I enjoyed the original TWEWY a great deal—I happened to play it at a time in my life when I was doing an absurd number of cross-country flights, and wound up racking up an absurd number of hours just having fun doinking around in the fantastically fun combat system. I also found the story enjoyable, though not life-changing or deeply resonant like some of my friends did (I played it when I was well into my 20s, which might've muted its impact some; I think the story's themes would've landed harder when I was a teenager).
I say all that to give context on what my mood was coming into NEOTWEWY, in case that helps you decide how useful my judgment is, haha. I would've been happy with a merely-okay game ("exceeds expectations"), and I wasn't likely to be super-fussed about e.g. major tweaks to canon, the lack of inclusion of any particular characters of the original, etc
ALL THAT BEING SAID:
I thought NEOTWEWY was a great sequel, and like, fantastically better than anything I expected for something that spent so long in development. If you told me this dropped a year after TWEWY came out, with the same development team, I would've believed you. It feels very much in the same spirit as the original game, with the appropriate amount of polish.
* Storyline: is more wobbly than the original. TWEWY had some loredumping near the end, but was generally pretty straightforward to follow, with clear arcs for each of the major characters, right? Well, NEOTWEWY goes a little bit deeper in the "90s JRPG nonsense" end of things; I always understood my characters' motivations and what we were doing, but some of the other stuff in the plot felt contrived or goofy or "wait what is this lore doing exactly." This held it back from being a great story, but I thought it was a perfectly decent story (though note I have pretty high tolerance for scifi-y nonsense, heh).
* Writing: Pros: It's especially strong at zingers, memey stuff, funny one-liners, and "flavor" text (dialogue with shopkeepers, item descriptions). Cons: it's a little repetitive in parts... like a less-bad version of "Persona 5 syndrome" (where people are constantly reminding you of something you've already been reminded of multiple times, and there's a decent amount of superfluous dialogue)? It didn't overly mar my enjoyment but it was a thing; overall the pros gave it enough charm that I forgave the cons, but yeah, it wasn't as tight as it could've been.
* Little touches: Fully voice-acted Sho is an absolute treasure. Food system is surprisingly fun (which was good, because I needed something to fill the void in my heart when I realized the fashion system was gone, alas). In general the voice acting was all really well done and a total delight.
* Combat: is fun! Alas, the frantic touchscreen scribbling and wild two-screen stuff is gone... but they do a pretty decent job of translating the feel of the combat pins to a goofy controller layout, which gave me like 80-90% of the same satisfaction, and they swapped out the two-screen stuff for a reasonably-well-tuned hack-n-slash that felt the correct amount of challenging most the time.
* Other: They include some characters from the original game. I won't spoil who or how many, beyond saying, some of these inclusions are fantastic, just the right amount of "old meets new", and some feel a bit "meh", in a sort of "they couldn't decide whether to Bring Back Old Favorites versus Fully Committing To The New Cast" kinda way? But I did enjoy the returning characters in-and-of-themselves for the most part, with one exception whose characterization just felt kinda "meh".
By far the best thing was how much they captured the UG Shibuya vibe & how fun they made it to explore, as my gushy post up above implies :P
So yeah, that's my thoughts! I'd generally recommend anyone who liked TWEWY to give it a shot; I imagine most-but-not-all would be pleasantly surprised and like it at least a decent amount. (Though the owning-a-Switch thing may understandably be the larger barrier to entry there, haha. Report back if you end up playing it!)
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Date: 2022-08-31 12:58 am (UTC)I say all that to give context on what my mood was coming into NEOTWEWY, in case that helps you decide how useful my judgment is, haha. I would've been happy with a merely-okay game ("exceeds expectations"), and I wasn't likely to be super-fussed about e.g. major tweaks to canon, the lack of inclusion of any particular characters of the original, etc
ALL THAT BEING SAID:
I thought NEOTWEWY was a great sequel, and like, fantastically better than anything I expected for something that spent so long in development. If you told me this dropped a year after TWEWY came out, with the same development team, I would've believed you. It feels very much in the same spirit as the original game, with the appropriate amount of polish.
* Storyline: is more wobbly than the original. TWEWY had some loredumping near the end, but was generally pretty straightforward to follow, with clear arcs for each of the major characters, right? Well, NEOTWEWY goes a little bit deeper in the "90s JRPG nonsense" end of things; I always understood my characters' motivations and what we were doing, but some of the other stuff in the plot felt contrived or goofy or "wait what is this lore doing exactly." This held it back from being a great story, but I thought it was a perfectly decent story (though note I have pretty high tolerance for scifi-y nonsense, heh).
* Writing: Pros: It's especially strong at zingers, memey stuff, funny one-liners, and "flavor" text (dialogue with shopkeepers, item descriptions). Cons: it's a little repetitive in parts... like a less-bad version of "Persona 5 syndrome" (where people are constantly reminding you of something you've already been reminded of multiple times, and there's a decent amount of superfluous dialogue)? It didn't overly mar my enjoyment but it was a thing; overall the pros gave it enough charm that I forgave the cons, but yeah, it wasn't as tight as it could've been.
* Little touches: Fully voice-acted Sho is an absolute treasure. Food system is surprisingly fun (which was good, because I needed something to fill the void in my heart when I realized the fashion system was gone, alas). In general the voice acting was all really well done and a total delight.
* Combat: is fun! Alas, the frantic touchscreen scribbling and wild two-screen stuff is gone... but they do a pretty decent job of translating the feel of the combat pins to a goofy controller layout, which gave me like 80-90% of the same satisfaction, and they swapped out the two-screen stuff for a reasonably-well-tuned hack-n-slash that felt the correct amount of challenging most the time.
* Other: They include some characters from the original game. I won't spoil who or how many, beyond saying, some of these inclusions are fantastic, just the right amount of "old meets new", and some feel a bit "meh", in a sort of "they couldn't decide whether to Bring Back Old Favorites versus Fully Committing To The New Cast" kinda way? But I did enjoy the returning characters in-and-of-themselves for the most part, with one exception whose characterization just felt kinda "meh".
By far the best thing was how much they captured the UG Shibuya vibe & how fun they made it to explore, as my gushy post up above implies :P
So yeah, that's my thoughts! I'd generally recommend anyone who liked TWEWY to give it a shot; I imagine most-but-not-all would be pleasantly surprised and like it at least a decent amount. (Though the owning-a-Switch thing may understandably be the larger barrier to entry there, haha. Report back if you end up playing it!)