Tokyo is the largest city on earth, and in my first few trips, it also felt the busiest. I mean when you walk around in Shibuya, the large amount of visual information around you is the busiest: signs, screens, fonts, graffiti, municipal mascots. It is a total enjoyment-minimalism and overwhelming. I believe it will settle down the longer you stay there, but I always go in and out. To some extent, I don’t want it to settle down. NEO: The World Ends With You is very good at capturing this kind of stuff.
As a sequel to the brilliant DS Spectacle, Neo is another role-playing game set in the Shibuya area of Tokyo, starting from the iconic Scramble Crossing and entering skyscrapers, curved shopping streets, highway underpasses and more. Tokyo, a kind of Tokyo; this city is vast and multifaceted, full of busy splendor. This is the same field that Jet Set Radio explores—sometimes you can recognize the paving or slope of a famous building—it’s also the same emotional field: a world pop culture full of youth, fashion, brands, shopping, friendship, and phone messages. refer to.
But that kind of minimalist visual impact! I think you will get it twice: first when you walk through the streets where the game’s story and missions are staged, and second when you are fighting-the part of the game where the hot soul is. Where to look! The first game on DS allows you to divert your attention between the top and bottom screens because you use different input methods to control different fighters-one is button click, the other is a stylus-and accepts various tattoo frogs And eagles and other wild animals. Neo retains many of these features. Many enemies are familiar, especially in the early stage. Many of the attacks you collect and upgrade are delivered in the form of badges and come from earlier games. But there are no two screens. There is no stylus. What should I do? Where to look?
Before talking about the story and all other jazz music, entering the combat system can feel bumpy, but Neo is still a very bumpy game. So that’s it. In Neo, you can control a group of fighters at any time during the battle, and each fighter has a different badge to support their attacks. Badges come with different inputs, so when you have four people to control, you will have a triangle guy, a square guy, and several bumpers or triggers. I like to use triangles to guide-usually sharp repetitive strikes, blade impacts or diagonal lines that may flash. Square supports them with lightning or magic arrows, and then I can hit the bumper and trigger to heal, if I feel cautious or bored, or take the iceberg out of the ground, the bigger the iceberg, the longer I charge the button.
Considering avoidance and the fact that the spiked animals you are facing like to mix and match attacks, you have enough consideration. But Neo has just begun. At the top of the screen is a Groove meter, which accumulates as you attack. This is how it works: hit the bad guy with one action until you get a combo timer, then switch to another action and keep the combo until you get another combo timer telling you to switch again. When the Groove meter fills up, you can perform a special action, and when it bursts-fireballs, ice shards, flowing Top of the Pops lightning-you can rebuild your meter. It never has to end.
What you have to balance is the cooldown of each badge and its attack-this is where the real issue arises. Therefore, when you use the triangular jab, you are trying to get close to the cooldown. Can you switch to different party members and perform different attacks to time the clock before breaking the chain? Can you continue to switch to stay before the charging period? Can you do this while paying attention to the upcoming attack, which party member was disabled by the jellyfish, and what your groove meter is doing?
I like fighting, and as the story progresses, it will only continue to increase the complexity of the joy. Even from the outside, it looks beautiful. Neo’s artistic style is visually excessive: thick black lines, anime heroes, trendy hairstyles and exquisite and delicate youth fashion. Inevitably, your attacks are suitable: huge laser explosions, torrents of flames, sparkling magic. There are enemies! I especially like the shark in the early game. It likes to swim under the sidewalk and burst out. Jellyfish always show that you will be busy-they like to split in two-and then the boss, the best of them I can’t talk about, but one of them makes me sobbing with laughter. At the end of the first act of the game, target priority is one of the more things you must consider, and then the enemies that must attack from a certain angle. Oh yes, there are also enemy teams.
This is the source of the story. Like the first game, you and your team of friends are basically placed in a metaphysical reality TV game show. Trapped on the multi-dimensional island of Shibuya’s landmark, you are at the mercy of a group of death gods who divide your life into days and then weeks as you compete with other teams for the championship. Every day there is a new mission-a series of puzzles, maybe a mysterious instruction to complete certain missions, or a territory game that allows you to fight monsters and other teams on the map. At the end of the week, one team won, well, the bottom team really lost.
This is equivalent to a pleasant excuse to confront a very strange stereotype with another. The opponent team is the regular intruder in the soap opera plot, quickly established around you trying to understand the Reaper’s game and stay alive. I especially like the team that is addicted to the river-but what kind of river? -And the big bad guy who sees life as a game of Othello. The plot strives to align you with the other teams while feeling a certain sympathy, as they are planning and counter-conspiracy against you, and everyone is eager not to be at the bottom before this weekend. Your phone is constantly related to the progress updates of other teams, even if it is strictly written, it feels very active, like a modern world constantly changing around you.
It’s not just the team. Usually, a task will involve you exploring Shibuya and affecting the lives of passersby who cannot see you or talk to you while you are playing a game of Grim Reaper. Some people will be affected by bad emotions, and you are happy to fight for them and eliminate the monsters that prey on their souls. Some people need a moral reminder or reminder. You can do it by suddenly entering their minds and constructing basic ideas for them one word at a time, or solving difficult problems to implant memory. Sometimes-especially at a certain moment-the game is really hard to understand the meaning of these things, but it is also often warm and interesting, and provides players like me with a welcoming glimpse of the attention of distant cities.
Tokyo! If battle is one of Neo’s trump cards, then this city is another big man-exploring Shibuya and the surrounding area is just a treat, divided into neat small parts, all of which are carried out while maintaining their own identity. Looking around is beautiful-the game has a strong tourist reputation-but there are pedestrians, you can read their thoughts by stepping into another area, where you can also link monsters for some large-scale battles. There are shops where you can buy equipment that can improve your stats (you can upgrade the shop to get better things) and restaurants that permanently increase your stats, but if you eat too much, you need to cool down. Each of these institutions has its own characteristics and its own products. I will never get tired of eating delicious cheeseburgers at Scramble Crossing. I spent 20 minutes trying to remember the location of a particular bookstore the other day. I don’t even need a book-I just want to browse it.
Neo is amazingly huge, even though its map is very comfortable. Of course, all these pins can be found and upgraded, they have different attacks and different synergy. Teams with opponents have to fight and gradually understand. When you encounter a peak in difficulty, there will be a lot of tribulations, and then all the smart business-time travel, therapeutic diving-is used to spin battles and inexplicable things, and travel in different missions. Yes, Neo may be very repetitive, but for me, its two trump cards come to save the day. On the one hand, backtracking in Shibuya, looking at all the shops, people, and landmarks, if I backtrack in an ordinary fantasy world, it will never get old-it provides plenty of opportunities for puzzles that involve quite a hard search. In an urban environment, a mid-range example is particularly interesting. On the other hand, these battles are very interesting. When you switch between the attack of one team member and the other, you sometimes get close to the rhythmic action, keep your best condition, and hear the benefits of each team as you move forward. encourage. The suspension here is an absolute dream. You chew every victory gloriously.
This setting can make everything look new. Even if it is a series of unlockable privileges, when it is dressed up as the network of your emerging social network, it will feel a little special. You can unlock nodes by providing friends points to people you know. These badges will release excellent attack power and can be upgraded and evolved, but they also seem to be very collectible and very desirable. Although sometimes the storytelling can be very lengthy, the characters are drawn neatly, and everything is chattering with the ping and status updates of the incoming text.
Occasionally I will feel a strange tingling. I have been to Shibuya myself, and once stayed at a hotel opposite Scramble Crossing, I got strange recognition while playing Neo. But more often, I feel that the world is looking at the world-Neo’s world is shuffled from Jet Set Radio’s world. I think I will never be able to understand a place as vast as Tokyo, but in the game you can see its wonderful angle. This is indeed a generous game.
