NEO: The World Ends With You, the sequel to the homonymous title (or almost) that was released on Nintendo DS back in 2007, finally arrived on PS4 and Nintendo Switch last July. After a long-awaited announcement, this desired JRPG will land on PC on July 28.
The developers of the saga never hid their ambition to develop a second part of the 2007 title. The modest sales that accompanied it, however, thwarted this desire until this very year.
Although fourteen years have passed between the first title and this sequel, what NEO: The World Ends With You promises us is by no means a break with the style of its predecessor. In fact, despite being developed for undoubtedly more powerful hardware, it maintains the visual and playable taste of the most classic Japanese RPG.
The World Ends With You… but better.
In this new title the premise we are presented with is very similar to that of the original game. This time a group of kids in the city of Shibuya is involved by a group of strange characters in the “Reapers Game”. The macabre game consists of fulfilling, along with your teammates, the tests that are posed over several weeks, so that the winning team can make a wish that will be granted. The other participants will not be so lucky.
The tests that the protagonists will have to overcome will be of the most varied. You will have to solve riddles, tests of visual acuity, find certain elements in the streets of the city, face tests of questions and answers, or direct competitions with other teams for the dominance of certain neighborhoods of Shibuya. As if this were not enough, the secondary missions and challenges will complete a playable menu that promises to keep us busy for more than 50 hours.
A story with crumbs
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NEO: The World Ends With You will put you in the shoes of a new protagonist: Rindo Kanade. But he won’t be the only important character, since you’ll have to work together with other characters to achieve all your objectives. As a good role-playing game, it promises a story rich in twists and plot. The numerous lines of text in your conversations will be justified by how entertaining and enriching they are for the story and how useful they are when it comes to getting your bond with the characters is getting closer.
Do not expect in any case a deep game in terms of exploration. The map, not very extensive, we will serve more as a vehicle to reach the different tests that we propose, to move freely. Thus, the areas to which we can access will almost always be limited by what the plot sets us for the day in which we find ourselves.
Real-time combat system
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Combat is one of the fundamental parts of the game, as every so often we will have confrontations with rival teams or, more frequently, against the creatures known as Noise. And we won’t need to wait for the story to put us in front of a combat challenge, as we will be able to scan for Noise to link as many combats as we want in search of rewards.
And here is one of the most important features that the title promises in this regard: combat will be absolutely configurable in terms of difficulty. We will be able to increase or decrease the general difficulty of the combat as well as the level of the enemies, although this will directly affect the rewards that this will bring us.
The combat will be in real time (not by turns), in which each character will be assigned a button on the controller, so that we can use all the characters of the team during the battle. The game will have a system of “pins”, by which we will establish a psychopower for each of our characters that will define the type of attack that this will deploy during the battle. These pins can be collected and exchanged throughout the game, and we must bear in mind that the more we use the same type of attack or “pin” the more powerful it will become.
Unique Special Abilities
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In addition to the psychopowers that players deploy during combat, each of them will have a unique special ability: invade the minds of others, help to remember through the psyche, or the one that will give you more possibilities during the game, the ability to go back in time.
The latter will be the ability of our protagonist Rindo, and the one that will allow us a deeper interaction with the game, even having to travel to the past of the very day in which we find ourselves, to change it. Thus we will be able to solve some events that would have less desirable outcomes.
…And a whole bunch of other stuff
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NEO: The World Ends With You, beyond the main plot and side missions, offers us a good handful of things to entertain us and keep us glued to the game’s setting. And is that we can not only learn, use and collect new psychopowers through the pins, but also clothes with which to improve our character and give it a captivating style.
In addition, we can improve our stats or cure undesirable character states, satisfying our appetite. In the city of Shibuya we will find restaurants where we can offer our team a tasty food with a lot of properties that will enhance their capabilities.
In short, NEO: The World Ends With You brings to our homes something we have been waiting for 14 years: a sequel adapted to these times of a JRPG that many liked despite its little commercial impact. This time it arrives with a perfect translation into Spanish -not like its predecessor-, with very comical cellshading graphics and all the flavor of the Japanese RPG that we fell in love with in 2007. We can only hope that it has not lost any of the depth of the first title and the passage of time has been worth for us to live an adventure even more fresh and dynamic on our computers.