So, remember how the 'About me' page for this site mentions autistic ramblings and this site being a journal of sorts?
This is one of those times.

Recently, I've been thinking about the things I like. This was, in part, spurred on by that mobage thing I wrote a few months ago, where the only game I found I genuinely liked was mostly because it was fucking incomprehensible. I played a lot of Buriedbornes after that. It was fun. I enjoyed my time figuring out what on earth was going on with the game, and I truly do think the game is worth playing for people into that sort of experience.
I have since stopped playing it.
This is not because the game is bad. This is because of a growing problem with my own tastes that I've noticed, particularly in the last 2-3 years of my life: I am so far on the fringes of taste that no company is going to pander to me. It's an upsetting thing to realize, particularly because it's not for lack of trying; companies have attempted to make games, shows, comics, series that appeal to me. They don't do well, at least not in the current market. One of a few things always happens:

• The game has characters I like, and is a complete garbagefire of a game I don't want to be anywhere near. Game might do well.
• The game has gameplay I like, and characters I don't. Game might do well.
• The game has both characters and gameplay I like. The universe itself conspires to absolutely ruin everything about the game or otherwise make it fail.

I have examples for each of these. I wish I didn't. I wish this could be a simple case of "the market is just untapped!", but it never is. Sometimes. Sometimes it's the publishers being so utterly abhorrent that even if the game might have otherwise sold, the game was marketed so poorly that its numbers ensure no company will ever try something similar again.

Anyways, all this is to say that I desperately want you to go buy NEO: The World Ends With You right this instant.

NEO is an action RPG, published by Square Enix and developed by h.a.n.d., who you might recognize from hood classics such as Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, Kingdom Hearts: Re:Coded, Fantasy Life, and the first TWEWY title, way back on the DS. In case you aren't familiar with the first TWEWY, here's the breakdown:
You play as Neku, a boy who wakes up in the Middle of Shibuya's own Scramble Crossing (think Times Square, but cleaner), only to find that nobody can hear him, nobody can see him, nobody can touch him, and he can't remember his own name. A message flashes on the billboard covering the massive 104 shopping mall:
7 DAYS REMAIN
Neku, having no idea what this means, walks to the statue of Hachiko nearby, only to find that a few people can actually see him; said people are swiftly erased from extistence by strange, graffiti-like monsters called the noise. A girl named Shiki shouts at Neku: "Quick, form a contract with me!"

It is at this point that the gameplay directors stared at the board, unsure of how to handle the combat mechanics. TWEWY was originally a rhythm game before those mechanics were scrapped, and the devs are trying to come up with a system that can utilize the potential of the DS to its fullest. One of them, his eyes bloodshot and head throbbing with a deep, ceaseless hangover, suddenly shoots up.
He begins flipping frantically through the pages of his notebook. Idea after idea litters the paper, scrawled like the ramblings of a madman, before it clicks:
FUCK IT, LET'S DO IT ALL

TWEWY is one of the most experimental games on the DS. There are mechanics that suck ass and make no sense for anyone trying to make anything resembling fun. This is why I love it. Let me attempt to break down the combat system for you as best I can.

Pictured above is what you're going to be looking at in the combat screens of TWEWY. The top screen has Neku's current partner, who controls incredibly simply. You play a little minigame in which the D-pad is used to select one of three branches on a combo tree. Each button press is a hit, each hit deals damage, the card at the end must be deliberately selected to build meter. It's fairly simple on its own.
You may have noticed that there are copies of every enemy on the top screen on the bottom screen.
You see, Neku and his partner share health. The enemies, too, share health with their top screen counterparts. If it dies on one screen, it dies on the other.
You may wonder what the on earth is going on with Neku. "If the D-pad is the partner, are the ABXY buttons for Neku?"
Absolutely fucking not.
Neku is a different game entirely. You equip pins to Neku, which each function as an attack triggered by a specific guesture on the touch screen. Slashing will activate your slashing pin, tapping an area on the screen will activate your shooting pin. Drawing a circle to activate your rotating orb pin will make you want to take a long walk off a short pier when it doesn't work ever. This system truly comes together with the puck-- a small orb of light that pings to the other screen every time the character holding it finishes a combo. Said orb grants a damage multiplier that increases in value every time it switches, and said multiplier goes up to 5x.
As you might have guessed, this gets really nutty, really fast. It's fantastic. It doesn't always work well (or in the case of the draw a circle pins, literally ever) but when it clicks, it's the some of the neatest, most calculated and insane action gameplay you'll ever touch on a handheld.
And NEO TWEWY blows it out of the fucking water.

NEO is good. Really, really good. If the original TWEWY's goal was to throw every single little idea at the wall and see what sticks, NEO's goal is to take what stuck and refine it into solid fucking gold. The incredible stylization of the original game? Pushed to its limits, with every particle and environment oozing with the graffiti inspiration they approached it with. The difficulty scaling that keeps things approachable while also rewarding those looking for a challenge? Just as good. The food and fashion systems that take standard RPG mechanics and give them a layer of style and flavor that, in some cases, even adds to the characterization? Not only still there, but made actually fun because the food isn't tied to the system clock any more.
Of course, those are all the secondary ideas. The real question is simple:
Is the combat still just as good and just as creative?

You'd better fuckin' believe it is.

So, let's run over what made the original TWEWY interesting: The puck and sync meter system rewarded you for splitting your attention between two characters and being in "sync" with both. The pin system allowed for a wide range of interesting attacks while still restricting the player enough that the dual-screen mechanics couldn't (usually) be complete ignored in ideal circumstances, aided by the shared HP bar. Essentially, the end result is that you have a series of mechanics that force the player to think in a very specific and unique way, planning the set ups and functionality of two different systems in harmony, effortlessly enhancing the message of learning to cooperate with others.
NEO's most fascinating achievement is that it achieves all this while throwing out all of what TWEWY did beyond the most basic concepts like "attacks based on equipped pins" and "build a meter for The Good Shit".

So, how does it do this?
Let's start with the pin system. in NEO, you are now only allowed to equip one pin per party member. All party members are present in any fight at any given time-- the camera will (generally, there's a bit of nuance) focus on the one holding the pin you used most recently. Your controls will affect both whoever the camera is currently focused on, and whoever else is using a pin. If you've played any other ARPGs, you might be thinking that this sounds a bit like Kingdom Hearts or the like, where party members are generally rather useless unless you're going out of your way to tell them what to do.
This is not the case.
Party members in NEO will not act at all unless instructed. They will also automatically dodge damn near everything-- across my entire playthrough, I found exactly two fights in which the party members not being actively controlled could take damage, and one of those is an entirely optional fight. The end result of this system is that you're effectively juggling 2-6 party members at any given time, estimating how many active hitboxes are worth having out to do your absolutely fucking sicknasty combos. This game telegraphs attacks far better than most ARPGs, I might add-- if you're familiar with Kingdom Hearts's Revenge Value system, that's been iterated upon here. If you're not, then a brief explaination: in NEO, some enemies will have an invisible counter that ticks up as you beat the living shit out of them. Every attack you do adds to this counter, and you do not get to see it. When this counter reaches its maximum, that enemy will automatically break out of your combo and initiate a revenge attack.
If I were still talking about Kingdom Hearts, I would stop there.
In NEO, this mechanic is telegraphed twice: at what I estimate to be about the 2/3rds mark, a bright yellow flash will appear behind the enemy in question. At maximum, this will happen again, but red. This gives the player not only ample time to react to these revenge moves, but also a pretty solid way to get a vague sense on how much horseshit you can get away with.
It's the small shit like that, something that just makes everything NEO does feel solid, intentional. Then NEO, smiling, puts a hand on your shoulder:
"Hey, remember the sync meter you had to play a minigame to fill? Wack shit, right? Check your pins screen."
Every single pin in the game has a condition under which it will trigger a "beat drop". This condition depends on the pin-- it could be inflicting the targeted enemy with that pin's status effect, or launching then into the air, or even just using the finishing hit of a melee pin's combo. Any number of things. When a beat drop has been triggered, the currently targeted enemy will have text placed on them: "DROP THE BEAT!", it says, surrounded by a circle-shaped meter that rapidly depletes until the whole thing disappears.
What does this do?
Well, when you use a different pin than the one that triggered the beat drop, you "redeem" it, and gain Groove Meter. At full Groove, you can activate a super large-scale attack that varies based on the element of the last pin to "redeem" a beat drop.
The implications of this are a bit tough to articulate, but I'll do my best. NEO is, at every waking second of your time spent playing that game, begging you:
"Please," it cries, wearing an expression somewhere between a mad genius and a desperate crack fiend. "Please make the most God awful combos you can. I want you to make the enemies cry."

Every system is pushing you towards using 2-6 party members to wombo combo every single enemy on screen. A boy in an orange hoodie combos a grizzly bear and launches it into the air, followed by his brainlet friend swinging the bear around like he's trying to play Mario 64. The bear goes flying, slams into a wall. It thinks its troubles are over-- or not, because the edgy guy in the hoodie has been charging up a flying kick this entire time. The last thing the bear hears before it's wiped from existence are the jubilant screams from a crowd of FGC players.
This is a common occurance.
If you actively engage with this game's combat system, literally every fight can become this in its own way. Even the pins that sound like they're for very boring people turn into degenerate setplay nightmares that have your enemies' health bars melting before your eyes.
Also, just to make any RPG fan reading this blow their load: Status effects work on every single boss. The way this game mixes its RPG mechanics and its action mechanics is absolute bliss. I could talk about this game's flaws; the enemy variety is lacking, for example. The remix of Three Minutes Clapping blows ass. The Switch version absolutely does not run well.
I'm not going to.
Every single flaw this game has is mitigated by the fact that it's one of the most fucking solid games I have played in ages. It's my GOTY 2021. It will not be de-throned from that spot. There is no nostalgia in this statement; prior to my friends screaming my ear off about it when NEO was initially announced, I hadn't even heard of the first game. This, right here, is why this file is titled "mald.html". Why this writeup began with me seething about my tastes being too niche. It's because games like this are flying under everybody's radar. I can/will be mad about the new Mario Golf sucking ass, but ultimately, a bad game is a bad game. I don't think there's any "wasted potential" in a bad game because, ultimately, the developers will learn from its mistakes. The audience will learn from its mistakes. Future developers will learn from its mistakes.
But a good game that does poorly? A good game considered a total failure? A good game that flies under fucking everyone's radar aside from a few fujoshi on twitter and a bunch of misinformed idiots shitposting about its translation? Who the fuck learns from that? The game was good. Absolutely nothing in regards to the game itself can explain why a game that, at its absolute worst, only maybe dips to like, a fuckin' 8/10, fails. Developers are at best just going to try the same thing again and at worst are going to go in the opposite direction as a misguided correction. Future developers might not even hear of the game unless it manages to hit the broader "internet cult weirdo" crowd like Earthbound or the like.
The game fails, the game dies, the world moves just that little bit for the worse.

I don't have a good way to end this. This shit will be my first update in months, and frankly, I don't think many people are going to read the whole thing. In my post about INFRA, I told people to go play it. You still should, it's good, but let me introduce a separation between the way I told you to play INFRA and the way I'm telling you to play NEO.
I do not care how you play NEO.
Buy the PS4 version. The Switch version. The EGS version. Hell, if you hate all those options, pirate the goddamn thing. Don't let a game this solid and this creative just fall into the rubbish bin of "cult classic" like its predecessor. It's too good for that. I'm not going to tell you this game is perfect, and I do not want to overhype this any more than I already have, but I need to make my views on NEO as clear as possible:
NEO is, at the moment, my absolute favorite Action RPG. It will stay that way for the forseeable future. It is an absolute crime that a game that should have at least sold comparable to a Platinum Games title sold badly enough that Square Enix briefly mentioned how shit it was for eactly one page before trying to shill NFTs to their shareholders. It is entirely Square Enix's fault this game sold poorly. Did you know this game came out in late July of 2021? That was just over a month after E3 2021, the online-only conference in which Squeenix's showcase was so fucking lame that it trended for every single conference after it, simply due to people making the joke that everyone else, no matter how barren, had more to show than Square Enix. The full conference, when isolated from the rest of the stream, lasted about 45 minutes.

Let me break down what was shown there.
From 0:30 to 18:35, Square Enix showed nothing but the Guardians of the Galaxy video game they were developing. As it turns out, this game ended up being pretty okay, but at the time absolutely nobody wanted to see it due to the recent flop of their Avengers live service game.
Starting at 18:36, there's a trailer for a "pixel remaster" of the first 6 Final Fantasy games. These remasters have been widely criticized for being ugly as fuck and occasionally really buggy.
Less than a minute later, at 19:11, they show the opening movie for a rerelease of Legend of Mana.
From 20:00 to 23:30, they talk about content for the Avengers game. As I mentioned earlier, nobody watching wanted to see this; it was already widely hated.
At 23:31, they play a cinematic trailer for a Hitman mobile game.
At 24:04, they play a trailer for a Nier mobile game.
From 24:20 to 25:07, they play two trailers for FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS, a mobile game.
At 25:08, they play a trailer for a battle royale mobile game based on FINAL FANTASY VII.
From 25:43 to 30:46, they play trailers for BABYLON'S FALL, an attempt to make Platinum Games make a live service game. This game tanked because it was dogshit.
Starting at 30:47, they play a trailer for a remaster of Life is Strange. Putting aside the debate over whether this game has good writing or not, these remasters look worse than the originals.
Starting at 33:08, they play a trailer for Life is Strange: True Colors. I have nothing to say about this game.
At 37:34, they play a trailer for STRANGER OF PARADISE: FINAL FANTASY ORIGINS. Despite everything else, this game is actually pretty alright. It seems to be doing decently well, too. Good.
This concludes their presentation.
I have not met a single person who enjoys action games, let alone ARPGs, who I could not sell on NEO. Most of them are sold from the moment they start the tutorial and realize how fucked things are going to get once they notice they're controlling two characters. Literally all it takes to sell an Action Game fan on NEO is to show them how it plays. How it works.
At 40:38, during the closing sizzle reel for the presentation, Square Enix shows about four seconds from one of NEO's rare prerendered cutscenes. This is preceeded by quick cuts of the FF7R DLC, the Nier remake, and Outriders, a game I didn't even remember existing until I checked the presentation to write this post. It is followed by another scene from Life is Strange: True Colors and the Avengers live service game.

I wish the games I valued were valued by the people making them.