Fans of the original The World Ends with You are still celebrating NEO: The World Ends With You on social media, recently announced for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 hardware. It is wonderful to see a cult classic getting a proper sequel on two extremely popular consoles, which will hopefully help the game find a broader audience than its precursor. But there is a cautionary tale written in the The World Ends With You franchise’s thirteen-year-long hiatus which—aside from a couple Kingdom Hearts cameos—was filled with mediocre, “remixed” ports for a variety of platforms.
After a series of countdowns and other teasers, Square Enix finally announced NEO: TWEWY will be arriving in summer of 2021. The sequel features the same striking, cell-shaded aesthetic that marries anime to street art, new characters, and full 3D environments that will allow players to explore Shibuya in greater depth than ever before. Even though a pair of powerful next generation consoles have just arrived on the scene, releasing the sequel on the Nintendo Switch and PS4 makes perfect sense from a market penetration standpoint. But without careful development, the sequel may lack a certain something that made the original game magic.
Those who have only experienced the Nintendo Switch’s TWEWY: Final Remix could be forgiven for failing to understand the rabid devotion for the action-JRPG that has kept some fans talking for over a decade. Taken as a whole, the game’s story rivals the finest Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts have to offer, but the beginning has not aged as well as the game’s awesome audio and vibrant, eye-catching visuals. Fortunately, the original game’s incredibly innovative mechanics were more than sufficient to captivate players until the story hit its stride, but unfortunately, the shift in platforms required certain mechanical concessions that marred TWEWY’s magic.
The original TWEWY was tailor made for the Nintendo DS and leveraged every affordance the hardware had to offer. While the stylus-based movement system takes some acclimation, it allows players to quickly guide Neku across the handheld’s touch screen, while they are assisted by a rotating cast of AI partners who do their part on the system’s top screen. The player powers up their partner by passing an energy puck back and forth between the two screens in a wonderful mechanical metaphor that drives home the game’s themes of teamwork and trust. As a result, TWEWY is one of the most effusively praised and critically acclaimed titles for the platform.
But the Switch has only one screen, and no stylus. Certain “pins,” which are the game’s addictively collectible magic spells and abilities, play beautifully with a stylus on the DS’ touch screen, but feel clunky or completely wrong on the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons. Combination attacks that leveraged both screens also had to be modified and simplified. As a result, the experience on the Nintendo Switch was a far cry from the original.
While it might sound trite, TWEWY was not merely developed with the DS’ unique capabilities in mind—it made players feel like the reverse was true as well. It seems the DS was custom-made to let TWEWY sing. Features that felt like gimmicks or novelties in countless other titles were not only justified, but suddenly essential. This may explain why, despite the disappointing ports, TWEWY remains such a distinctive experience 13 years later, and why lead designer Tetsuya Nomura’s passion for a sequel never dwindled.
With a technical focus on dedicated hardware like the original and DS, such developemnt can lend a title can lead to the sort of harmony between platform and software that made the original TWEWY so sublime. But the new game isn’t just in development for one console, but two: the PS4 and the Switch.
Based on the graphics on display in the NEO: TWEWY trailer, neither platform will break a sweat running the game, which is a vital first step. But unless Square Enix develops two very distinct versions of the same game, NEO will be completely beholden to common features between the platforms. The Switch cannot leverage features intended for the DualShock 4’s touchpad. The PlayStation 4 cannot make use of features that could be tailored for the Switch’s Joy-Cons. As a result, it will be harder for NEO to achieve the same bespoke quality that made the original TWEWY so special.
For Square Enix to succeed with NEO: TWEWY, it needs to identify the absolute essentials that exist between its chosen platforms. Rather than accommodating every bell and whistle on a given system, the developers can focus on the raw essentials required to produce a brilliant JRPG in the spirit of the original TWEWY. In fact, it may rescue TWEWY from ideas that simply don’t work, like the Switch’s tendency to force Joy-Con waggle-based play on titles that don’t need it. Sony can give its controller-embedded speaker and relatively limited touch-pad a break.
By stripping away all the noise that comes with a given platform, NEO: TWEWY can still deliver a true-to-form experience. The PlayStation 4 and Switch have a tremendous amount in common. It’s no accident that Switch players have been begging for a Persona 5 port, or that footage of NEO has led gamers who are unfamiliar with TWEWY to conclude that the series is a Persona 5 knock-off, rather than an early influence.
With fewer hardware eccentricities to worry about, more attention can be devoted to other features. Baton-passing across screens is an excellent metaphor for teamwork, there are other ways to explore that message ludically. In the trailer, multiple characters are present on the field during combat, meaning it is likely that the player will have to switch between them, as per Star Ocean, Tales, or even Genshin Impact. It is even possible that the game will feature a robust cooperative multiplayer system.
While it is hard to say farewell to one of the most innovative control schemes in the annals of JRPGs, progress is defined by the challenges that shape it. And ultimately, a thorough reinvention of similar themes and concepts is better than trying to reverse engineer the incredibly hardware-specific experience of the original.
NEO: The World Ends With You is currently in development, and scheduled to be released next summer for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.
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