"Time has not dulled the series’ edge, apparently, because NEO manages to come through, succeeding remarkably at almost everything it tries to do, successfully evoking the original, and building upon its canon with its own fresh ideas. " It’s a remarkable balancing act, one that even sequels born in less difficult circumstances often have trouble with, and it’s a wonder NEO pulls it off as well as it does. And at the same time, it also takes advantage of the intervening 14 years and of the far more capable technology it gets to be on to deliver a substantially bigger and more fleshed out experience – it never feels like it’s content to just stay within the boundaries the original title marked, either. It’s hard to believe that there is almost a decade and a half separating the two entries because of how well NEO channels the original, in fact. NEO: The World Ends with You is very close to being the perfect sequel to a game like The World Ends with You – it is, essentially, everything that fans of that game have been asking for for 14 years. Time has not dulled the series’ edge, apparently, because NEO manages to come through, succeeding remarkably at almost everything it tries to do, successfully evoking the original, and building upon its canon with its own fresh ideas. Where the original game was remarkable in large part because of its novelty, NEO has to stand out on its own merits. Even as Square Enix ignored the property for over a decade, urban JRPGs started to become more and more popular, and JRPGs as a whole started to mount a comeback. But the trail that The World Ends with You blazed was followed and built upon by many. The World Ends with You, with its urban setting and extremely relatable themes, as well as a striking sense of style, refreshing aesthetics, and hip hop soundtrack, as well as its extremely unique dual screen gameplay enabled by the DS, stood out from the pack right away. Back then, JRPGs were on the decline, and the overwrought nature of their plots and characters had turned many off from the genre. It’s coming 14 years after the original, and it’s launching in a very different market than the one that the original title released in. NEO: The World Ends with You could easily have fallen into that category. Trying to follow up on that years later – either with the same team, but who are now very different people than they were when they worked on the original, or with a mostly different team altogether – is typically a recipe for disaster. A lot of the times, what makes something so beloved to so many people is attributable to the extremely unique blend of the people who worked on it, as well as their specific headspace at that present moment in time. Look at the subpar results achieved with the attempted revivals of Arrested Development, or the Terminator movies. Trying to make a follow up to a beloved cult classic years after the fact rarely, if ever, goes well – this isn’t just true for video games, mind you.
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