NEO: The World Ends with You (2021)

This is the first game I've ever played where I'm just like, "I would have loved this when I was younger."

I put like 4-6 hours into this one, but it just isn't grabbing me. I love the art style, I love the music, but I really, really just don't have the patience for learning the game's fairly demanding mechanics, and I think I've finally aged out of the shounen anime thing completely. That's not to say I'll never like another one again, but this one was really trying my patience with the tropes and overacting.

And I'm gonna be real too, I have never liked the narrative style where the story is told through flat images on a static screen. I really, really hate when games do this. It makes the action incredibly hard to follow, and while the stills look great, it just completely throws the emergency break on any momentum the story may otherwise have.

I'm sure this game is excellent, and I can confidently say it's good, but it's just not for me.

Ok, so, ok, so. Here me out. I have a confession.

I subscribed to Playstation Plus Extra. I know to those who like their games physical and collected forever, this is blasphemy. But I got a year's membership on sale and it pays for itself after, like, two games. And I've been trading in games that I finish with no intention of replaying for years. Games are expensive and anything that makes them cheaper is ok in my book.

Anyway. The first big game I've played with the membership is Neo The World Ends with You. And what a pleasant surprise! I played the first game way back in the day and this sequel is such a step up in every way. It's the most stylish looking game I've played since Persona 5. Battling is short and snappy and I kind of wish there was more of it. There's a lot of running about, chatting, eating, shopping. I feel like this game would be beatable in half the time. But the visual quality, music and likeable, mostly voiced cast mean you might not want to rush it anyway.

The game is amazing by all means, the style and charm of it are the main points of attraction to the game, I was so amazed and enamored by the style that when I started the game I legit couldn't stop playing for the first 5 hours or so.

The gameplay itself is another matter though, at first it feels awesome then it's meh and finally just kind of..... copy-paste. the longer you play the more different "pins" you see but the sooner you will realize they just have a fancy exterior and practically the same move set inside. Battles will sadly become tedious and very repetitive to where it just becomes button-mashing at some points.

overall if you're going into this, i hope you have a lot of patience as this is a really creative and passionate game 100%, just really stretched out and should've been about 20 hours ~ish.

Trying to reach the end of this game feels like torture, I'm 24 hours into it but I don't know If I can keep going considering I found out it takes over 40 hours to complete the game, I guess the only upside is that I got it free with PlayStation plus.

The combat started off good and I enjoyed experimenting with the pins but the further it got into the game trying to pick the right pins just became a chore and enemies become damage sponges with ever increasing health bars.

When it comes to the story they could've cut a lot of it out and it would have worked fine, just seems to me like they wanted to drag it out by having you run around doing tedious tasks that were often pointless in the grand scheme of things.

It's kind of annoying how the game makes you lose in cutscenes without even getting to fight the person and then you have to go through tedious tasks just to start the fight or you do win the fight then lose in the cutscene, feels like a waste of time to me.

Also could characters stop stealing pins from me in retarded cutscenes.

I'm trying my best to really like this game but something's just not clicking. It seems very all-over-the-place as of the moment. I remember feeling the same way with the earlier game from this series, which is a shame as I've read a lot of good reviews of that.

I've played this game for several hours already but I still struggle over which buttons to push to get to different menus outside battles. Also, I'm so not a fan of how the camera auto-adjusts when I'm walking along streets. Game mechanics-wise, I'm getting the notion that if I want to see what the vast majority of the other pins are, I have no choice but to play at higher difficulty. Playing at normal difficulty drastically limits which pins I can obtain. I'm starting to want to abandon this game, especially since I feel like I've already put so much into it and yet the game shows that I have merely made 13% progress. Trying again this weekend, and hopefully my affinity for this game increases. Otherwise, perhaps it's best for me to enjoy the series as an anime show.