(TWEWY) NEO: The World Ends With You - We Feel Like A Pin Cushion In This Next Review

Neo: The World Ends With You pits players in the shoes of school student and phone obsessed, Rindo.
Whilst enjoying a normal average day, both Rindo and his best friend Fret end up finding themselves getting teleported into a strange world, a world that is controlled by a group of Reapers. The only way to survive this new world is to compete for points.

Though Rindo and his friends don’t possess any special powers themselves, they soon find out that through acquiring pins that anything they once thought impossible, is now certainly possible. Pins are a very important feature to the game, as they give you unique abilities which are needed to survive this new world. From being able to fight using melee weapons, to throwing and controlling various different elements.

Speaking of which, the game requires each pin to be assigned to a certain key and they all come with cooldowns.
You can also only equip one pin per character, this can all become rather complex over time as new pins become available. The reason for this is that it is often difficult to find the correct pin combination to use, also as pins can only be powered up so far they can only be used for a certain amount of time before needing to be swapped over to something else. It can all feel like a headache.

The soundtrack is amazing, composed by Takeharu Ishimoto who is known for his music in Final Fantasy Dissidia and Crisis Core, it features many upbeat techno and heavy metal tracks. My personal favourite is the INSOMNIA track, but there is so many unique and different ones that you can’t help but want to sing to them all. It also suits the punk type world that we now find ourselves in.

One major flaw within the game though is the whole fashion and gear feature. Whilst playing the game you will notice that the game tends to force you to wear different clothing, which is basically the gear that helps improve your overall stats. You can purchase these from various different stores and all of which have different brands attached to them, in fact wearing a full set of clothes from one specific brand even rewards you with bonus abilities. So this is quite an important feature, the gear isn’t something random that you simply purchase and it definitely feels like it has an important aspect to it. HOWEVER, if this gear is meant to be so important then why does it not reflect on the character wearing it? It would of been nice if the clothes on the characters changed depending on what they were wearing. I guess this is more of a missed opportunity rather than a flaw, but still it is rather disappointing.

Another wasted feature is the collectibles. Though there is quite a few of them to collect, a lot of them, if not all, can all be purchased from various stores and requires barely any effort in getting or finding them. This could be due to the whole scope of the city, or the lack of as the whole city isn’t exactly big and thus exploration is on a bare minimum.

The game does feature various different side quests. However, they didn’t account to much as they were often short and featured the same basic task in order to complete it. Which was to either defeat a foe or solve a puzzle, this got tiring rather quickly.
Also on top of this, some side quests came with optional dialogue options. All of which came to the same inevitable conclusion and the same exact rewards, what is the point of having optional dialogue choices if nothing really changes?

The whole game just felt like it was on rails and despite having collectibles and optional side quests, as they didn’t have much depth to them it didn’t really help with the games already present problems.

OVERALL:

It started off well but as the game continued the problems inevitably began to show themselves. The game lacks any real sort of exploration, optional tasks with any real depth and the story felt really bland. Also, the game became very repetitive with the same mission tasks each week and it was really slow getting to the point. I will forever praise the soundtrack though but this is a video game not a music concert.
In this day and age and for the price we now pay for purchasing games, you would expect more for your money.

Anyway since we are talking Neo: The World Ends With You and since, as I said, cannot praise the music enough be sure to grab the soundtrack to which here: Square Enix, Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music

Developer: H.A.N.D
Publisher: Square Enix
Release Date: July 27th, 2021
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PS4
Genre: Action RPG
Main Story Length: 30-35 Hours
Platinum Trophy Length:
Platform Reviewed On: Playstation 4
Overall Rating: 2/5 (Poor)

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Selphie1999Gaming

Admin at Selphie1999Gaming

The owner of Selphie1999Gaming.com.
Has been playing video games for her entire life so far. Grew up with the Sega Megadrive. Her favourite games include both Resident Evil 2 (OG) and Final Fantasy VIII.
She now writes articles about video games.

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