4/5 ★ – Ginja17's review of NEO: The World Ends With You.

TL;DR: The game is a worthy sequel. Lots of familiar gameplay elements with lots of new ones. Camera is annoying. Battles are played differently. Music is great, find the official soundtrack on YouTube. New characters are all good and written well into their roles. Returning characters as well. Amazing artwork, story is semi-rehashed. Neo: The World Ends With You is a worthy successor to The World Ends With You. Even though it took 14 years to release, the game takes place 3 years after the events of The World Ends With You. There's a lot of elements that were carried forward, and many new things. Though, if you do plan on playing this game, please make sure that you have played the first one beforehand. It'll lessen the confusion impact. I do wish I had a refresher of the story of the first game so I wasn't racking my brain on remembering anything. General gameplay is maybe half of the first game. You still travel around Shibuya fighting noise and completing reaper missions to progress to new areas. You still had to scan the area to find the noise to fight. Starting the game, you can chain together 5 fights. These are called noise reductions. Later in the game, you can get up to 20 chain noise reduction. The one thing about area traversal that really annoyed me was the camera. It looked like you were looking through a wide angle lens the entire time, distorting the way many things looked. There was also absolutely no camera control, you were at the whim of however it was positioned where ever you were in what district. Pins are still equipped for battle, and they still have cooldowns. What's new is that not only the main character uses pins to fight. Everyone uses a singular pin. This opened up many ways to conduct battle. There are other new elements to battle such as the groove gauge. Stunning an enemy would activate a "drop the beat" gauge that would empty out in about two second. In that time, you had to hit that enemy with a different character. Doing this would increase your groove gauge on an average of 15%. At 100% you would be able to do a remix of whomever hit the last beat drop, corresponding to the element of the pin they have equipped. As you progress through the game, the groove gauge could get up to 300%. The soundtrack to this game is amazing. I found myself just putting the controller down so I could just listen to the music. Finding the official music on YouTube will give no spoilers, I highly recommend looking it up. There are several new tracks as well as several remixed tracks from the original game, called NEO mix. The music in the overworld changes every time you go into a shop or the main menu. You can even select which song you want to be your main menu song. Battle music changes every time as well. I found this feature quite refreshing, that way a song never got old. As far as characters go, I would say it's a 60/40 split between new/old characters. Updated looks for returning characters and even further character growth for them was nice to see as well as the exponential growth for the new characters from beginning to end. There was one character I even hated from the get go to becoming a character I kind of liked. The artwork is the same as the last, and it's still amazing. Still love it, nothing really to write about here. The story does kind of feel like a rehash of the original, with several updates. Characters enter the Reaper's Game, get told how they can get out, just to be played and remain in the game. Though it does play out differently, and still brilliantly told. Though I didn't do it, there's plenty to do after you finish the game. Revisit completed chapters and get 100% on the game. Post game, I didn't reload to find out. Both games are definitely worth playing and I believe well worth full price. But, these times are trying times at the time of writing these, play these if you can.