher, Patrol Round, Psychic Shotgun, Storm, and Diffusion Beam pins are especially useful for this.
Another cool thing about NEO is how even pins with the same Psych archetype actually have differing ways to make them stand apart mechanically.
For example, the Patrol Round pins each have different arcs that effect how they return towards you and impact enemies.
Cony x Cony (the Gravity variant) shoots out 5 different boomerangs and come back to you as five while Stop the Music (Burst variant you win from Scramble Slam) shoots out 3 different boomerangs but come back to you as one.
On paper, this might make Stop the Music sound worse but you have to keep their Beatdrop conditions in mind. Cony x Cony requires for an enemy/boss to be knocked down to the ground and/or launched in order for you to activate its Beatdrop whereas Stop the Music just has you hitting the enemy with the explosion it activates in order to get the Beatdrop. Little stuff like this can have an impact on how you approach combat when it comes to the bosses and mob design and it's like this for a lot of pins in the game, which I appreciate.
All in all, it’s a very robust and fun battle system with a lot of depth to its various mechanics and the bosses show these aspects off quite nicely, providing fun and unique mechanics of their own as well as a decent challenge if you’re fighting on the higher difficulties. A lot of people are under the impression that button-mashing is the optimal strategy and while that can probably get you through the main game on the lower difficulties, they fail to consider these factors:
-Noise have built-in forced retaliation (think revenge values from Kingdom Hearts.) The enemies will flash yellow, while during this, the damage they received, during combos after the fact, multiplies the enemy attack by how much damage was done to it, then it will flash red and instantly counter attack you with the damages built up in its system. The system is different for a few enemies but will instantly begin the moment they flash yellow. Which means that just button mashing can get you killed, especially when you’re engaging in long chain battles and the revenge values become far more frequent throughout each round.
-There are multiple pin set-ups that highly reward you for timing your combos right in order to build up the most Groove in one go, especially when you unlock the Beatdrop sweetspot mechanic later on that can increase your Groove intake when hitting the Beatdrop in a certain spot (which also differs depending on the pin)
-Ememy design has a decent amount of variety, forcing you to think about what sort of pins and threads to bring into battle as there’s not really one deck that makes short work of every enemy. The dinos, mammoths, and birds are prime examples of these
-Just mashing the buttons all at once will leave you unable able to properly counterattack against particularly troublesome enemies and will most likely lead to you dying multiple times
-The game itself ranks you on how much time you’ve taken playing through a chain as well as how much damage you’ve taken overall, incentivizing you to get better at the mechanics as higher rankings leads to higher PP intake, which is incredibly handy for leveling up and evolving pins.
Another thing I want to talk about is the music and man, they absolutely nailed it yet again. Much like the original, NEO covers a large variety of genres while also going for it’s own distinct vibe at the same time. Whereas the original went for a mix of J-pop, disco, and J-rock, with some stray metal, piano, and rap here and there, NEO goes for a more balanced mix of J-rock and metal, with more rap and pop mixed into tracks with heavier sections, as well as a greater emphasis on mashups, electric instruments, and blended-up and crunchier versions of old songs. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its own fair share of genre variety, however, as the game also contains various genres such as liquid DnB, techno, acoustic, club, drum n bass, power pop, symphonic nu-metal, and more. On top of that, the songs in NEO are much more closely tied to the themes of the game and the progression of the characters, with some even cleverly foreshadowing character details that get revealed later on, such as We’re Losing You and Shibuya Survivor. One thing in particular that I want to talk about in regards to the soundtrack is the inclusion of Soundsurfing and how much I love it’s implementation. Not only is it a clever way to speed up overworld traversal and make traversing through Shibuya a breeze, it’s gives you additional Groove intake bonuses that carry over to a round, which is an incredible use of gameplay mechanics synergizing well with one another. On top of that, Soundsurfing gives almost every song in the game additional and unique percussive elements to spice up the soundtrack even more, giving the music even more variety, which is genuinely impressive as hell. And lastly, it adds up to one incredible usage in the final boss fight.
All-in-all, NEO is a fantastic game and a more than worthy successor to one of the best games on the DS and I tip my hat off to the devs for managing to create another compelling experience even after all of these years.
And with that, I bid you adieu.
The storytelling and characterization this time around goes for a more subtler approach compared to the original and relies on character interactions and the way these evolve throughout the game, which ties into its main theme: identity. If OG TWEWY was about how relationships can change and affect the individual, then NEO TWEWY is the opposite in that it’s about how individual change affects that person's relationships. On the surface, they might seem like the same thing, but they’re really not because it’s through this lens that you’re able to see how the characters evolve and change, with our main character Rindo being the perfect examples of this.
Rindo’s an almost painfully realistic depiction of your average teenager: a guy that has no confidence in himself and the decisions he makes and tries to pass off his responsibilities onto other people whenever he gets the chance to. He’s quiet, reserved, and very closed off, only ever truly opening up to his friend Swallow, and you can see this constantly when you peer into his head and observe how he neurotically commentates on every move he or someone else does. He also has the tendency to take the people around him for granted. In some ways, he’s lot like Neku in the sense that he’s cut himself off from other people but whereas Neku actively rejected other people, Rindo just doesn’t care to get close to them. Even when their team needed more people so they could survive just one week, Rindo preferred relying on the skills Sho had already shown them rather than even trying to meet Nagi, and he might not’ve recruited her if not for him trying to avoid having her Dive into his head again. There’s also how he didn’t confide into his teammates about his time travel abilities until Sho dragged it out in the open for the others to know about. To Rindo, following along with who he already knew while not confiding in them kept him safe and able to just slip through life without having to worry. In that sense, I honestly feel that his arc is more organic and fluid compared to Neku’s and I say this as someone who loves Neku’s character arc. As the game goes on, he learns to takes charge, listens to his teammates fully, seeks and reaches out to people, and overpasses his aversion of going towards people to make the first connection. He’s actually the one willing to do the first step and remind people of what’s at stake, instead of being lead around on a whim by others.
Over the course of the game/Game, Rindo grows from someone not deciding anything to avoid the responsibility of a bad outcome and bristling when called out on that, to someone becoming brave enough to fully undertake the weight of such decisions, willing to risk himself in a bit more and as a leader, and fully expressing his opinion about things and plans instead of just poking holes into others’ ideas and appropriating their advices as his like he did with certain influences in his life.
You get to see this progression for most of the other characters in the game, with Shoka in particular being one of the best written characters across both TWEWY games in my opinion thanks to her characterization and the subtleties in her actions. That’s not to say this approach is perfect as the pacing can be pretty slow at times and some characters could’ve definitely benefitted by having more screentime but overall, I still found that NEO had a valuable message and theme to deliver in spite of it all.
Next up is the combat and hoo boy do I have a lot to say about it. It most definitely isn’t perfect, with its issues mostly boiling down to the lower enemy variety compared to the original (which had its fair share of recolors as well, mind you) and the camera being an annoyance at some points but by God, they somehow nailed the combat and it’s honestly tied with the original as one of my favorite JRPG battle systems. This time around, each character is mapped to a button to the controller (you can switch around which characters has what pin so it isn’t set in stone for which character can use a certain pin). Each attack type in the game has a condition that requires you to “Drop the Beat”, basically a combo finisher that’s tacked onto each pin and they each have their own variations. For example, some will have you inflicting status ailments on enemies, others will have you launching enemies in the air or into walls and some will have you piledriving them into the ground and so on and so forth. You do this in order to gradually build your Groove meter and unleash Mashups, which are 15 different elemental attacks that each have their own unique effect and can be activated and used on the battle field while you’re doing combos, such as summoning a giant gravitational ball of energy to suck enemies in, covering the ground with ice spikes that freeze enemies on contact and can have you bounce them around on the spikes for additional damage, stopping time to freeze absolutely everything to place, and more. There are pins with special abilities that reward you greatly when you set certain combos up right, whether it’s using knockdown pins to activate Grave Marker’s finisher, using launcher pins to increase the power of aerial pins such as Leo Armo or Meteor Strike, using chain pins to entangle enemies and increase the power of Drift Tackle or Swift Strike pins and more.
You have a wide variety of options that range from straight attacks, wide attacks, knockbacks, launchers (and following launchers), knockdowns, quick safe attacks, slow high investment attacks in exchange for higher damage/combo opportunities, repositioning attacks, crowd AoEs and more. You also have options for ranged attacks (with bullets, lasers, sweeping shockwaves, rockets for differing effects), charge attacks, staggering enemies and dispersing crowds, repositioning (enemies and yourself), multi-hit and freezing enemies, planting mines, and more.
On top of all of this, each pin has different attack speeds, damage outputs, ranges, and special utilities, which encourages you to mix and match in order to find the best possible combination for you and equip a deck that is highly synergized. Even low-powered pins end up being useful in the lategame thanks to quick reboot time compared to the higher damaging types, which is also great for building up Groove faster and getting those 6x Mashups, making for an incredibly balanced system for the most part.
Any good action game worth its salt rewards good positioning and NEO does that and then some and even expands on it compared to the original in multiple ways, both in regard to how you can lay down traps to catch Noise off guard and how you can utilize Mashups in extending your combos or take down enemies quickly. This also applies to how pins work as well.
Take how Massive Hit targets enemies for example. If you line it up just right, you can catch multiple enemies in your line of fire while you're on your way to kick the target into next week or up into the sky. Same thing also applies to Assassin Strike and I actually used this trick to stun multiple enemies at the same time. There's also some cool stuff that you can pull off with Patrol Rounds. The thing about them is how they ALWAYS come back to you after you launch them and if you position yourself to have the Patrol Round come back at you in a specific way by running to a spot, you can catch multiple enemies in the arc as the rounds makes their way towards you. This method also makes taking down Chameleon Noise a breeze since they're usually right by enemies and when you target the Noise next to them, they tend to get caught in the crossfire, which makes them easy to spot. Grenade Launcher, Patrol Round, Psychic Shotgun, Storm, and Diffusion Beam pins are especially useful for this.
Another cool thing about NEO is how even pins with the same Psych archetype actually have differing ways to make them stand apart mechanically.
For example, the Patrol Round pins each have different arcs that effect how they return towards you and impact enemies.
Cony x Cony (the Gravity variant) shoots out 5 different boomerangs and come back to you as five while Stop the Music (Burst variant you win from Scramble Slam) shoots out 3 different boomerangs but come back to you as one.
On paper, this might make Stop the Music sound worse but you have to keep their Beatdrop conditions in mind. Cony x Cony requires for an enemy/boss to be knocked down to the ground and/or launched in order for you to activate its Beatdrop whereas Stop the Music just has you hitting the enemy with the explosion it activates in order to get the Beatdrop. Little stuff like this can have an impact on how you approach combat when it comes to the bosses and mob design and it's like this for a lot of pins in the game, which I appreciate.
All in all, it’s a very robust and fun battle system with a lot of depth to its various mechanics and the bosses show these aspects off quite nicely, providing fun and unique mechanics of their own as well as a decent challenge if you’re fighting on the higher difficulties. A lot of people are under the impression that button-mashing is the optimal strategy and while that can probably get you through the main game on the lower difficulties, they fail to consider these factors:
-Noise have built-in forced retaliation (think revenge values from Kingdom Hearts.) The enemies will flash yellow, while during this, the damage they received, during combos after the fact, multiplies the enemy attack by how much damage was done to it, then it will flash red and instantly counter attack you with the damages built up in its system. The system is different for a few enemies but will instantly begin the moment they flash yellow. Which means that just button mashing can get you killed, especially when you’re engaging in long chain battles and the revenge values become far more frequent throughout each round.
-There are multiple pin set-ups that highly reward you for timing your combos right in order to build up the most Groove in one go, especially when you unlock the Beatdrop sweetspot mechanic later on that can increase your Groove intake when hitting the Beatdrop in a certain spot (which also differs depending on the pin)
-Ememy design has a decent amount of variety, forcing you to think about what sort of pins and threads to bring into battle as there’s not really one deck that makes short work of every enemy. The dinos, mammoths, and birds are prime examples of these
-Just mashing the buttons all at once will leave you unable able to properly counterattack against particularly troublesome enemies and will most likely lead to you dying multiple times
-The game itself ranks you on how much time you’ve taken playing through a chain as well as how much damage you’ve taken overall, incentivizing you to get better at the mechanics as higher rankings leads to higher PP intake, which is incredibly handy for leveling up and evolving pins.
Another thing I want to talk about is the music and man, they absolutely nailed it yet again. Much like the original, NEO covers a large variety of genres while also going for it’s own distinct vibe at the same time. Whereas the original went for a mix of J-pop, disco, and J-rock, with some stray metal, piano, and rap here and there, NEO goes for a more balanced mix of J-rock and metal, with more rap and pop mixed into tracks with heavier sections, as well as a greater emphasis on mashups, electric instruments, and blended-up and crunchier versions of old songs. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its own fair share of genre variety, however, as the game also contains various genres such as liquid DnB, techno, acoustic, club, drum n bass, power pop, symphonic nu-metal, and more. On top of that, the songs in NEO are much more closely tied to the themes of the game and the progression of the characters, with some even cleverly foreshadowing character details that get revealed later on, such as We’re Losing You and Shibuya Survivor. One thing in particular that I want to talk about in regards to the soundtrack is the inclusion of Soundsurfing and how much I love it’s implementation. Not only is it a clever way to speed up overworld traversal and make traversing through Shibuya a breeze, it’s gives you additional Groove intake bonuses that carry over to a round, which is an incredible use of gameplay mechanics synergizing well with one another. On top of that, Soundsurfing gives almost every song in the game additional and unique percussive elements to spice up the soundtrack even more, giving the music even more variety, which is genuinely impressive as hell. And lastly, it adds up to one incredible usage in the final boss fight.
All-in-all, NEO is a fantastic game and a more than worthy successor to one of the best games on the DS and I tip my hat off to the devs for managing to create another compelling experience even after all of these years.
And with that, I bid you adieu.
Neo the World Ends with you is the Sequel to the World Ends with You: Final Remix and has a great story, as well as characters, and good yet repetitively annoying gameplay incomparison to the first game.
Neo allows you to have a group of party members (up to 6) compared to its predecessor which was mainly just partners. The new characters are enjoyable and funny, and the returning characters are a treat and emotional to witness all grown up.
The game is a great sequel which only suffers from 1 slight set back... levels go on for way too long, I understand the reason for this is because the original TWEWY was a DS Game (as Well as Ported to Mobile and to Switch), so the legend of TWEWY, was at the very least a long game for a ds game at the time. So I understand the length of the game needed to be extended. However the issue becomes when the game starts padding out levels to no end.
The beginning of the game is great, the middle is where it slogs and drags way too much that it can honestly make you want to quit halfway through. The biggest levels at fault for this issue are Week 1 Day 7, Week 2 Day 6 and 7, the game pads these levels out with the game stopping your for long drawn out dialogue conversations, or repetitive noise enemy encounters.
However... If you stick it out though, towards the end/final weeks you start to enjoy the game again and seeing characters from the previous game appear is so sweet, and the story get really good and emotional. Also the music really goes all out towards the end.
I myself nearly quit after reaching Week 2 Day 7 and witnessing that day, really was padded out, but luckily I pushed through, and was able to finish. I think this is a game where you play it once and never again, but if you're planning on playing it, try to enjoy it, you'll find it very enjoyable, and a worthy sequel to the original
😎🙏
Neo allows you to have a group of party members (up to 6) compared to its predecessor which was mainly just partners. The new characters are enjoyable and funny, and the returning characters are a treat and emotional to witness all grown up.
The game is a great sequel which only suffers from 1 slight set back... levels go on for way too long, I understand the reason for this is because the original TWEWY was a DS Game (as Well as Ported to Mobile and to Switch), so the legend of TWEWY, was at the very least a long game for a ds game at the time. So I understand the length of the game needed to be extended. However the issue becomes when the game starts padding out levels to no end.
The beginning of the game is great, the middle is where it slogs and drags way too much that it can honestly make you want to quit halfway through. The biggest levels at fault for this issue are Week 1 Day 7, Week 2 Day 6 and 7, the game pads these levels out with the game stopping your for long drawn out dialogue conversations, or repetitive noise enemy encounters.
However... If you stick it out though, towards the end/final weeks you start to enjoy the game again and seeing characters from the previous game appear is so sweet, and the story get really good and emotional. Also the music really goes all out towards the end.
I myself nearly quit after reaching Week 2 Day 7 and witnessing that day, really was padded out, but luckily I pushed through, and was able to finish. I think this is a game where you play it once and never again, but if you're planning on playing it, try to enjoy it, you'll find it very enjoyable, and a worthy sequel to the original
😎🙏
This review contains spoilers
this is a game that i find extremely conflicting. it's difficult to accurately convey all the feelings and emotions that arose within me playing this game because i felt a true spectrum of joy and frustration. i was fluctuating anywhere between rating this a 2.0/5.0 and 4.0/5.0, and i ultimately settled on 3.5/5.0 because that felt the most fair appraisal, all things considered. but i cannot stress enough that for as many peaks that this game had, there were arguably just as many valleys.
to start with the gushing, i adore this game's gameplay. the biggest consideration i've had with a sequel to TWEWY has been gameplay. so much of what made TWEWY work was the DS itself. combat taking place over two screens was an inspired choice that you just can't emulate on any console, so color me pleasantly surprised to see that the gameplay of NEO surpassed it for me. combat in NEO is frantic, hectic, rhythmic, opportunistic, and, above all else, extremely rewarding when understood and executed with precision.
this is one of the best examples i've seen in recent memory of "easy to learn, difficult to master". it's very easy to get away with button mashing, especially on lower difficulties, and minimal awareness of enemy behaviors. but try that shit on hard or ultimate and you're done. enemies have revenge values that prevent you from doing too much damage without reprisal, and often have attacks that will either incapacitate your inactive party members if you let them linger for too long. yet, for the most part, they will automatically dodge almost all attacks if they're not using their pin. imagine that! party members who won't take damage when you're not controlling them! it's inspired design, because it keeps you in control of up to six different characters without ever once feeling overwhelming, confusing, or, most importantly, unfair. i find it very funny in a cosmic sort of way that FFVIIR released in 2020 and tried to do "multiple party members in an action JRPG" and failed miserably (for me, at least). meanwhile square releases another game with minimal fanfare and hardly any budget in comparison, and it still outshines FFVIIR in spades.
i really cannot say enough nice things about the way this game plays. there was just an extremely fun loop i found myself in where i'd get urges to stop the plot entirely and just spend my time grinding because i was having fun in the random encounters. the game gives you a gigantic assortment of pins to try out, and while some are less impressive than others, i consistently wanted to see what would happen if i tried out new party compositions and builds. with over 300 pins, this game delivers plenty of unique pins to try out that each have strengths and weaknesses that make them stand out from each other. when you compare two different shockwave pins, for example, you're not only comparing damage outputs, but also elemental damage, reboot time, potential for growth, etc. etc. the game gives you so much room for self-expression and experimentation that the lion's share of my fun was exploring the depths of this ocean of content.
the cherry on top of gameplay is that the OST for this game is stellar. it's not just serviceable, it's not just good, it's not even just great, it's stellar. i'll admit, in the first week, i wasn't quite on board with the OST because a lot of the weaker tracks are front-loaded. but even then, you get superb tracks like "bird in the hand", which i lovingly describe as an intrusive thought because of how i feel compelled to chant-sing the hook any time i hear it. there's a lot of variety in this OST, going from an acoustic driving rhythm type song like "CHASE" to a cathartic shout-the-chorus type song like "breaking free". and that's only touching on the new songs they brought to the table; this game ended up remixing/rerecording a lot of the predecessor's songs and they're all great with only a few exceptions ("someday" sounds outright terrible compared to the original recording, and "twister" here is just. . . not quite as good as it was). idc how lame this makes me sound, hearing the version of "Calling" that they made for this game put a gigantic stupid dopey grin on my face. it's not just paying homage to the first game's OST, it's adding its own flavor. i love it.
okay, enough unmitigated gushing, we need to talk about the plot. i will just come out and say it: i do not like this game's plot and a lot of the new characters either fall flat entirely or just do not compare to the first game's characters (which does not help when SO many of them return in this game). i think my biggest problem is that the main trio in rindo, fret, and nagi, all annoy me in some way. rindo's whole thing is that he's a dumb indecisive teenager, and i get that, but good FUCK is it frustrating to see the game dangle "should i ask swallow who they are?" for the near entirety of the game. you really mean to tell me you've known this person for 3 years and you don't know their real name, what they look like, or basically anything about them? meanwhile with fret, you get "he likes memes! and he's the class clown type But He's Actually Really Sad Sometimes" and that just feels like a trope that's been done to death. NEO doesn't do anything creative or interesting with fret; you will already know exactly the type of character that he is after hearing him for five minutes and the game does nothing to challenge or change that. all of that would be fine if i didn't find him so incredibly annoying.
and nagi's got this whole "chunnibyou meets autistic girl" thing going on, but the game doesn't mention either of those terms so it ends up going unexplored. nagi is like, pretty textbook autistic, but the game doesn't want to name it, and instead just wants to make her the butt of jokes. forgive the shit out of me for invoking this comparison, but we had futaba in persona 5 explore these issues and give depth + humanity to what it means to be autistic. why should we accept something lesser than when it came out years after that? nagi had so much potential, but the game does nothing with her, and she remains a largely static character. at least rindo and fret, for all my annoyance with them, have arcs. nagi is just a flat character with largely nothing to do and nothing to overcome. she is arguably the worst character in the game because she is wasted.
ultimately, i'd probably have loved this game without any qualms if i could attach myself to any of the main trio, but i regularly found myself going "oh christ i have to read their dialogue now" any time they talked. this is a JRPG! dialogue should be one of the things i look forward to! but there's just so much here, and it's not paced well at all. pacing is an element of this game that is belabored and haunts it at every turn. so often it feels as though characters stop to repeat things we already know or cover things that they just talked about. a lot of this could've been edited to have either more character moments or just cut entirely. this problem unquestionably reaches its zenith at the final day, where you not only have to redo the same events three times, but you go through fucking mountains of dialogue just to get characters up to speed with what the audience knows. this script needed to be edited desperately, and i suspect that a lot of it feels unpolished because of either a rushed release date or lack of budget. square letting this game basically die wrt advertising is what makes me suspect either of those, but i don't have any concrete facts on the matter.
regardless of what the cause is, the plot consistently ends up being the worst part of the game. a lot of character motivations just do not make sense or are unexplored. why does susukichi fight us to the death on w3d6 despite us having the same goal of stopping shiba? well, the game needed to end that day with a boss, so we have to fight susukichi even though he was literally trying to save us minutes before that. why does shiba want to destroy shibuya? and why did he want to destroy shinjuku? well, he was being manipulated by the Plot Twist Villain (PTV) and we never find out how he was able to convince shiba to do any of what he does in the game. and, of course, shiba isn't anything special himself, just being xemnas in battle and having an extremely generic personality. with PTV, at least i can describe him in some capacity. shiba is a nonentity as antagonists go.
speaking of PTV, why did he want to do any of what he does? and why do angels want to "purify" shibuya? how is shibuya impure? how was shinjuku impure? none of this goes answered, and it feels like a shin megami tensei game law ending in that the angels are appealed to for solving everything and then their power and authority go unquestioned despite them trying to invoke genocide. the difference is that SMT games acknowledge that law endings are hierarchical appeals to authority with pros and cons, sometimes often not even having the pros. this game. . . just paints that hierarchical authority as inherently moral and just. haz and joshua are complicit in the destruction of an entire city + want to destroy ANOTHER entire city, and i'm supposed to think that they're the good guys? the game doesn't answer so many important questions, and the secret reports don't even provide any important context for the angels or character motivations like they did in TWEWY. again, i don't care what caused the plot of this game to end up in the shape that it's in, this is just not a good story. and i know good characters save a bad story, but, as mentioned, i don't particularly like the main characters of the game.
the best parts of this game's story come entirely from moments that the first game earned. "neku" being a fake out for beat? all while "calling" plays? that's a great moment, maybe even one of my favorite ones in the entire game! the part where neku reunites with shiki and she starts crying because it's been years since she's seen him? again, fantastic moment that made me feel things, and it's all built on the backs of characters from the first game. so many of the first game's characters steal the spotlight here because the original characters just do not provide anything to work with. who is ayano and why am i supposed to feel sad that she dies? i barely got to see her prior to her death! i could not describe her with more than four adjectives if you put a gun to my head. the only new character that garners even a fraction of as much affection from me is shoka. was her joining the team and ultimately being swallow incredibly, extremely obvious from the getgo? yes, but the game gives her a lot of development and intrigue to work with. i can't say the same about any other NEO character, and that makes me sad.
as far as other nitpicks go, they're few and far between. i really strongly dislike the design of iris cantus alpha, because you basically have to use a specific build or you're just eating shit. i also really dislike how the superboss of this game is just leo cantus armo with 50% more HP and a shitload more damage resistance. considering that you'll see all that fight has to offer by the three minute mark, making it go on for 10-15 minutes is extremely tedious, even by square enix superboss standards. it'd also have been nice if the game gave you a way to have different decks for threads like it does with pins.
i think i've ultimately hammered all the points i really have to hit with this review. i so wanted to love this game, and, in some ways, i did. but it'd be extremely dishonest of me to omit how often in a first playthrough i was either frustrated or bored. pacing is a genuine problem in this game and the writing is undercooked. i adore this game in a "turn off your brain and listen to the music while you play this great combat engine" sort of way. the fact that i'm calling the plot of this game the worst part of the experience really is a shame, because, had it been better, i could see this being one of my favorite games of all time. this was a 5.0/5.0 OST combined with 5.0/5.0 gameplay dragged down by a 1.0/5.0 plot.
to start with the gushing, i adore this game's gameplay. the biggest consideration i've had with a sequel to TWEWY has been gameplay. so much of what made TWEWY work was the DS itself. combat taking place over two screens was an inspired choice that you just can't emulate on any console, so color me pleasantly surprised to see that the gameplay of NEO surpassed it for me. combat in NEO is frantic, hectic, rhythmic, opportunistic, and, above all else, extremely rewarding when understood and executed with precision.
this is one of the best examples i've seen in recent memory of "easy to learn, difficult to master". it's very easy to get away with button mashing, especially on lower difficulties, and minimal awareness of enemy behaviors. but try that shit on hard or ultimate and you're done. enemies have revenge values that prevent you from doing too much damage without reprisal, and often have attacks that will either incapacitate your inactive party members if you let them linger for too long. yet, for the most part, they will automatically dodge almost all attacks if they're not using their pin. imagine that! party members who won't take damage when you're not controlling them! it's inspired design, because it keeps you in control of up to six different characters without ever once feeling overwhelming, confusing, or, most importantly, unfair. i find it very funny in a cosmic sort of way that FFVIIR released in 2020 and tried to do "multiple party members in an action JRPG" and failed miserably (for me, at least). meanwhile square releases another game with minimal fanfare and hardly any budget in comparison, and it still outshines FFVIIR in spades.
i really cannot say enough nice things about the way this game plays. there was just an extremely fun loop i found myself in where i'd get urges to stop the plot entirely and just spend my time grinding because i was having fun in the random encounters. the game gives you a gigantic assortment of pins to try out, and while some are less impressive than others, i consistently wanted to see what would happen if i tried out new party compositions and builds. with over 300 pins, this game delivers plenty of unique pins to try out that each have strengths and weaknesses that make them stand out from each other. when you compare two different shockwave pins, for example, you're not only comparing damage outputs, but also elemental damage, reboot time, potential for growth, etc. etc. the game gives you so much room for self-expression and experimentation that the lion's share of my fun was exploring the depths of this ocean of content.
the cherry on top of gameplay is that the OST for this game is stellar. it's not just serviceable, it's not just good, it's not even just great, it's stellar. i'll admit, in the first week, i wasn't quite on board with the OST because a lot of the weaker tracks are front-loaded. but even then, you get superb tracks like "bird in the hand", which i lovingly describe as an intrusive thought because of how i feel compelled to chant-sing the hook any time i hear it. there's a lot of variety in this OST, going from an acoustic driving rhythm type song like "CHASE" to a cathartic shout-the-chorus type song like "breaking free". and that's only touching on the new songs they brought to the table; this game ended up remixing/rerecording a lot of the predecessor's songs and they're all great with only a few exceptions ("someday" sounds outright terrible compared to the original recording, and "twister" here is just. . . not quite as good as it was). idc how lame this makes me sound, hearing the version of "Calling" that they made for this game put a gigantic stupid dopey grin on my face. it's not just paying homage to the first game's OST, it's adding its own flavor. i love it.
okay, enough unmitigated gushing, we need to talk about the plot. i will just come out and say it: i do not like this game's plot and a lot of the new characters either fall flat entirely or just do not compare to the first game's characters (which does not help when SO many of them return in this game). i think my biggest problem is that the main trio in rindo, fret, and nagi, all annoy me in some way. rindo's whole thing is that he's a dumb indecisive teenager, and i get that, but good FUCK is it frustrating to see the game dangle "should i ask swallow who they are?" for the near entirety of the game. you really mean to tell me you've known this person for 3 years and you don't know their real name, what they look like, or basically anything about them? meanwhile with fret, you get "he likes memes! and he's the class clown type But He's Actually Really Sad Sometimes" and that just feels like a trope that's been done to death. NEO doesn't do anything creative or interesting with fret; you will already know exactly the type of character that he is after hearing him for five minutes and the game does nothing to challenge or change that. all of that would be fine if i didn't find him so incredibly annoying.
and nagi's got this whole "chunnibyou meets autistic girl" thing going on, but the game doesn't mention either of those terms so it ends up going unexplored. nagi is like, pretty textbook autistic, but the game doesn't want to name it, and instead just wants to make her the butt of jokes. forgive the shit out of me for invoking this comparison, but we had futaba in persona 5 explore these issues and give depth + humanity to what it means to be autistic. why should we accept something lesser than when it came out years after that? nagi had so much potential, but the game does nothing with her, and she remains a largely static character. at least rindo and fret, for all my annoyance with them, have arcs. nagi is just a flat character with largely nothing to do and nothing to overcome. she is arguably the worst character in the game because she is wasted.
ultimately, i'd probably have loved this game without any qualms if i could attach myself to any of the main trio, but i regularly found myself going "oh christ i have to read their dialogue now" any time they talked. this is a JRPG! dialogue should be one of the things i look forward to! but there's just so much here, and it's not paced well at all. pacing is an element of this game that is belabored and haunts it at every turn. so often it feels as though characters stop to repeat things we already know or cover things that they just talked about. a lot of this could've been edited to have either more character moments or just cut entirely. this problem unquestionably reaches its zenith at the final day, where you not only have to redo the same events three times, but you go through fucking mountains of dialogue just to get characters up to speed with what the audience knows. this script needed to be edited desperately, and i suspect that a lot of it feels unpolished because of either a rushed release date or lack of budget. square letting this game basically die wrt advertising is what makes me suspect either of those, but i don't have any concrete facts on the matter.
regardless of what the cause is, the plot consistently ends up being the worst part of the game. a lot of character motivations just do not make sense or are unexplored. why does susukichi fight us to the death on w3d6 despite us having the same goal of stopping shiba? well, the game needed to end that day with a boss, so we have to fight susukichi even though he was literally trying to save us minutes before that. why does shiba want to destroy shibuya? and why did he want to destroy shinjuku? well, he was being manipulated by the Plot Twist Villain (PTV) and we never find out how he was able to convince shiba to do any of what he does in the game. and, of course, shiba isn't anything special himself, just being xemnas in battle and having an extremely generic personality. with PTV, at least i can describe him in some capacity. shiba is a nonentity as antagonists go.
speaking of PTV, why did he want to do any of what he does? and why do angels want to "purify" shibuya? how is shibuya impure? how was shinjuku impure? none of this goes answered, and it feels like a shin megami tensei game law ending in that the angels are appealed to for solving everything and then their power and authority go unquestioned despite them trying to invoke genocide. the difference is that SMT games acknowledge that law endings are hierarchical appeals to authority with pros and cons, sometimes often not even having the pros. this game. . . just paints that hierarchical authority as inherently moral and just. haz and joshua are complicit in the destruction of an entire city + want to destroy ANOTHER entire city, and i'm supposed to think that they're the good guys? the game doesn't answer so many important questions, and the secret reports don't even provide any important context for the angels or character motivations like they did in TWEWY. again, i don't care what caused the plot of this game to end up in the shape that it's in, this is just not a good story. and i know good characters save a bad story, but, as mentioned, i don't particularly like the main characters of the game.
the best parts of this game's story come entirely from moments that the first game earned. "neku" being a fake out for beat? all while "calling" plays? that's a great moment, maybe even one of my favorite ones in the entire game! the part where neku reunites with shiki and she starts crying because it's been years since she's seen him? again, fantastic moment that made me feel things, and it's all built on the backs of characters from the first game. so many of the first game's characters steal the spotlight here because the original characters just do not provide anything to work with. who is ayano and why am i supposed to feel sad that she dies? i barely got to see her prior to her death! i could not describe her with more than four adjectives if you put a gun to my head. the only new character that garners even a fraction of as much affection from me is shoka. was her joining the team and ultimately being swallow incredibly, extremely obvious from the getgo? yes, but the game gives her a lot of development and intrigue to work with. i can't say the same about any other NEO character, and that makes me sad.
as far as other nitpicks go, they're few and far between. i really strongly dislike the design of iris cantus alpha, because you basically have to use a specific build or you're just eating shit. i also really dislike how the superboss of this game is just leo cantus armo with 50% more HP and a shitload more damage resistance. considering that you'll see all that fight has to offer by the three minute mark, making it go on for 10-15 minutes is extremely tedious, even by square enix superboss standards. it'd also have been nice if the game gave you a way to have different decks for threads like it does with pins.
i think i've ultimately hammered all the points i really have to hit with this review. i so wanted to love this game, and, in some ways, i did. but it'd be extremely dishonest of me to omit how often in a first playthrough i was either frustrated or bored. pacing is a genuine problem in this game and the writing is undercooked. i adore this game in a "turn off your brain and listen to the music while you play this great combat engine" sort of way. the fact that i'm calling the plot of this game the worst part of the experience really is a shame, because, had it been better, i could see this being one of my favorite games of all time. this was a 5.0/5.0 OST combined with 5.0/5.0 gameplay dragged down by a 1.0/5.0 plot.
Shenmue
1999
First off, holy shit this came out in 1999. Regardless of what you think about the game itself, you have to consider all this in a game from that era impressive. All 3D, NPCs having programmed routines, literally everything voiced, and so on.
If I had to use a word to describe this game, it'd be ambition. Sometimes ambition can cloud what makes a game good though. Every single line spoken by every character is voiced, but the voice acting is incredibly stilted as if everyone reads a script. (You get used to it and it's part of the charm, but that doesn't make it good). There's a day/night schedule the game operates on, but you spend a lot of time doing something else since there's so much waiting. The game is abound with smaller activities and a few sidequests, but you'd have to stumble on them otherwise you'd have no clue they exist. Combat's alright.
The best stories are the ones you can create yourself. When I saw the 18 year old coping with the loss of his father alone outside snowy nights in front of a department store constantly spending money on gachapon machines to get his favorite Sega toys, I felt that.
The gameplay itself just isn't that interesting. Combat is rare so you won't get to enjoy it much until the end. The first half is DO YOU KNOW ABOUT CHINESE PEOPLE and DO YOU KNOW WHERE SAILORS HANG OUT? While the second half is operating a forklift which you can get into the groove of and is alright as a timekiller. For a story that's standard martial arts fair, it really asks you do do lots of maniacal tasks for more of it.
There's a lot to love, and a lot to hate. But you cannot deny that a ton of hard work and effort went into this vision. That is Shenmue. Is it a good game? Nah. Does it have heart? Absolutely.
If I had to use a word to describe this game, it'd be ambition. Sometimes ambition can cloud what makes a game good though. Every single line spoken by every character is voiced, but the voice acting is incredibly stilted as if everyone reads a script. (You get used to it and it's part of the charm, but that doesn't make it good). There's a day/night schedule the game operates on, but you spend a lot of time doing something else since there's so much waiting. The game is abound with smaller activities and a few sidequests, but you'd have to stumble on them otherwise you'd have no clue they exist. Combat's alright.
The best stories are the ones you can create yourself. When I saw the 18 year old coping with the loss of his father alone outside snowy nights in front of a department store constantly spending money on gachapon machines to get his favorite Sega toys, I felt that.
The gameplay itself just isn't that interesting. Combat is rare so you won't get to enjoy it much until the end. The first half is DO YOU KNOW ABOUT CHINESE PEOPLE and DO YOU KNOW WHERE SAILORS HANG OUT? While the second half is operating a forklift which you can get into the groove of and is alright as a timekiller. For a story that's standard martial arts fair, it really asks you do do lots of maniacal tasks for more of it.
There's a lot to love, and a lot to hate. But you cannot deny that a ton of hard work and effort went into this vision. That is Shenmue. Is it a good game? Nah. Does it have heart? Absolutely.