Tokyo is the largest city on the planet, and for my first few trips there, it also felt like the busiest. I mean busiest in the sense of the sheer amount of visual information that lives around you when you walk around Shibuya: signs, screens, lettering, graffiti, municipal mascots. It’s a complete delight to take in – maximalist and overwhelming. I’m sure it settles down the longer you spend there, but I’ve always been in and out. In a way, I don’t want it to settle down. And it’s this kind of thing that NEO: The World Ends With You is so brilliant at capturing.
NEO: The World Ends With You reviewPublisher: Square EnixDeveloper: Square Enix, H.a.n.d.Platform: Played on PS4Availability: Out on PS4 and Switch July 27th
The sequel to a glorious DS oddity, Neo is another RPG set in the Shibuya area of Tokyo, fanning out from the iconic Scramble Crossing to take in skyscrapers, crooked shopping lanes, freeway underpasses and much more. Tokyo, a certain kind of Tokyo; this city is vast and multifaceted, is captured in its hectic splendour. This is the same turf that Jet Set Radio explored – at times you can recognise the paving or the cant of a famous building – and it’s the same emotional territory too: a world of teens and fashion and brands and shopping and friendship and phone messages and pop culture references.
But that maximalist visual onslaught! You get it twice, I reckon: firstly as you navigate the streets where the game’s story and missions play out, and secondly when you’re battling – the part of the game where its fiery soul lives. Where to look! The first game on DS had you air-hockeying your attention between the top screen and the bottom as you controlled different fighters with different input methods – button taps on one, stylus swipes on the other – and took on a variety of tattooed frogs and hawks and other wildlife. Neo keeps a lot of this in play. A lot of the enemies are familiar, particularly upfront, and a lot of the attacks you collect and level up, delivered in the form of pin badges, have come across from the earlier game too. But no two screens. No stylus. What to do? Where to look?
NEO: The World Ends with You | Final Trailer Watch on YouTube
It would feel topsy-turvy going into the combat system before talking of the story and all that other jazz, but Neo remains a wonderfully topsy-turvy game. So here goes. In Neo you control a gang of fighters at any one time in combat, each with a different badge powering their attacks. Badges come with distinct inputs, so by the time you have four people to control, you’ll have a triangle guy, a square guy, and a couple of bumpers or triggers. I like to lead with the triangle – generally sharp repetitive taps that blast out strikes or slashes of a glittering blade, perhaps. Square backs them up with lightning, or magical arrows say, and then I can hit the bumpers and triggers to heal, if I’m feeling cautious or boring, or to bring an iceberg spearing out of the ground, the bigger the berg the longer I charge the button.