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queenluaMy first time in Seattle, I took a taxi from the airport to a little address near downtown, where I had an apartment for the summer. When I saw skyscrapers rising in the distance, I gasped and asked, "Is that the city?" The driver chuckled and said, no, that's one of the suburbs.
Then, once we got into the city proper, I gasped again, this time because of all of the trees. I'd been to cities before, and loved them, but so often cities meant concrete and gray and pathetic overtrimmed lawns that passed for parks. Here, we seemed to drive through whole forests, mere minutes from downtown, and directly next to soaring skyscrapers, people's lawns ran patchy and overgrown and wild. "Is it always this green here?" I asked the taxi driver. He laughed again and said, welcome to the Emerald City.
Which meant: yes. Yes and yes, oh my gosh yes.
He dropped me off at the address. By absurd good fortune, I had a twentieth-floor apartment with a view, and I stared out over trees and buildings and trees and trees for what felt like an hour. Then, I left to wander around my street, and wandered into the fanciest sushi place in the city by complete accident. I didn't realize my mistake until they seated me and handed me a menu and I panicked at the price tags. Abashed, I scuttled out and grabbed a sandwich from the Subway across the street instead. Then I bought some flowers from a girl as I wandered through a nearby park, and bought some groceries, and when I wandered home, the sun was still up. The sun didn't set until 9:30pm. Past nine! So much daylight! I called home two days later and, swooningly, told my parents that I was in love.
Which was ridiculous. I didn't love the city; how could I? I'd only been there for two days. I didn't even know the city yet. But I loved all that green. I loved summer. I loved being someplace new. Over the next few weeks, I loved talking to strangers on buses and at the local card shop, and I collected up other twentysomethings to go exploring all over —to an underground rap show, a hike, a summer festival, whatever. [1]
NEO: The World Ends With You loves Shibuya the very same way, the way only an excitable, loud, self-consciously hip twentysomething can love their chosen city: scattered, unfocused, naive, risible, and a bit shallow—but no less earnest and sincere, for all that!
And that's not a bad thing. NEO TWEWY, at its strongest, conveys the giddy feeling of learning a city like nothing else. There's a "social graph" mechanic, which draws lines of connections between the city's various denizens as you learn more about them, and lets you "unlock" new people to meet. This runs the risk of turning people into just another collect-a-thon, some unlockable you grind through for the sake of completion. But the rewards are minute enough that you're only really doing this exploring if you're into it for its own sake. I like that most of social links don't require any particular sidequest or lengthy conversation tree, the way they might in, say, a Persona game. This world doesn't revolve around you, and you're not going to have some meaningful heart-to-heart and then solve all the life problems of every random employee or shop owner you run into (side-eyeing you, Persona 5). Just like in real life, you don't become a "regular" at the local cafe by saying the right things in some elaborate conversation tree; you just do it by being there a lot. And, just by being around a lot, you start picking up on things. You learn the waitress at Hachiko Cafe is actually the daughter of the cafe's owner, and that she wishes he'd modernize the menu a bit. You inspire a random cram school student who overhears one of your party member's mathematical ramblings, and get a glimpse of the kid's dream to win a Fields Medal. You learn the clerk at your favorite clothing store likes his long commute because he gets to listen to so much hip-hop during the train ride, and also, he's old friends with one of your new teammates. Little connections like that.
All this energy (these loving paragraphs of character profiles, and food descriptions, and overheard thoughts), combined with the game's overarching plot of "save Shibuya from destruction," seems to suggest a game that would be about Shibuya, in the same way that Disco Elysium is a game about Revachol, or the way Dragon Age II is a game about Kirkwall, or the way "Rhapsody in Blue" is (oft interpreted as being) a song about New York City.
But.
While TWEWY wants to be about Shibuya, it also wants to be about "learning to trust yourself and overcome hesitation" (feat. Rindo), and "learning to be emotionally honest with people around you" (feat. [spoiler]), and also "yet another Battle Royale setup," and "killing God", and some Nomura-tier metaphysics, and so on. Some level of design-by-committee and/or multivalence is inherent to the epic-length-RPG genre, of course—these are huge technical projects built by hundreds of people on tight deadlines, after all, and seeing those hundreds of wildly varying ideas jumping out is a huge part of their charm—but, generally, they're held together by some concrete theme or meaning or resonant motif. Take Final Fantasy 7, which, for all its wacky setting shifts, never failed to center lifestream and loss and memory at the center of each of its micronarratives, such that it's impossible to misunderstand what the game is about, what this world is and what this story is for. [2]
NEO TWEWY's themes don't hang together quite the same way. Mostly you scramble from objective to objective—quite reasonably, since your survival's on the line!—and the dialogue, while fun and often hilarious, is generally too repetitive and overstuffed to gesture at any particular thematic focus. Sometimes the game seems to remember it wants to be about something, so we get some stilted heavy-handed talk-therapy-tier revelation from one of our characters, before we rush to the next over-the-top splashy battle.
It doesn't help that the primary villain's motivations are utterly inscrutable for so long—we know he wants to destroy Shibuya, but we have no idea why, and since we don't know what exactly he hates about Shibuya, it's hard for us to decipher what Shibuya is to him, and to us. So the net result is a game that's very much in Shibuya, of Shibuya, but incidentally so, and a little distractedly. [3]
But maybe that's for the best—maybe this portrait of Shibuya, while limited, is fundamentally more honest than the alternative. Because, how many of us actually have that sense of a city in our daily lives? the city as a whole? its character, its aura?
Us urbanites think we do, certainly. We love to crow about the special character of our chosen homes, how our city is particularly artsy, or crunchy, or in-your-face, or academic, and so on. Everyone moans that their city has the worst drivers. We sling around pithy sayings to sum ourselves up: "Bostonians think their city is the best, but New Yorkers think their city is the only place acceptable for living." And we laugh at how accurate these little jibes feel.
And yet—even the most New York-y New Yorkers I know, in reality, know one "scene" or neighborhood well, maybe two, and only in their own borough. Then they go to some shows and bars, and extrapolate from there that this is What New York Is TM. We imbue cities with character, using a touch of the same romantic-nationalist-spirit that imbues countries with imagined histories and national epics. But, even when such anthropomorphizations serve to inspire and unify (absolutely not a guarantee!), they are, ultimately, a fiction. There is no such thing as "New York"—there's just millions of people, in some millions of communities, which overlap and interlink in millions of ways. But you can only see your handful of nodes in this web, and there's always far reaches of it that you will never directly touch and never truly know—just as surely as NEO TWEWY'S UG and RG exist, deeply interdependent but never intersecting.
If NEO TWEWY's Shibuya does have a core, some special essence that makes it what it is, one suspects that the resident slacker-side-character, Kariya, is the only one who's got the sense of it. But he isn't and can't be the main character in this story. He knows Shibuya precisely because he's always lurking somewhere off screen, lying around and shirking his duties. We, however, are always running. So we see Shibuya, but we see it as clusters of shopfronts and people resolutely doing their own thing. We see it in glimpses, out of the corner of our eye, a kaleidoscopic blur that we cherish even as we know we'll never get the focus quite right.
[1] An internet friend of mine lived here her whole life; that summer, we met up in person for the first time and drove to a wolf refuge in Tacoma. Fucking Tacoma! Who goes out of their way to drive to Tacoma? A bunch of overeager kiddos, that's who.
[2] (As an aside, this is why I tend to roll my eyes when forum nerds rail on various RPGs as Objectively Bad TM because the plot is wobbly. The plot may well be wobbly, sure, but if that's not a load-bearing element of the work, maybe it doesn't matter. It's not just ignorance or fanboyism that may make someone enjoy something like Advent Children; even with the janky plot, the art, music, and story beats are all beautifully focused and on-theme.)
[3] If we include the original game in this analysis, I do recall TWEWY having some legitimate touches of immanence. The Shibuya River is a presence as haunting as it is alluring; that long walk down the tunnel into the Dead God's Pad really does feel like entering the heart of something. But the journey we take in NEO TWEWY doesn't have the same vibe.
Then, once we got into the city proper, I gasped again, this time because of all of the trees. I'd been to cities before, and loved them, but so often cities meant concrete and gray and pathetic overtrimmed lawns that passed for parks. Here, we seemed to drive through whole forests, mere minutes from downtown, and directly next to soaring skyscrapers, people's lawns ran patchy and overgrown and wild. "Is it always this green here?" I asked the taxi driver. He laughed again and said, welcome to the Emerald City.
Which meant: yes. Yes and yes, oh my gosh yes.
He dropped me off at the address. By absurd good fortune, I had a twentieth-floor apartment with a view, and I stared out over trees and buildings and trees and trees for what felt like an hour. Then, I left to wander around my street, and wandered into the fanciest sushi place in the city by complete accident. I didn't realize my mistake until they seated me and handed me a menu and I panicked at the price tags. Abashed, I scuttled out and grabbed a sandwich from the Subway across the street instead. Then I bought some flowers from a girl as I wandered through a nearby park, and bought some groceries, and when I wandered home, the sun was still up. The sun didn't set until 9:30pm. Past nine! So much daylight! I called home two days later and, swooningly, told my parents that I was in love.
Which was ridiculous. I didn't love the city; how could I? I'd only been there for two days. I didn't even know the city yet. But I loved all that green. I loved summer. I loved being someplace new. Over the next few weeks, I loved talking to strangers on buses and at the local card shop, and I collected up other twentysomethings to go exploring all over —to an underground rap show, a hike, a summer festival, whatever. [1]
NEO: The World Ends With You loves Shibuya the very same way, the way only an excitable, loud, self-consciously hip twentysomething can love their chosen city: scattered, unfocused, naive, risible, and a bit shallow—but no less earnest and sincere, for all that!
And that's not a bad thing. NEO TWEWY, at its strongest, conveys the giddy feeling of learning a city like nothing else. There's a "social graph" mechanic, which draws lines of connections between the city's various denizens as you learn more about them, and lets you "unlock" new people to meet. This runs the risk of turning people into just another collect-a-thon, some unlockable you grind through for the sake of completion. But the rewards are minute enough that you're only really doing this exploring if you're into it for its own sake. I like that most of social links don't require any particular sidequest or lengthy conversation tree, the way they might in, say, a Persona game. This world doesn't revolve around you, and you're not going to have some meaningful heart-to-heart and then solve all the life problems of every random employee or shop owner you run into (side-eyeing you, Persona 5). Just like in real life, you don't become a "regular" at the local cafe by saying the right things in some elaborate conversation tree; you just do it by being there a lot. And, just by being around a lot, you start picking up on things. You learn the waitress at Hachiko Cafe is actually the daughter of the cafe's owner, and that she wishes he'd modernize the menu a bit. You inspire a random cram school student who overhears one of your party member's mathematical ramblings, and get a glimpse of the kid's dream to win a Fields Medal. You learn the clerk at your favorite clothing store likes his long commute because he gets to listen to so much hip-hop during the train ride, and also, he's old friends with one of your new teammates. Little connections like that.
All this energy (these loving paragraphs of character profiles, and food descriptions, and overheard thoughts), combined with the game's overarching plot of "save Shibuya from destruction," seems to suggest a game that would be about Shibuya, in the same way that Disco Elysium is a game about Revachol, or the way Dragon Age II is a game about Kirkwall, or the way "Rhapsody in Blue" is (oft interpreted as being) a song about New York City.
But.
While TWEWY wants to be about Shibuya, it also wants to be about "learning to trust yourself and overcome hesitation" (feat. Rindo), and "learning to be emotionally honest with people around you" (feat. [spoiler]), and also "yet another Battle Royale setup," and "killing God", and some Nomura-tier metaphysics, and so on. Some level of design-by-committee and/or multivalence is inherent to the epic-length-RPG genre, of course—these are huge technical projects built by hundreds of people on tight deadlines, after all, and seeing those hundreds of wildly varying ideas jumping out is a huge part of their charm—but, generally, they're held together by some concrete theme or meaning or resonant motif. Take Final Fantasy 7, which, for all its wacky setting shifts, never failed to center lifestream and loss and memory at the center of each of its micronarratives, such that it's impossible to misunderstand what the game is about, what this world is and what this story is for. [2]
NEO TWEWY's themes don't hang together quite the same way. Mostly you scramble from objective to objective—quite reasonably, since your survival's on the line!—and the dialogue, while fun and often hilarious, is generally too repetitive and overstuffed to gesture at any particular thematic focus. Sometimes the game seems to remember it wants to be about something, so we get some stilted heavy-handed talk-therapy-tier revelation from one of our characters, before we rush to the next over-the-top splashy battle.
It doesn't help that the primary villain's motivations are utterly inscrutable for so long—we know he wants to destroy Shibuya, but we have no idea why, and since we don't know what exactly he hates about Shibuya, it's hard for us to decipher what Shibuya is to him, and to us. So the net result is a game that's very much in Shibuya, of Shibuya, but incidentally so, and a little distractedly. [3]
But maybe that's for the best—maybe this portrait of Shibuya, while limited, is fundamentally more honest than the alternative. Because, how many of us actually have that sense of a city in our daily lives? the city as a whole? its character, its aura?
Us urbanites think we do, certainly. We love to crow about the special character of our chosen homes, how our city is particularly artsy, or crunchy, or in-your-face, or academic, and so on. Everyone moans that their city has the worst drivers. We sling around pithy sayings to sum ourselves up: "Bostonians think their city is the best, but New Yorkers think their city is the only place acceptable for living." And we laugh at how accurate these little jibes feel.
And yet—even the most New York-y New Yorkers I know, in reality, know one "scene" or neighborhood well, maybe two, and only in their own borough. Then they go to some shows and bars, and extrapolate from there that this is What New York Is TM. We imbue cities with character, using a touch of the same romantic-nationalist-spirit that imbues countries with imagined histories and national epics. But, even when such anthropomorphizations serve to inspire and unify (absolutely not a guarantee!), they are, ultimately, a fiction. There is no such thing as "New York"—there's just millions of people, in some millions of communities, which overlap and interlink in millions of ways. But you can only see your handful of nodes in this web, and there's always far reaches of it that you will never directly touch and never truly know—just as surely as NEO TWEWY'S UG and RG exist, deeply interdependent but never intersecting.
If NEO TWEWY's Shibuya does have a core, some special essence that makes it what it is, one suspects that the resident slacker-side-character, Kariya, is the only one who's got the sense of it. But he isn't and can't be the main character in this story. He knows Shibuya precisely because he's always lurking somewhere off screen, lying around and shirking his duties. We, however, are always running. So we see Shibuya, but we see it as clusters of shopfronts and people resolutely doing their own thing. We see it in glimpses, out of the corner of our eye, a kaleidoscopic blur that we cherish even as we know we'll never get the focus quite right.
[1] An internet friend of mine lived here her whole life; that summer, we met up in person for the first time and drove to a wolf refuge in Tacoma. Fucking Tacoma! Who goes out of their way to drive to Tacoma? A bunch of overeager kiddos, that's who.
[2] (As an aside, this is why I tend to roll my eyes when forum nerds rail on various RPGs as Objectively Bad TM because the plot is wobbly. The plot may well be wobbly, sure, but if that's not a load-bearing element of the work, maybe it doesn't matter. It's not just ignorance or fanboyism that may make someone enjoy something like Advent Children; even with the janky plot, the art, music, and story beats are all beautifully focused and on-theme.)
[3] If we include the original game in this analysis, I do recall TWEWY having some legitimate touches of immanence. The Shibuya River is a presence as haunting as it is alluring; that long walk down the tunnel into the Dead God's Pad really does feel like entering the heart of something. But the journey we take in NEO TWEWY doesn't have the same vibe.
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