Neo:
The World Ends with
You

Neo: The World Ends with You (2007) is a role-playing game set in the modern-day Shibuya shopping district of Tokyo. The place is a ghost town where the dead are forced to battle to try and gain their lives back. With stylized art and a fantasy story, it stands out for its quirky gameplay and individual characters.

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You explore Shibuya to help the lost souls and complete missions. You scan the slowly expanding world to find (a huge number of) pins that enable you to upgrade and customize how you perform in battles. Scanning also reveals enemies that you can battle. Unusually, you can choose to pick more than one at a time to gain more resources from winning.

The original versions of the game used both screens for combat so you could perform attacks with gestures or by shouting into the microphone. The Neo version of the game enables you to control multiple characters in battle and coordinate their attacks in time with the beat to perform powerful combos. While the original game is loved for how deeply you got to know a handful of characters, the Neo version focuses more on how the ensemble work with (and doesn't work with) each other.

The different World Ends With You Games are available:

• The World Ends With You (2007) DS
• The World Ends With You Solo Remix (2012) HD version on iOS, Android
• The World Ends With You Final Remix (2018) HD version with additional co-op on Switch
• Neo: The World Ends With You (2021) Sequel on Switch, PS4 and PC

In the games, each district has its own fashion trends that affect gameplay. You can combine outfits and pins from the more popular brands to gain benefits. You also affect a brand's popularity in a district by repeatedly fighting battles there with specific items from that brand.

The original games stood out for the amount of depth. For example, after completing the game you can return to any moment in the story and replay events, keeping the characters' current statistics and inventory. There are also Secret Reports to be found that reveal more background. There's also an A New Day mode in the Final Remix game that offers additional missions that explain the storyline further.

Neo continues and expands the original story in terms of characters, setting, and the secrets of the mysterious Reapers. Each character in Neo brings something unique to the team, adding in abilities such as reading the minds of people on the street to solve puzzles and travelling through time to change events of the day.

The World Ends With You is a dense experience that requires some time and patience to get into. It's worth the effort as it creates a unique style of role-play experience that offers space to consider life, death and the importance of friendship (and fashion).

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Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Neo: The World Ends with You 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 9 months ago.