Welcome to our review of The World Ends With You: Final Remix.
Complete the mission…or face erasure. That’s all Neku knows after regaining consciousness in the middle of a busy intersection without his memories. Now he and his partner must fight to survive a life-or-death game in this twisted tale with more turns than the urban labyrinth of Tokyo they’re trapped in. This definitive version of Square Enix’s RPG classic brings the dark story to life on the Nintendo Switch system along with an extra chapter, exclusive two-player combat, and some killer, newly remixed music.
In the crowded chaos of Tokyo, players of the Reapers’ Game must complete daily missions or face total erasure. Neku might not be enthusiastic about forging relationships, but with his very life on the line, he’ll need to learn how to work together with a partner—and fast: they only have seven days. Gear up with stat-enhancing threads and collect mysterious pins to unleash psychic abilities in battle. Take control of real-time, action-fueled RPG battles using touch controls or Joy-Con™ controllers. With new features in addition to all the content from the Nintendo DS and mobile versions, the definitive version of this modern classic is finally here.
The World Ends With You originally released on Nintendo DS and it is incredibly clear this game is all about touchscreens. Either use the Joy-Con in TV mode or use the touchscreen! During my game time, I often did wish I was able to use the buttons just to make the next speech bubble appear. The further down the game, the more I ignored this, but I still found it important enough to mention it in my review.
The World Ends With You: Final Remix starts with you being stuck in some sort of game, that pits you in Tokyo. You start off in Shibuya near the Hachiko statue. Your hand is showing a counter and you do not know what is happening.
It slowly becomes more and more clear that you need to clear out the “noise” in order to keep progressing in the story and basically stay alive. As you go, you meet new people, you make a partner that you are somewhat reluctant to talk to, you keep seeing a guy in a red jacket that makes no sense, … All a bit of a mess at first, but it gets cleared up down the road and all puzzle pieces will fall into place soon enough.
The game itself is all about clearing the noise. Using the somewhat dodgy touch controls, you need to attack the noise after uncovering where it is. You get pins along the way that allow you to take up more or different ways of defending yourself. As the controls are originally intended for the DS, it is clear that this game would clearly benefit from a stylus… My fingers did not fully do the trick in my humble opinion and often was I triggering the wrong attack. Not to forget that part of hand was always blocking parts of the screen, something a stylus would not have as much.
This game is actually quite boring at first and it needs to really grow on you to fully enjoy it. At first, I wanted to even give it a failing grade. Not joking. I disliked the touch controls and the often inability to really escape an incoming attack. A lot of annoyances were right there in the beginning.
As I continued to play, I got better little by little. I got more into the story and it grew on me. I did spend several hours with the game on my flight to Hong Kong and I must say, it played better the deeper I was into it.
Based on my many hours of gameplay, I can actually agree with most commenters that previously played the game on Nintendo DS. This is a great game, but this is based on the story. Once you realize what those reapers really do and how to properly play the game, it goes from dull and boring to interesting and cool. A very honorable mention to the fact the music is always playing and the jam is always upbeat.
At times, I wished there was some sort of fast forward when reading all the speech bubbles, would have loved some more voice acting too. I guess this game was kept truer to the original than I would have liked?
In conclusion, I ended up loving this game despite the slow start and bad controls. As I did get more and more adapted to the touch controls, I would have loved more input or options to change them. Even just being able to skip or use of the buttons to see the next speech bubble, the small things really.
Story-wise, this game is the real deal. Before I knew it, I was playing it during a sleepless night at 3 am, I blamed the jetlag at that time but did not mind being able to play this game. I was in my third out of 7 days of the story line at that point and I ended up playing 2 hours straight. In the middle of the night… That said it all for me.
When I think about rating this game, I am stuck. I wanted to rate it at just a 7 out of 10 score, but the more I play, the more I enjoy the game. My current impression is already up at 8 and I have not fully beat the game at this point. I may end up writing an edit once I am done, but for now, I will stick at 8!
