What does The World End With You mean to you?

You're looking at this review, so I have to assume it doesn't mean nothing. Maybe you had heard about it, and it seemed cool! Or maybe it is a game you have played all of the versions of, know all the pin evolutions by heart, and know all of the deep lore about the different planes of existence in TWEWY lore.

No matter where you are on that spectrum, you’re here now.

I suppose I should give where I am. It’s a game that I can thank for a lot of things. I, at one point, considered TWEWY one of my favorite games of all time. I still do, though it has progressively fallen out of my top 5. But it is a game that I consider a watershed moment for myself. When I was younger, I didn’t have many friends. It was hard for me to make them, and even harder to keep them. But I ended up making a friend from scouts when I was around 11, and he was quite a bit older than me. He was like a cool older brother who showed me all kinds of video games he downloaded onto his R4 card. I was always transfixed by what he is playing, but my memory has made it hard for me to really remember which games he was playing.

Such was not the case with The World Ends With You. I remember vividly where I was when I first saw the game. It was a summer camp out, and it was very hot. We were just relaxing as there was nothing going on, and he was playing his DS. This was not uncommon, so I looked over his shoulder and watched. It seemed so cool, and he kept hyping up how awesome it was. The gameplay, music, graphics, and overall style had me transfixed. I wanted to play it.

Problem is, I was 11, and had no money. I also didn’t know much about how to emulate stuff either. So, The World Ends With You remained a memory. About a year after that, my friend graduated high school and went to college. I haven’t seen him since.

Fast forward a couple years, and I am 14, not quite in high school. I happen to have some money, and randomly decide to see how much The World Ends With You is, and find it is somewhere in the ballpark of $20. I was shocked to see it so cheap (my friend assured me that it was going to get rare someday) and bought it right away. I played it through, and it surpassed every possible expectation. I loved it.

But I have to thank The World Ends With You for a lot more than just being a great game. At this point in my life, most of my video game consumption was western AAA games on the Xbox 360. I played them and had some amount of fun, but I wasn’t passionate about many of them. The World Ends With You was, for me, something new and different. I knew that I loved EarthBound (which has remained my favorite game of all time) but my video game preference at the time was basically exclusively Nintendo first party games and games not unlike Call of Duty. The World Ends With You was new and different for me. It taught me to try and seek out other Japanese video games. RPGs at first, because that’s what I love, but I ended up falling in love with so many games that I didn’t love before. Games like Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, and (some) Final Fantasy games are now some of my favorites of all time. Check the games I have listed at a 5, please. It is better than trying to continue explaining my taste in games.

So the short of it: I love The World Ends With You, and appreciate what it did for me as a person who was learning what she liked from video games.

And then they made a sequel.

I’m now 22. I’m not a teenager anymore. I was concerned if a new The World Ends With You could possibly live up to my expectations. I was scared that they would make a sequel and my opinion would just be “well, TWEWY was cool, this one wasn’t for me.” I saw they had a demo and was a mixture of excited and nervous to give it a try.

By the time the demo ended, I was happily surprised. It was fun! Not fantastic, and it has a lot to prove still, but my anxiety was eased, and I let myself get mildly excited for it.

Release day comes and I buy it. I’m excited to finally play more, and over the course of a few weeks, I finally finish. At the time of writing, I just saw credits. What I found left me bafflingly happy.

TWEWY is a game that was built for the DS, and every attempt to move it from the DS was folly. They ‘work’ but are no way to play the game. However, those versions at least had a touchscreen to mimic that gameplay. NTWEWY is an entirely controller-based game, so that was not an option. I don’t know how they did it, but they took an experimental action game with a focus on dual screen gameplay focused around on multitasking and were able to translate that faithfully to a controller. Pass the puck works. The gameplay is extremely fun and engaging. The story is extremely anime and kind of dumb, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have never had reactions to story moments as I have in this game.

I will never forget the cast of Neo The World Ends With You. Fret and Nagi are both caricatures at first, but they do not remain that way. They have thoughts and feelings I never expected. The party dynamic with the whole group is fantastic. I would love to play side story with all of the characters just hanging out and living in the world. I didn’t think a new game in the TWEWY franchise (and it’s very strange to think it’s a franchise now) would make me feel this way as my teenage years have passed me by.

I went in expecting Neo The World Ends With You to be a fun trip down memory lane, revisiting a game that I haven’t played through in full since launch. What I got was so much more, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Omori is weird, but oh so very good.
I would personally call myself an EarthBound enthusiast. I've been a fan for years and have played all the games in the series multiple times. EarthBound is my favorite game ever! As such, I'm drawn to a lot to quirky RPGs.
The 2 major standouts before were Undertale and Lisa the Painful. Undertale is Undertale, it's great! I love it! You've absolutely played it! Lisa is also great! I also physically can't bring myself to play it! It is the most oppressive and unfriendly game I've ever experienced. Which is awesome, that's the point, I just can't handle it. I'm a very senstive person, and it is too difficult for me to handle.
Omori has come out and is now my favorite of the games to come from EarthBound's legacy. It was fantastic. It had its cake and ate it too. It had a quirky, lighthearted adventure in interesting locations. There are funny moments and characters constantly. It is fantastic. It also is a difficult psychological horror that terrifies you while also emotionally punching you in the gut.
Please play this game. It is truly fantastic.

I played this game as a diehard Persona 3-5 fan. I wanted to know what was up with that game that the creators made ahead of P5. What I found didn't really disappoint me, but also did not leave me especially happy with what I played.
Let me start: the puzzles are fun! I'm not great at them, but I had a lot of fun on the gameplay front
The rest: I dunno. I can think of realistic parries for a lot of the issues I had with this game. I think Vincent is irredeemable trash, but also, that's the point. But it's not like Scott Pilgrim where I end up at least wanting Scott to be better. Vincent sucked, and I hated him from start to finish, and it kept just getting worse. I didn't feel happy when he, in my playthrough, got married to Katherine. I just think Katherine deserved to be with someone better. I think the writing is okay at moments, but it deals with trans shit pretty damn badly. I'm a trans woman, so maybe I am a tad too sensitive to this, but still. I guess I'm glad my playthrough is as short as it was. I clocked in around 10 hours and felt satisfied. I don't know if I will ever do another run again.
I didn't do a Rin run because it was my first time, but honestly, I regret it. She is by far my favorite, and I wished I got my time with her.
Also, the Switch version had weird problems. Be careful, I don't know if the PS4 version is any better, though. Whenever I was at the bar and went to the home screen (which I did often as a sort of pause) and then reopened the game, the game would run at like 15 FPS. Not sure why! Weird! It happened multiple times to the point where I would save before pressing the home button so that I could easily reload to fix it!

Now here's what you're going to do. You're going to turn on Nier Replicant, sit down, and have a good time. You're going to play the entirety of the game until you reach the credits, and you're going to have fun. Take your time, fish, do sidequests, act like you would any other game. And once you beat that game, you're going to re-select that same save file. Don't start a new one, don't shut down the game, you re-open the same exact one. You're going to play it again. Once you do that, you're going to open it and do it again. You're not going to complain about playing the same game again, and I don't want to hear a word about how it's identical to last time. You are going to sit down, shut up, and collect all 33 weapons. And once you go to finish that game, you're going to save the game to two different game files. Not one, two, now that part is very important. You're going to then kill the final boss, and once you do that, you load the second save file you had. Beat the boss again, and let him live. I don't care if you think that's the right choice or not, he's gotta go. Finally, you're going to start over with a new file. You're going to play the game again until you reach the new content. Do you understand?