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acid-hydrangea · 3 years

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Three Years in Heaven

A few small glimpses at the winding, unending days of a certain boy.

(Includes post-story spoilers for both TWEWY games in their entireties, as this takes place between both periods.)

(AO3 Crosspost)

Night 1

It's dark.

So dark, he can hardly see his own hand in front of him.

He feels something.

Not by touch, no.

Someone silent

Yet that presence, their aura

It's so familiar,

It speaks one thousand words,

Nondescript, vague and cluttered,

Looping, repeating, silently, yet loudly,

Except for a few that ring out,

"How was your first Day back in the Underground, Neku?"

"... Josh?!"

Neku’s first cry, it's full of relief, shock, words caught in his throat finally let out of the cage in his throat,

"Josh... You..."

His voice rises, he clenches his fist, he's finally back on his two feet,

"Where the hell am I?! Why am I back in the UG again?! Did you..."

Neku crumbles, just a bit, hand over his chest, where his non-beating heart is,

"For the third time..."

"Did I kill you? Well, isn't that the question of the decade."

Neku yells once more, wishing for nothing more than to be heard, and for once, to have his questions answered,

"Don't fucking screw with me! Just give me an answer...!"

He seriously feels like he's at his last straw. Joshua's unconcerned nonchalance was going to be the death of him.

"... What a way to thank your savior." Joshua pouts. "That twisted Reaper had excruciating plans for you, you know."

"... Huh? That Reaper... Coco? What about her?"

"She killed you, sought to drag you to the Underground once more, to..."

Joshua held his arms out, gesturing to the absolute nothingness that surrounded them,

"Save the lost city of Shinjuku."

Neku doesn't even have time to process the fact that Coco killed him. It's not information he wanted to digest, right now.

"This is... Shinjuku? What the hell happened??"

"An Inversion." Joshua states, rather matter-of-factly.

Neku stutters, thoroughly confused. "A what, now...?"

"It's when the RG and UG collapse into each other, and cease to function entirely." Joshua sighs, twirling his hair curl between his fingers. "Much like if you were being choked. Your throat closes up, and you'd stop breathing. If prolonged, you could pass out, or die. It's like that, Neku."

Neku instinctively backed away, holding his hands over his neck, as if fearing Joshua would try to demonstrate.

It didn't help that Joshua was wearing the smallest of twisted smirks during the latter half of his explanation.

Perhaps Joshua just enjoys morbid discussions. That's none of Neku's business.

Joshua rolls his eyes, as if put off by how scared Neku is.

"... You should feel grateful I saved you, for the record. The job I have in store for you is a lot less painful."

Neku was still on the defensive. "...Oh, yeah? And what would that be?"

"To discover the very reason why an Inversion took place here."

"...You wanna tell me more, Private Dick Extraordinaire?"

"If I had more to say, I would have told you."

"I don't buy it."

"Well, isn't that a shame... Because you can't leave until you've figured it out."

If Neku addresses that, he knows he won't get meaningful answers. He doesn't even know if Joshua will stick around for long. He chooses his words carefully...

"I've seen what's left of Shinjuku. There's nothing here. How do you expect me to find any--"

"Make it work, Neku. We haven't got all day. How about you try to listen more closely?"

And just like that, the second Day begins.

Neku decides it's another day of endless wandering, once more, trying to listen to the absolute silence that he now knows is Shinjuku, Post-Inversion.

Night 7

It's been a whole week. 7 Days.

Joshua has yet to make another appearance, ever since that first Night.

Very little has changed, but Neku's grown a bit smarter. Learned a little more. Opening his mind to Shinjuku, bit by bit.

As his eyes close and the current Day ends, he has a familiar feeling he knows who to expect.

Joshua slowly claps, "I must say, you've really outdone yourself, Neku."

"Put a sock in it..." Neku crosses his arms. "I've barely picked up on anything."

"Care to share your discoveries with your beloved Partner?"

"What, you can't look around yourself?"

"I cannot so freely come and go from Shibuya like you, Neku." The look in Joshua's eyes turns a bit serious. "Even I have my harrowing responsibilities."

"... Is something happening in Shibuya?"

"Nothing for you to worry yourself over."

"Is something happening in Shibuya, or not?!" Neku steps towards him, three seconds away from grabbing the collar of his shirt, "Just because I'm not there doesn't mean I can't worry." There's a mix of anger and concern in Neku's tired eyes.

"How about an exchange of information, then?" Joshua twirls his pointed finger at Neku, pushing him out of his personal bubble. "Starting with that briefing you keep putting off."

"... Fine." Neku rubs the back of his head. "Like I said, it's barely anything... But I don't think the people of Shinjuku knew it was coming. It was like it surprised them all at once."

Joshua tilts his head. "... And?"

"That's it. I told you it wasn't much..." Neku reiterates, sincerely hoping Joshua doesn’t ask him for something he doesn’t have.

"No, I think..." Joshua rubs his chin, pondering. "That's enough, for now."

"Tell me about Shibuya, then. What's happening?"

"A handful of Shinjuku Reapers are taking refuge there. Our current Game Master has decided to allow them that mercy."

"... You seem bothered by the fact."

"My, my, you're getting much better at reading people, too." Joshua shoots him his trademark grin. "I have my suspicions that they partook in enacting their own city's downfall."

"Huh...?" Neku's bewilderment was apparent on his face. "Why would they want to tear down their own city?"

"Like I said, it's just a thought. How could it be that they are the only survivors, after all?"

Neku, too, began pondering this... Not that he really knew, though. This is Joshua he's talking to. Those Shinjuku Reapers could be totally innocent, and Neku wouldn't know,

“You’re the Composer, aren’t you? Why not kick them out if they pose a threat?” Despite his own thoughts, Neku figured Joshua would’ve taken more precaution--

“It’d be dangerous to let them out of my sight if they are responsible.”

Frankly, Neku had no argument against that. Joshua was right. Even so...

Neku's voice goes a bit quiet. "... Maybe something else caused the Inversion, though..."

"Hm, you think so?" Joshua snaps his fingers. "Go on, uncover more proof to back that theory up, then."

Neku's eyes shot open to the same, dreary sights as always.

It's sudden, but the eighth Day has begun.

Night 8

Neku had a very rare, very special, very horrific encounter against Noise.

He wasn't exactly prepared for a fight, but...

He had a few Pins on hand, luckily, it was enough to take it out.

He was surprised his psyches work as well as they do, given he's on his own. That's the least of his concerns right now, though.

Larger than most, it took all the longer to take down. Its attacks were also far more brutal, leaving every cut burning. After the Noise was felled, Neku felt revitalized,

but no, none of those were the concerning parts to be dealt with.

It almost felt like it was an amalgamation of human Soul and Noise matter that he was fighting.

Their thoughts were loud, so, so loud, forming words, sentences, phrases.

The cries, shouts, and whimpers it exuded all sounded incredibly human.

"No, don't hurt me! I mean no harm!"

"Go away! Get away from me!"

"What did I ever do to you...?"

"What... Where am I... What's happening?!"

"It hurts, it hurts!! Mama!!!"

"What are you doing to him?!"

Yet, they wouldn't stop.

They kept trying to hurt him.

Neku wasn't about to lay his life down, but...

He felt damn close to it.

The revitalizing energy that enveloped him after their defeat, it felt bittersweet.

He falls to his knees, collapsed, exhausted.

There are thoughts lingering, from all that it used to be. They sit there, as if waiting,

But Neku can't muster the will to do anything, right now.

His eyes shut on their own, refusing to perceive himself, or anything around him.

Neku wanted nothing more than to disappear, just like them.

The eighth Day is over.

Joshua looks forward, at the wisps of what once was a catastrophic bundle of Noise,

"Quite the curious entity that was, mm?"

Neku has no words. Nothing to say, to think, to... be.

The vacant, scared expression on his face... Joshua found it interesting, to say the least.

"...You okay, Neku?" Joshua tilts his head, as a few sparks of concern come through his usually sardonic demeanor.

Neku can barely get the words out, but he tries, "No... I'm not, actually." He's on the cusp of tears.

His voice could barely be heard by normal ears, but it's fine, because Joshua can hear him.

He always can.

"... Those thoughts aren't going anywhere," Joshua's tone has turned considerably sympathetic, far more gentle, possibly even genuine, "Let's just wait for a bit."

Joshua sits beside him, now.

Gently placing his hand on Neku's, he can feel it shaking, as it's clenched tight.

Neku feels the strange silence is comforting, simply because Joshua is here.

Neku, deep down, wanted nothing more than the company of someone else.

Especially right now.

Even if it was Joshua’s...

No, not ‘even’... He found comfort in Joshua’s knowing tone, and even in his kind gestures...

No matter how foreign it all was to Neku.

He didn’t feel like questioning it, right now. Joshua was the only other person here, the only one he could talk to.

Neku doesn’t want to take that for granted.

Neku tries to speak, once more, as tears blur his eyes, which he dared to open once more, too weak to look ahead, he stares at the ground below him,

at Joshua's hand, still tenderly holding his own.

"...Josh... Did I...", Neku gulps, trying to release the words tangled in his throat, "Kill those people...?"

"No, you didn't. They were already gone. You gave them mercy, if anything," Joshua brushes his thumb over Neku's hand, speaking calmly. "They can pass on peacefully, now."

"... You mean it...?"

"I do. They even left us their thoughts, it's something that can help us."

"... It can help us...?"

"Of course, Neku," Joshua gently brushes his shoulder against his, "Try to look forward, try to look at them."

As hesitant as he is, he trusts Joshua.

Joshua would take a chance like this to screw with him,

but he figured Joshua still has things for him to do.

And Neku knows he himself can't leave until he's done what he has to.

Whatever ulterior purpose Joshua has, refusing to listen to him would make things drag on.

He wasn't in the mood to deal with Joshua's ire.

... And who knows? Maybe Joshua actually was concerned.

Only if because Joshua wasn't his assailant, this time.

Neku looks forward.

There's naught but glowing wisps, a condensation of people's thoughts lingering in the air.

It almost seemed as though they were waiting.

"Try to read them, Neku." Joshua prompts him. "Read their thoughts, just like you've done before."

Joshua gently lifts his hand from Neku's, from which Neku tries to muster the energy to lift his arm... To try to understand the words waiting for him.

Neku feels weak, he hisses silently from a cut on his arm. It wasn't only because of the battle, no, but he hadn't noticed how tired he'd grown over the past week.

It's not like he was loitering around. He was trying his damndest to figure more information out, and find a way out of Shinjuku.

That last battle really cemented his exhaustion in--

Taking notice, Joshua helps, gently lifting Neku's arm up properly. He takes care to not worsen his injuries,

"There, just like that. Go on, Neku."

And so, Neku does.

Realigning himself with the thoughts before him...

He focuses...

He hears them.

"The pain, it's... Gone..."

"... It's okay now, right?"

"What was I doing before this...? Hmm..."

"That man, wearing a butterfly..."

"He looked vengeful, didn't he?"

"Mama, was there something wrong with him?"

Some of them pay Neku no head, some soon extend a silent thanks his way.

They don't speak to him, but he feels it, just before they all fade away.

A vague sense of gratitude.

Joshua lets go of Neku's arm, and Neku stands back on his own two feet, as does Joshua.

"I'd say that was worth it, no?" Joshua's snide tone returns.

Neku kicks at the ground, "... That battle sucked ass."

"You won though, didn't you?" Joshua winks.

Neku crosses his arms, "So what if I did..." Suddenly, Neku wonders, and his wounded arm falls to his side, being clutched by the other.

That battle... Still did a number on him, physically. It was difficult on all ends.

A concerned expression forms on Neku's face, "...Hey, I won't have to do that again, will I?"

"I can't say. You should prepare yourself for the worst, anyways." There's something different about the way he says that, Neku can't recognize Joshua's tone, but he rolls with it.

Neku is silent, his eyes pointed in Joshua's direction. He has better questions to ask.

"... Why are you here, anyways?"

"Why? Because I'm your Partner, Neku."

"Not what I meant. You're Shibuya's Composer. I didn't think you could do anything outside those boundaries."

Joshua chuckles, hand to hip, "You clearly underestimate my capabilities."

Neku rolls his eyes, "You were the one who said you can't come here yourself. Did you find some loophole?"

Joshua continues, this rare generous mood of his leading him to continue entertaining Neku with answers. "Oh, Neku... Neku, Neku, Neku... You are my loophole."

Neku realizes just how messed up his role as a messenger has become. He tried not to think about it before, because what could he do about it? Regardless, it still bothers him.

Neku sighs, "... You don't plan on letting me take a break, do you?"

Then, Joshua says something, that frankly, Neku didn't expect at all,

"Not my jurisdiction, that's all on you, Neku."

Neku's head is now fully turned towards Joshua, only to be met with his eyes staring back at him.

Neku tilts his head, curious, yet suspicious, "Is it, now?"

Joshua states, rather matter of factly, "You have a lot to learn before you can further deepen your understanding of what happened here."

Joshua grins with his eyes, yet his mischievous demeanor returns.

"By all means, take your time, Partner."

Neku opens his eyes.

It is now Day 9.

He's decided his fate is indeed in his own hands, and no one else's.

Neku spends the day trying to find peace of mind.

Night 21

“You don’t look too hot, Partner. Miss me that much?” Joshua asks.

Neku is silent, a strained expression on his face, eyes shut tight. Unresponsive.

It was like Neku barely heard him.

Joshua groans, wanting some kind of response from Neku. "If I didn't know better, I'd have assumed you went back on all of your changes, as a person. Are you back to hating everyone, Neku?"

Neither Neku nor Joshua look very well for wear, it’s been about two weeks since they last met. They've both been busy.

Neku’s sitting, hands pressed hard to his headphones, as if trying to listen to them like they’re broken conch shells.

Joshua sighs. “... Did you even realize the Day’s ended, Neku?”

Neku opens one eye, sulks, “I’m... Trying to find something...”, before shutting it, again.

Joshua tilts his head, “Would you mind enlightening me on what that is?”

Neku’s voice is quieter than usual, “... Their thoughts became muffled.” as if not wanting to speak over the City’s whispers.

“Hm... Isn’t that quite the predicament.”

Joshua sits in front of Neku, studying his face.

Looking from multiple angles, he notices Neku’s eyebags, seeing that sleep deprivation has set in, despite the mandated time that Days are supposed to end.

Maybe it was just his imagination, but Neku seemed a bit thinner, too. His arms, legs...

He’s definitely run into more Noise battles in the past two weeks, as well. Likely caught off guard for a good handful of them.

Wounds Neku poorly tried to hide and mend were incredibly obvious. A single healing Pin that needs time to reboot can only do so much.

Joshua has a lot on his mind, right now. A lot of priorities.

The Neku before him reminded him strongly of that.

“Maybe I can help. Take your hands off of those precious headphones of yours, Neku.”

Hesitant, yet stuck with no other answers, Neku complies.

“Guess it’s worth a shot, whatever you... Hey, wait--!”

Joshua swiftly robs Neku of his Headphones.

“There. Try it, now.” Joshua grins slightly, patting Neku’s headphones, as if reassuring him of their safety in his hands.

Grumbling, Neku thinks, ‘There’s no way it’s that easy...’

He tries to focus his mind once more, hands hovering over his ears, where his headphones used to be.

... He begins to hear things he once couldn’t.

His strained expression ebbs away slowly.

Joshua looks on, a silent giggle passes his lips.

Watching Neku’s expression relax, as he listens clearly to new thoughts floating in the air...

It made Joshua feel a fleeting sense of happiness, as he too felt rather worn-out.

Lowering his hands, opening his eyes, the exhaustion in his eyes faded out, even if just a little.

Neku whispers, quietly, “... Thanks, Josh.”

“Really, you were helpless without me, Neku...” Joshua jests, yet there's a hint of melancholy to his words, “You’re welcome, though.”

Joshua gives Neku his headphones back, placing them around his neck, then helps him back up on his feet.

“Try using that sixth sense of yours more, Neku.” Joshua's eyes fall to the side, “‘I’ve been quite busy lately.”

“Right... How’s Shibuya been?”, Neku asks... A slew of concerns rise up on his mind’s list of priorities.

Joshua crosses his arms, “Depends. Do you have anything new to report?”

Neku tries to think carefully about how to say this... He sighs, and decides to just be honest.

'... No. Not yet...”

Directing his eyes back to Neku, Joshua gives him a hard stare, for a few moments...

Joshua decides he’s had enough, for now, “... Since you seem to be having a hard time, I’ll forgive you this time, Partner.”

Neku releases a breath he held in anticipation, “Oh, cry me a river, why don’t you...”, He figured Joshua would stop being cooperative eventually, he’s just surprised it hasn’t happened yet.

Twirling his hair curl around his finger, Joshua continues, “In any case, the Shinjuku Reapers have basically taken over Shibuya’s Reaper Games,"Joshua tuts, rubbing the hair between his fingers casually, "The previous Game Master was unable to stop them.”

... Neku tries to not think about how that probably wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t off the previous Conductor.

Well, the Shibuya he knows and so dearly loves would be no more, but still... Part of his mind thinks, ‘at least there would have been one’...

Judging by Joshua mentioning only the Game Master... Did he even hire another Conductor, yet...?

... Neku didn’t feel like risking getting on Joshua’s bad side. Not to the extent that asking would bring about, anyways.

After a long pause, Neku replies. “... You say that like it’s not a huge deal.”

He knows better than to worry himself sick over things he can't control. If Joshua doesn't seem worried, chances are it's fine.

Joshua runs his hand through his hair, other hand in pocket, “Hah. Hard to say, really. If I’m being honest?” There's a slightly vicious look in Joshua’s eyes. “I’m kind of excited to see where they take it.”

... Neku takes it back. He forgot Joshua fakes his emotions for a living.

Neku crosses his arms, “Sounds like you’re lying through your teeth, Josh.”

Joshua realizes that he’s not the best at keeping up his facade when he himself is exhausted.

That, or Neku’s just gotten to know him that well. Joshua's little tics, stims, fidgets...

He kind of hates it, but he also kind of loves it. That wasn’t Neku’s business, though.

Joshua replies, brushing the hair out of his eyes, “It’s fine,” he rolls his eyes. “They’re not doing anything blasphemous, in any case.”

The silence is thoroughly awkward, between the two. It’s a wonder that the next Day hasn’t begun yet.

Joshua is just waiting, while Neku has other things on his mind...

Neku sighs, “... I get that you’re basically a God, and everything, but are you taking care of yourself?”

Joshua gives him an irritated look, “What, worried I can’t handle a bit of pressure from the opposition? You wound me, Neku.”

“Geez, is it wrong to be worried about my Partner?” Neku mumbles, rubbing the back of his head, “You just look... Tired.”

The more he cared, the more Joshua took offense to it, “You’re practically bleeding at every cut. You really have no place to be speaking to me like that.”

“Sorry, I haven’t exactly had time to rest,” Neku scoffs.

“That makes the both of us, then.”

“Guess it does.”

The two stare at each other for some time, arms crossed, eyebrows furrowed.

...

Neku sighs, letting go of the tension in his shoulders,

“Josh, I think we’re both tired as hell of all of this.”

Joshua tilts his head, unconvinced, “Your point being?”

“We need a long-term game plan.”

“You think I don’t have my own?”

“If you do have one, feel free to let me in on it.” Neku stands his ground. ”Just telling me to relay information to you isn’t exactly what I’d call a good plan.”

Day ???

"Well, well, if it isn't my splendiferous wonderful old friend, Nekkykins!"

"Hey, Coco."

Neku was given a brief explanation on what was going to happen, some time ago. He would return to Shibuya with the assistance of the Harrier Reaper Coco Atarashi, which included assisting her with something else, afterwards.

‘... And you’re telling me I have to wait a whole month before she gets here?’

‘That’s the deal, Partner. Don’t worry, it’ll all pay off in the end.... You trust me, don’t you?’

Said assistance would likely lead to more information about the Shinjuku Inversion being uncovered, as she has close ties with someone who was investigating, as well... That person in particular was in need of help.

"Since I’m here to pick you up, we should get going soon! Althooough... I also have something else for you!"

... Neku knew better than to let personal feelings get in the way, at this point, but he couldn’t help but feel somewhat bothered... Even so.

It's too much trouble to hold a grudge against someone for taking your life.

Even if it was isolating, horrifying, and downright made him feel like he didn't exist... For three, long, years...

It was fine. It ended up being for the greater good--

Coco cheered, “Here are some fresh new clothes for you!"

Neku’s response was delayed, as he’s deep in thought. "Huh...? Thanks, I guess."

"C'mon, c'mon, try it on, at least!" Coco prompts him, putting them in his hands. "Those old clothes must be so dingy and tight, by now!!"

"Alright, I get it... Give me a second."

It doesn't take too long for Neku to change, once he's found a place to do so.

Somehow, his old clothes never did shrink, if any part of his wardrobe did stay the same size through the years, it would probably be his old headphones and music player.

He was no longer in possession of either, though.

... The new clothes were pretty comfortable. Fits his style, too.

Coco claps her hands, "You look suuuper cute! Plaid really suits you, y'know!"

"Uh... Thanks.” Neku rubs the back of his head, somewhat bashfully. “Can we get to Shibuya, then?"

"Yes, yes! Buuut, before that... We should arrange for a place to meet up after you get there. It'll be alot easier to explain things!"

“I’ll be helping your friend out, right? Then she can tell us more about the Inversion that took place here.”

Coco nods. “Super-duper Splendiferous! You already know what you need to do!”

"Works for me. How about we meet up at Cat Street... Wildkat work for you?"

"Oh, you mean where it used to be?” Coco takes Neku by the arm. “Sure thing! Let's gooo!"

Not being given the time to process the implications of 'where it used to be', the two are already off to the races.

Things seem... Different, as Coco's dragging him along. He's not sure, but... Somehow, the inverted city of Shinjuku didn't seem as small or cramped, as the two approach it's border.

He didn’t even know there was a border, but if he guessed anyone would know about it, it would be a Reaper of Coco’s caliber... And not someone like himself.

While they're running at a brisk pace, Coco realizes something, and slows her pace. Letting go of Neku's wrist, she turns to him. Guilt apparent in her puppy-eyes, she bows before him,

"By the way... I'm ever so sorry for what I did three years ago!! I'm a whole new person now, I promise you!!!"

Neku can't shake the feeling that he can't trust or forgive Coco, no matter how close she thinks she is with him, and even if he's determined to help her friend.

It doesn't mean he can't try, at least. Neku gave the guy who killed him twice multiple chances to make it up to him, why wouldn't he do the same here?

... And for one thing, she actually apologized.

"... It's alright. That reminds me, though..."

"Oh? Do tell."

... It was fine to ask, wasn’t it? There was still one thing he was dying to know, for as long as he’s been dead.

"Why did you kill me, anyways, Coco?"

There's a vacant expression resting on his face, as he asks.

Any frustrations, tears, any sense of despair for his own death... It left him a long time ago.

He had the feeling death meant very, very little to Coco. Surely, it was just a small question to her.

"Ahh, about that... The truth is..."

Coco fiddled her thumbs, guilt written all over her face,

"IwantedyouandMisterMini-MotototeamupandsaveShinjukutogetherbutthenitwastoolate..!!!"

Coco takes a deep breath, having confessed in one fell swoop.

... It took Neku a second to process that.

Well. It was what it was.

"It's alright. Let by-gones be by-gones, and all that, I was just--"

Suddenly, a headache crashes through Neku's head,

"G-gh..." He clutches his head, staggering.

Coco exclaims, "Are you alright, Nekkykins?!"

It's another Vision. A Future Vision.

“Beat, are you okay?!”

“Don’t stop-- Keep goin’! I’mma stay here and keep him at bay.”

That's... It's Beat's voice.

“P-p-preposterous!”

“I can’t give y’all a speed boost right now... So I gotta slow him down instead. Ya feel?”

Something’s hurting him, someone’s hurting Beat--

“What’re ya waitin’ for? Go!”

“And leave you behind?!”

“I’m tryna buy y’all some time here, yo!”

“And what happens when you run out of time?!”

“We’ll see.”

What is he doing... What is Beat doing?!

“No, we won’t!”

“There’s no way we’re letting you face him all by yourself! You’re gonna get erased!”

Who?! Who are they facing--

... Erasure...?

“What-- you don’t think I can handle ‘im?”

“No, I don’t!!”

“Defeat is inevitable.”

“Y’all cold, yo!”

“And you’re hurt, Worms-For-Brains!!”

"Either we all escape together... Or we all fight together!"

Beat, you have to listen, BEAT--

"Look-- I’mma need you to chill for a sec. We all stay and fight, we all get erased."

“... B... Beat...? What are you doing...?”

Coco’s saying something, but Neku can’t hear her. He can’t hear anything except for--

"Ain’t nobody gonna be left to save Shibuya... I’ll catch up with you later, but for now, y’all gotta go.”

Is he... Is Beat planning to sacrifice himself...?

“Sorry, pal... Can’t let ya through.”

“Beat!!!”

That younger boy called out in fear, clutching a Pin desperately, a weakened Beat is holding back a rampaging Leo Cantus, there's no chance he’ll last long--

Before Neku even realized it, every second that Future Vision amped up, his legs were running for the Barrier of Shinjuku,

The vision ebbs away, but everything in it is burned into his mind,

‘He looks so different--'

any exhaustion Neku might have had was completely gone,

'He looks how I used to look, even with his own headphones--'

replaced with the urgent need to save one of his closest friends.

'He's throwing his life away to protect the others, the other Players in the visions I've been getting for the past three weeks--'

Neku's thoughts are burning inside his head, as the Vision keeps replaying in his head, he feels like he's about to combust,

‘Hang in there, Beat, hang in there!’

He doesn't even realize he's completely left Coco behind, but

There are tears streaming down Neku’s face,

his breathing's turned erratic,

his non-beating heart is beating, loudly in his chest,

Neku needs to get back to Shibuya,

Neku needs to save Beat,

Right now,

Before it's too late.

Before it's too late...

BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE--

#joshua #twewy #ntwewy #the world ends with you #neo: the world ends with you #yoshiya kiryu #sakuraba neku #coco atarashi #neo twewy spoilers #twewy spoilers

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olivemeister · 3 years

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OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

#neo twewy #neo twewy spoilers #this turned into a behemoth. im so sorry #I CHECKED AND IT'S OVER 11K WORDS #I'M SO FUCKING SORRY

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ichika27 · 3 years

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TWEWY 12

Grande Finale already!

I felt the same nervousness and excitement I felt when I watched the first episode while watching the last one. I’m excited, half knowing what I’d see but not knowing what else to expect.

Can’t believe we finally got to this point. I took so many screenshots... I had to limit myself cause they’re not all gonna fit in one tumblr post.

Also I don’t have to give a spoiler warning anymore. Length warning though cause this is super long!(longer than the usual posts I made for this series at least).

Kitaniji transforms into a three-headed monster and unlike in the game, he doesn’t capture any of Neku’s partners nor use Josh’s power to do so. I’m not sure what explanation there is as to how he got more than one noise form but I guess he’s the Conductor so maybe it’s part of his powers here.

Shiki and Beat awaken in the middle of Neku’s fight and help out. The trio then forms some kind of three-way pact (four if Rhyme actually counted although now completely sure?) and continue battling Kitaniji. The fight scene was pretty cool especially Beat’s attack with the chains. It just sucks the fight ended too fast. I guess all of TWEWY anime’s boss fights end kinda fast even though they’re uh, boss fights.

Final attack beam like in the game! It was too fast and I couldn’t get a good shot of the white version this transforms into (which looks like the one in the game). They have an explanation later as to why it looks different at first but they’ll talk about it later.

It’s sad Joshua isn’t part of this. This is supposed to be the four-way fusion attack. (;-;)

They defeat Kitaniji who disappears, sad that he was unable to protect Shibuya. Joshua never showed up in this boss battle so Kitaniji never got to talk to Joshua for the last time. In the game he at least dies happy in a way - he lost but he gave it his all and his Composer praised his efforts. He was also able to tell Neku that the rest is up to him now. Here in the anime, he just... he lost and felt bad. I wish they had Josh show up here but they had other ideas.

A new door opens and Neku braced himself as he knows the fight isn’t over cause there’s still one last guy on top.

They find themselves in this room/hallway (is this supposed to be the Trail of the Judged?) filled with CAT murals. This somewhat confirms the “CAT = Composer” theory and Neku has now accepted it, calling out Mr. Hanekoma to show himself.

And yeah, the last episode’s title is the show’s title as well “It’s a Wonderful World”.

Someone else showed up instead. Joshua finally makes his reappearance!

Boy, have I been waiting for you! I wish you were with them in the final battle earlier so you guys could be a team (and you could be one of Neku’s partners) one last time.

Neku is surprised but happy to see Joshua again. He thanks Joshua for saving him before and is glad that he’s okay.

In the game, this never happened cause Josh appears in the middle of a fight. Things were too hectic and when the battle with Kitaniji finally ended, he and Josh talked about their own game and so after Kitaniji disappears, what’s left is questioning what was happening. Since Josh didn’t show up earlier, they were able to reunite in a more peaceful way and Neku had no suspicion until Joshua himself brought it up.

And I guess that’s why I was so nervous when I watched this. It’s a bit too peaceful. I know what’s gonna happen next but not exactly how they’d adapt it.

Joshua finally explains the truth to Neku and his friends.

This felt more... awful to watch. Like we had both Joshua and Kitaniji giving bits and pieces of the truth in the game via their conversation so there’s two people to focus on. Here it’s just Joshua. But in a way, I guess this works cause there’s no one else there to soften the blow and Joshua could make the revelation hurt more if he wishes so. It also kinda feels worse cause you see Neku happy to see Joshua earlier before the reveal happens. Kinda heartbreaking.

“I’m the Composer of Shibuya.”

He finally says it clearly to a confused and surprised Neku.

We get a flashback of Joshua and Kitaniji talking about Shibuya’s impending destruction, why it must happen, and Kitaniji making a deal to try and save it. He has a month to change things for the better and if it works out, he wins. If not, Joshua continues the destruction plan.

Joshua’s Composer form is more vague here. It’s human shaped but you don’t see his face and the outline glows like this so you don’t properly see the shape. I think this is better cause there’s no way you can tell who the Composer is like this and he looks less human.

Beat gets angry at the revelation and tries to attack Joshua which he couldn’t do because of Joshua’s powers. I wasn’t able to get a screenshot of this but Josh is twirling his hair after this while Beat struggles to try and punch him. He’s cute and I know this is kind of inappropriate to say in this situation given he legitimately made someone mad and he deserves that punch to his pretty face.

Joshua uses his powers to freeze the others (and later renders them unconscious to keep them quiet). Neku is worried about his friends and is mad.

Joshua tells him he won’t hurt Neku’s friends. He then explains about how he found his proxy. Which is Neku much to his horror at what this meant.

I just had to get this with the subtitles on. I replayed the scene several times to hear if there was no error. Joshua says “Daiji na Neku-kun no tomodachi...” and I google translated it. It says “daiji” means “important”. So yeah, he definitely called Neku “important” to him. It’s surprising although this wouldn’t be out of place in the original game since they had more moments to just talk on there.

Yeah, I know I focused on this a little but I’m a nekujosh/joshneku shipper so forgive me for latching onto this.

Neku slowly sees the bigger picture as Joshua continues to explain himself. As a reward for getting this far, Joshua returns Neku’s memories.

He really had to get that close while saying Neku’s name, didn’t he?

Neku’s death flashback. The scene plays almost similar to the game right down to the censored guns (is this a creative decision to make it faithful to the game or are they really just not allowed to draw actual guns?). I was gonna make a joke about how Joshua stopped Minamimoto’s bullets using an AT field but the shot was different and the bullets just looked like they froze midair and not stopped by some kinda force field like in the game.

Neku ends up getting shot by Joshua complete with bleeding unlike in the game. I just have to wonder if I was the one who got it wrong cause in the game, Joshua looks like he’s aiming for Neku’s head and here, Neku gets shot on the chest. Did they change it cause a headshot would be too much or has it always been a shot to the chest?

Neku angrily walks over to Josh and grabs him by the collar. Joshua stops Neku with his powers as he continues to explain about what happened regarding the death scene and Minamimoto. Joshua then materializes two guns out of thin air and places one on Neku’s hand as he tells him the rules of their final duel: just shoot and if Neku wins, he could save his friends and he becomes Composer and do what he wants. What stood out with how he said it is that he didn’t exactly go “If you don’t beat me, Shibuya is destroyed.” and instead went “If you win, these are what you get to be Composer and whatever else you’d like! Sounds good, right?”. As if saying killing him has a lot of perks.

It feels weird seeing Josh physically placing the gun on Neku’s hand cause in the game, the gun was by Neku’s feet and Neku had to pick it up on his own accord. Anyways, I like the effect they used to materialize the gun cause it’s the same effect for the names of the routes when they show them on screen. Like graffiti or something.

At this point Neku’s crying. The shot didn’t feel as dramatic as in the game in my personal opinion. Neku is tearing up here but he looks tired and was about to sob in the game. Joshua meanwhile, counts down from ten.

Before Joshua’s count hits three, Neku hears a somewhat distorted voice (which we know is just Mr. H) saying “Trust your Partner”. This reminded Neku how he got to where he is: by trusting his partners. (I have something to say about this later)

In a very shocking turn of events, instead of just lowering the gun and letting himself be shot like in the game, Neku drops his gun and with a hand outstretched tells Joshua “I’ll trust you”. Oh my god... they really did it. I love this change not gonna lie. I think they might have added this cause they didn’t adapt Neku’s ending monologue where he does say he trusts Joshua. It’s less dramatic than the game though since Neku doesn’t say anything while Joshua is counting down. In the game, he was crying and saying how he thought Joshua was his friend and how all of this really hurt him. Guess we take what we can get and they gave us this.

Joshua smiles as he shoots but as Neku falls, the smile on Joshua’s face disappears.

Mr. H didn’t show up at the end here either so Neku didn’t get to see him.

Neku wakes up in the middle of Scramble Crossing like usual but he bumps into people and so he realizes that he’s alive now. He doesn’t scream after the very stressful crap he went to like in the game. Might not be entirely the same but Joshua still left him lying down in the middle of the street. Nice.

We then see a short timelapse from above Shibuya which is probably supposed to show a week has passed. Neku’s monologue wasn’t added in and no ending music as well. I’m disappointed “A Lullaby for You” wasn’t used. Here I was hoping for a miracle.

By the way, Shooter, Yammer, and I think Makoto all passed him by the scramble. They really didn’t get much screentime but at least they made cameos.

Neku finally meets up with the Bito siblings like at the game’s epilogue! The shot they did was almost the same as with the game, too. They have dialogue here instead of just stills with Neku showing how happy he was to see his friends alive again, too. I’m happy the anime version showed him smiling more at the end cause he needed that after everything. It’s nice to see him smile.

RG! Shiki is here! With the same shot as in the game! They really aren’t gonna show us her face, huh? Also, all of the shots with Shiki on them has her back towards us. Like there are scenes where Neku and the rest are looking forward and she’s in front of them with her back turned on us. Why? They could’ve used the lighting on her glasses to obscure her eyes, too. So her bangs are a secret as well then?

They show Eri later, too enjoying a concert, by the way. I was hoping to see a reunion between her and Shiki as well and them finally talking after the stuff from before. Oh well.

Neku takes off his headphones and he and Shiki do a proper introduction with each other with Shiki being herself this time. (Is Shiki the same height as Neku? It looks like that from this angle.)

Anyways, this was a nice way to adapt Neku taking off his headphones since they can’t do it like in the game.

They adapted the secret ending but expanded it to add stuff from the secret reports to explain other lore stuff which would’ve been missed by the anime-only watchers since those are part of bonus game contents. Mr. Hanekoma and Joshua talk about the events of the long game and Joshua says he knew it was Mr. H whose responsible for Minamimoto.

They also talk about the Red Skull Pins and how Mr. H made it for Kitaniji. Mr. H says the pins imprints Kitaniji’s will on people and that he himself (Mr. H) doesn’t need that cause he could do so with all the graffiti he left all over town.

Which brings me to earlier in the duel: Neku hears a voice, clearly (to us) is Mr. Hanekoma’s and it’s in a place filled to the brim with CAT graffiti. Did he imprint the words “Trust your partner” to Neku?

Meanwhile, Beat wonders how they were able to pull off the final attack. Neku says it was probably the pin Hanekoma gave them (the keypin looking thing). I guess they needed an explanation for the last attack but they didn’t have the fusion pin so they used this keypin instead. It’s why the attack looked different in the beginning when the attack was powering up.

There’s apparently a new CAT graffiti at Udagawa and of course, CAT-fanboy Neku has to see it. On the way, they meet Sota and Nao who are now alive! I’m so happy!! Joshua brought them back, too! I always felt bad about what happened to them in the game. I’m glad they got a happy ending in the anime.

Def March, 777′s band, are back as well and look... they got their winged mic back! It makes me wonder if they found it later on or if Joshua gave that to them back the same time when he brought them back lol. I’m just really happy for all of them.

Joshua’s wings!! This is, unfortunately, the best shot I could get since they never really zoom in on this. In the game he is in his Composer form in the secret ending and turns into a ball of light when he leaves. Here, we see his wings. It’s smaller than the one he has in KH:DDD. At least we canonically see it here.

I can now use the term “Joshua Maji Tenshi” and be accurate!

Mr. H points out that Joshua looks lonely and is in denial and Josh just leaves. Mr. H also shows his wings and leaves afterwards, too. I didn’t take a pic of it since we see it in the game’s secret ending anyways. His wings also seem smaller than in the game.

Final shot of the new CAT graffiti. I was so close to crying the entire ending and this nearly tipped me over but it didn’t. If “A Lullaby for You” was playing, I’d have probably bawled my eyes out. This graffiti is beautiful. I want a sticker of it.

Also, I just noticed but CAT’s old graffiti at Udagawa had mostly darker colors. This new one is brighter and is more colorful.

First of all, I wanted to thank tumblr for not giving me an error for posting more than 15 images like I usually did. I was bracing myself for the error pop up and was gonna make a part 2 instead but there was some kind of miracle and I got more than 20 pictures on here.

I have a lot of melodramatic things to say about the anime but I’ll save it all for later. For now, I’ll say something else. I’m sad they didn’t adapt Neku’s monologue. Those words from Neku still hits me in the feels to this day. Him saying that the entire ordeal really affected him in more ways than one and it wasn’t all good even though he’s happy about changing and what he learned from the experience. His line about how he can’t forgive Joshua but trusts him was cut along with it and it would’ve been nice to have to know what he thought of Joshua.

The thing I missed the most was the “I have friends now. We’re meeting each other for the first time in a week. See you there?” lines. It shows how happy Neku is that he now has people to call his friends which is super heartwarming and the line implies that he counts Joshua as one of those friends, too (which is properly confirmed in KH: DDD which I’d probably make a post about later if I get the motivation to do so). That would’ve also made the last scene with Josh hit harder. In the game, knowing Josh wanted to be with them and is sad he couldn’t already makes me sad but also knowing Neku is waiting for him makes it much worse (and I still feel pain thinking about it even after all these years).

Maybe we’d see them get reunited in NTWEWY. Hopefully. I really do hope so.

The anime isn’t perfect but it did what it could with the limited amount of time it had. The show would’ve been better if they had more episodes but we don’t know why it ended up with just 12 so we can’t really say anything else. They did it and it wasn’t as bad as I was fearing in a way. Would I recommend it? I’d probably rec the game first, to be honest. I was only okay with watching cause I have played the game and could fill in the missing stuff but the anime-only fans couldn’t and the thought that they won’t be able to fully appreciate the entire story of twewy is kinda sad. It was a nice watch though and I’d miss waiting for it every week.

I wonder if they’d make “A New Day” OVA since the anime is supposed to help the ones who haven’t/couldn’t play the first game but would go play NTWEWY and that scenario has story stuff that’s connected to the sequel.

Anyways, thanks for reading this far if you did! I’ll be watching gameplays of NTWEWY when it comes out in full (since I don’t have the money nor the console for it).

#Subarashiki Kono Sekai #the world ends with you #twewy #subaseka #sana_post #joshneku #nekujosh

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