#but also i just think squeenix kinda

[thefinalwitness]

y'all are gonna start making me mute dumb shit huh

[sjofn-lofnsdottr]

One of my favorite ways to troll my husband is by threatening to turn my hyur dude (who is married to his catgirl) into a rabbit man. Thing is, in the updated benchmark, my hyur dude's facial hair seems to still be a touch glitchy:

Like, why are his sideburns black, Squeenix? They should not be that color! I'm hoping it's just that one bit, since Mercuriel looks pretty normal otherwise:

But just to see, I put Bunny Mercuriel through too:

Facial hair checks out, and Derplander's new hair looks good on him, I think. He also looks like he's on his way to burn down an orphanage, but I expect that when it comes to Bunny Mercuriel.

I dunno, I think he's kinda hot.

[zahra-hydris]

finally finished the msq up to dawntrail last night (after about a week of trying to get groups for the trials lmao)

so I found the whole thirteenth storyline really boring before I stopped playing ffxiv last year and coming back to it... it's still kinda boring. it's not *as* boring as it was, but I think it's helped when you're not playing little bits and pieces in the patch drops.

I just found it hard to care too much about azdaja's fate and zero bounced between being likeable and interesting and then kind of flat. golbez wasn't compelling until the last few quests (and even then it was too little too late - I mean he was actually a kind of emet-selch figure but without any of the character depth emet had). it seemed really lacking in any notable character moments from the main crew. and the humour was missing. it became super earnest, especially re: zero's shift into mini wol. and that was fine and all, but just kind of eh.

things I did like:

learning more about the thirteenth and its fall

the dungeon where you go back to the contramemoria and play through golbez's memories

y'shtola revealing she changed the incantation for her nixie and then threatening wol and estinien into silence about the old version

GAIA ACTUALLY REAPPEARING AND BEING VOICED though right at the end and with the whole 'you should have asked me for help' YEAH WE SHOULD HAVE WOW WHAT A THOUGHT SQUEENIX

that moment when they're talking about the trust and belief in someone displayed by clasping their hand (like a handshake) and wol thinks about zenos reaching out to them as he died (made me a little feral!!!!!)

but the big thing that seemed off to me was that... this kind of felt like a big side quest? I kept waiting for the moment where this would tie to a bigger story and then they were like 'ok all done bye zero'. we didn't even get any significant payoff in terms of establishing cross rift travel? and THEN the dawntrail msq started.

speaking of the dawntrail stuff... I'm also kind of 'eh' about it. I liked that they actually stressed that maybe it's not a great idea to just jump into a foreign country's power succession process and that you know very little about the person whose claim you might be supporting. I like that krile is finally getting a chance to shine (though I am FURIOUS about g'raha staying behind). but I'm not super invested atm. the only thing I am very curious about is what thancred and urianger are up to (besides being unable to stay apart).

and i'm sorry but pictomancer looks kind of ridiculous

[ageofzero]

Choose violence ask game numbers 17/18 (I think they are closely related) for FFXV?

17. there should be more of this type of fic/art

selfishly, pettily (it's the secondmost ship of the chocobros rn Tega), greedily, I want more ignoct art across the board. But I guess specifically... idk, I want stuff catered to my tastes and that means I have to make it. More android AUs (I've read two I think and they were good), more selkie AUs!, more of the good thing ie Ignis utterly devoted to Noctis to the point of destruction.

18. it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

Probably more of the ladies. They're kinda small in number, as this is a story about the four boys and their brotherhood. The CANON sleeps on these girls, we were supposed to get DLC episodes for Aranea and Luna! But I don't see enough Iris Amicitia being the daemon-slayer she becomes during the timeskip, since the creators didn't want to/didn't have time to model her a timeskip model even though they made one for baby boy Talcott

I'm not innocent of this, for sure. I love drawing the boys, I haven't drawn nearly as much of the girls. I know there are people who are dedicated fans of the girls, from what little we're given of them! This is just my perception of the fandom from the window I'm looking through, and it's not like Squeenix made it easy in the first place.

(This is a personal taste opinion, but I think fandom might also be resting on their laurels regarding Prompto sometimes.)

[wandringaesthetic]

I wanted to kinda respond to @risingoflights post I reblogged re: FFVII Rebirth feeling shallow but didn't want to do it on the reblog of their post because this is going to be a lot

First of all, if I was grand czar of the universe, Remake/Rebirth/Reunion wouldn't exist. You can't go back, you can't step in the same river twice. I don't like the cash grab, I don't like the idea of replacing the original. Nothing can replace the original. It's not 1997 and we live in a world in which Final Fantasy VII already exists. I would rather they spent the time and money working on FFXVII.

However.

I am also mortal and weak and FFVII had a huge impact on my life and I'm against the concept of denying myself simple pleasures, so ofc I played them, preordered them asap, etc. And with Remake? With the understanding that I don't think that the game should exist, I also think that it is about the best possible version of the concept that could exist. In the words of Tim Rogers, it is more Final Fantasy VII than Final Fantasy VII. It's not flawless, but nothing is. I think of it like I think of the Lord of the Rings movies. Are they *perfect* adaptations of the books? No. But they're about the maximum good it was possible for them to be. And the fact that it is a stealth *sequel* to the original game actually makes me feel better about the whole endeavor. We aren't even really trying to replace the original. The original is a key component to what we're doing here. It's in conversation with the original.

(Adaptation may be an even more apt metaphor than I originally intended, because a video game in 1997 and a AAA video game in 2024 are for all intents and purposes different mediums. It's like comparing silent film to something that came out last week. It has a different toolkit, a different runtime, a different budget, etcetcetc)

(spoilers for all of Rebirth from here)

I enjoyed Rebirth quite a lot but I don't feel as rosy about it as I did about Remake. I spent about 130 hours on Rebirth. One could play the original game in its entirety three times in that time, and there's not that much more going on in Rebirth, plot-wise, than there is in this segment of the original game. There's a lot of *setup*. It looks like there's going to be a lot more going on in Wutai than in the OG in part 3, Rufus is having a really weird time, I love what they did with the Gi and with Cosmo Canyon &etc, but beyond texture there's not a huge amount of meaningful content here. The stuff that is going on with Cloud and Sephiroth is so much more *subtle* in the OG, but also it can be because it's doing it with a fraction of the runtime and the text. Sephiroth has to pop up a lot more here because while you're running around taking photos and making cactuar poses and finding every piece of the genji armor and soaking up the gleefully absurd world and its approximately 3000 minigames you might legitimately forget about him if he didn't pester Cloud repeatedly.

This makes me very interested in what Squeenix might do with a game/story/world that was built for this runtime/structure, and again, I had a really fun time with this game, but it does, I agree, make for a more shallow overall experience than the original did.

AS FOR THE PLOT where it diverges rather than just expands on the original and the multiverse/meta stuff: now that I know that they're going for multiverse shenanigans and not just straight up "we are taking a different path from here" like it looked like they might be at the end of Remake

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm how to put this

The more you increase the scope of a conflict, the more you run the risk of the whole thing collapsing in on itself. Now I know this is Final Fantasy and the stakes being no more or less than the fate of the world is the norm here. An epic scope is a necessity. But when you're dealing with the fate of multiple timelines and every reality, it makes the choices and stakes of the individual human characters and conflicts kind of trivial. Original flavor FFVII is, at least on one level, about holding off the corporate-greed-driven death of the planet we live on. Rebirth makes that kind of a side show to Sephiroth and Aerith's struggle to see who gets to say what reality is and maybe also their struggle for Cloud's soul. By making the stakes even bigger, you kind of make them even smaller. Instead of being about monopolies and energy consumption and breaking out of the matrix, etc, it's kind of just about this one guy (Sephiroth) who sucks. Why are Aerith and Cloud and Zack and Sephiroth determining the fate of every reality again? Why THESE guys?

(This is notably a potential critique of the original game, that Sephiroth kind of sucks all the light and air out of the plot post-Midgar. Wouldn't it be interesting if Shinra were the main baddies the whole way through? Yeah, but that would be a different story, wouldn't it?)

What was I saying?

Well.

Without something to ground these multiple realities-and-planets-and-universes types stakes it gets sort of hard to relate to and hang onto and be touched by the story. Since Aerith is dead in some realities and alive in others and since "dead loved one" is a reality many people face within our universe and "both alive and unalive" loved one is not.... I mean, again, epic fantasy story but it has to hang on to real life emotions in SOME way, right? If there are many universes does what we do even fuckin matter, man?

FFXIV grounds its grand multiple-universes-and-planets stakes by making Endwalker metaphorically about each person's struggle against despair and the knowledge of each of our own inevitable deaths. And, I don't know, maybe Reunion will do something like this eventually but Rebirth pretty much doesn't and so I don't know what to do with it at this time.

[blackmoonrose13]

It's so annoying, yes I have my misgivings about it mainly it due to being a phone game, and massive fear how much lore they are going to put into the game and then when 4 does come out the game assumes we all played the side games...you know kinda what they did with 3, and with 2 if you think about it (but it worked for 2 in a way actually kinda)

I have a feeling I wont be playing it because like pokemon go I live in a small town and we never get the good stuff in pokemon go...and I don't really leave my home.

But am I shitting on Squeenix for doing this side thing? No I know they are a company and they know phone games are cheaper to make than the full big games, and they can make constant money...all about the munnie baby.

I mean that is most likely why they also did so many side titles, they were relatively cheaper to make and needed less man power to make game boy advance games and DS games so the a lot of workers could focus on the big main game for Kingdom hearts and keep our appetites sated and while waiting for the next big one to come out. Think about how many side games came out between the major titles. Its just how they are doing this one.

Similar tactic squeenix uses for the Final fantasies if you think about it

Sorry for adding a wall of text.

just saw someone say squeenix should stop wasting their time with unnecessary side things like Missing Link and make "actual kh titles"??? my brother in kingdom hearts it is nearly 2024 and Strelitzia was in the kh4 trailer how do you still believe this

[zwei-rhunen]

Squeenix why do u do dis to me D:

Someone tell the lalafells that there's an untapped market to be had! Level 35-48 jewelry is the latest trend!

A once in a lifetime gil-gathering endeaver for your local, aspiring venture capitalist!!!!

.... in other news, I've been prepping myself for jewelery-crafting shenangians, which means clearing out my inventory LOL

But I got too invested and this time I took the time to research alot of the stuff that I've been hanging onto, and it turns out they're really easy to get later if i really wanted them back.

Most of it was either crafting materials (i thought they were turn-in tokens bc they looked special) or they were things that were fairly inexpensive to buy off other people if I wamted to do that in the future. I'd kept alot of things bc I wasn't as familiar with the UI/the game as i am now back when I tried downsizing in the past. Like I'd hold onto alot of junk bc for example, I'd research about this cool shiny item. and it'd start out so innocently lol.

I'd be like,

"oh I can use this to craft neat gear! Well I'll hold onto it bc i want to do that soon"

but then itd quickly spiral into

"oh, well I need a master crafting tome of X level, and to get that I need to collect these things. Okay that's doable. But wait, to do THAT, I first need to level up these 2 jobs so i can craft/gather the ingredients, alright.. (goes to level up the jobs) ...oh. i don't even have access to the zone that I need to collect those materials in, so then ACTUALLY I need to do the MSQ up to THIS point. Damn, thats kinda devastating bc I just spent all this time leveling lmao. Well, I got this far and i dont want to just toss these items, so ill just hang onto them for now

And then eventually I forgot about the details related to those items, but I remember how let down I felt while dealing with them so i just put it off and eventually they blurred into the clutter of the other stuff going on in my inv/I got invested into other goals lol

But now I've gotten better at asking the right things like "is this item rare? Where is it dropped? What is it used for, is it for crafting or a token or smth else? Also, does an NPC vendor ask for this in return for something cool? Could i buy this item on the MB later on?"

Whereas before, I'd just be like "okay. what can i use this for?? " And then I wouldn't see any crafting use for it, so I'd just toss it, and then 10 mins later id go to Mor Dhona and realize DANG IT was a TOKEN, i coulda traded that for smth interesting!! And it seems like a PITA for me to get again 😭 .....so thus began my hoarding :)

can't regret what you don't discard! lmfaooo

Also said screw it and sold off most of my food bc I realized by the time I worked thru all those edibles, id probably have a sub and would be able to buy HQ food really easily. Like, I'd been holding onto the food from when I had brute-force-leveled CUL to 50, and I'm still gonna have like ~200 hours worth of exp lmao.

I also actually, seriously reviewed the differences in food stats for once in my life (this deserves so much praise tbh bc I do not care for their details as long as I'm getting the exp buff lmao) and realized my level 15 HQ food is useless to hang onto bc my lvl 40 normal foods are still way better, and all this other info that's probably common knowledge lmao (and ik i CAN get more efficient with this if I prioritized food with stats that align with which jobs I'm gonna main for now but um. this is far as I care to go into the weeds with food details for now lmaooo like... no. stop thats too much to worry abt for me 😭😂😂 i mean like, i know (i think i know?) Strength and determination for tank, spell speed/piety for casters, skill speed for dps bc it just sounds like it makes sense lol. So like ill half-assedly try and pick the best stat buff food but its not really smth tht im overly concerned abt atm tbh. Maybe later at a higher level but for now everything seems to be okay without needing to suffer over the details)

So I sold off a buncha stuff off to an NPC and now i have a whole page and a half of space. I'm so excited!

I also reviewed the clutter in my chocobo sidebags and finally traded in the ancient gear drops to Rowena and sold off some faded maps that i realized are really common and can get again later lol

I'd have more space but i think I can use those few items up in the short term so it's just a waiting game for moar space uwu

But, yeah!!

✨️ A page and a half of inventory!! ✨️

I haven't had this much space ever since probably the MIDDLE of doing the main 2.0 MSQ!! xD

[thornescratch]

Gonna have to ask about some of those FF7 fics ... Jailbait and Bodyswap please! ❤️

I answered Bodyswap, so Jailbait it is. Jailbait is pretty straightforward-- it's just my all purpose pregame fic universe where Cloud and Zack and Sephiroth hook up, but timelines being what they are, it's kinda really hard to get around the fact that Cloud is, at best, sixteen and therefore, well, jailbait when this happens.

So. It's mainly just a story about a short period of happiness between three deeply weird people, at least two of whom have some serious issues going, and how that gets balanced out between them with a lot of dumbass hijinks. And then, if I can ever make it happen, it connects into a way more depressing story about Cloud and Zack's time in captivity and the surreal adventures of Zack in Cloud's head, and then into post-game reunions because I love a happy ending and it's not like I trust Squeenix to give me one.

It also mostly ignores pretty much, like, everything else. Crisis Core, Advent Children, DIRRRRRRGE, everything. Ain't no one got time for accepting all that. And by no one, I mean me.

I feel like you’ve already seen some of the funnier pieces of this so I’m just grabbing something from early in the story.

"Now, what did I tell you about how to act when you meet someone new?" Zack asked him, right outside the door.

"I should… be myself," Sephiroth said, after only a brief considering pause of sorting through the many and conflicting things Zack had told him about the rules of social interaction, discarding all that involved nudity or alcohol.

"Huh," Zack said. "Actually, uh. No. Do not be yourself this time. I don't want to scare him too much; it's kind of a big deal to me. He's like, a lobster."

"A lobster," Sephiroth echoed, and wondered if it was still possible to break his own wrist, get out of the cuffs, and leave. Or break the handcuff chain. Or Zack's wrist. "Literally?"

"No, I mean, like," Zack said, and waved his hands distractedly. Sephiroth used the opportunity to test the slack in the handcuff chain. "Like, if you put a lobster in boiling hot water, they get all writhey and upset and go into death-struggles? But if you put it in cold water, and slowly heat the water up, the lobster doesn't know it's being cooked, so it doesn't freak out? Like that. And then, melted butter."

"By that assumption, I'm the water, and my personality traits are the water's temperature, with a higher temperature correlated to my standard state of being, and a lowered temperature correlated to some degree of deception towards making myself seem the opposite," Sephiroth said. He looked at Zack. "Are you the pot?"

"I figured I was the fire, actually. It seemed cooler."

"Hotter."

"No, cooler as in—shut up, you knew what I meant."

"If so, the fire would be what would increase the temperature of the water. So, your presence would be what would actually make my own personality seem as more markedly my own, and stand out as undesired." That actually made reasonable sense; Sephiroth was under no impressions that he was normal, and having Zack around for comparison purposes only made that all the more obvious. "To make me seem normal, you need to remove the fire from the equation."

"Exactly! Wait, no.  Like hell I'd leave you alone with him. I mean, no offense. It's just, seriously, you'll scare him to death on your own."

"Anyway both of your scenarios end in the lobster's death." Sephiroth considered that. "In the end, I don't think your metaphor works."

"You know, it kind of doesn't, does, it," Zack said. "Anyway, my point is, don't glower and maybe try not to be so tall."

“Noted,” Sephiroth said.

[sword-and-lance]

((oh ffs

gonna preface this rant by saying: disability-related addons are A+ in my book, I give u smooch to the forehead, definitely not referring to those here when I’m talking XIV plugins

but

@ the weirdos wanking about plugins being necessary: no they ain’t, and throwing the most buckwild tantrums about this is not going to magically change the ToS, also the logistics of that kinda thing would be a goddamn nightmare on a legal and technical level I’m sure, stop being fucking Gamer Bros (TM) and move the fuck on

and @ the weirdos wanking about anyone so much as breathing the acronym ACT needing a report-wave + banning: no one likes that sorta bullshit, I assure you as someone who used to be like that; long as someone isn’t actually literally hacking/botting/fucking with server-side shenanigans, just roll your eyes, bitch to your friend group about how we used to learn to slidecast by feel without these fancy visual bars back in MY day dammit, and maybe flip them the bird in your head and then move the fuck on, Squeenix isn’t going to fuck you for being such a good little reportbot over something that goddamn innocuous

jesus christ I didn’t think we’d be going all “the Big Ole Yearly AO3 Argument”-style over fucking XIV plugins but here we are

all y’all’re gonna do acting this way is get Squeenix the wider company jamming its metaphorical nose into the whole thing and given the utter lack of brain cells up there you do not want that, especially with Blizz having some very spyware-y precedent already set for this shit, and also it’d probably get the actual disability-related things taken down which would be unequivocally bad and is also kinda why the report-spam/BAN EVERYTHING assholes grind my beans so goddamn much here

just stop being Fucking Weird about being a plugin shill or a REPORT ALL THE THINGS shill this should not be that hard, behave))

[adenial-a]

🔥

      listen . square enix ? has a problem . it has a huge problem with taking things from judaism , and making villians out of it . i mean , the whole world does let's be honest , anti-semitism isn't dead it's still pretty prevalent and on the rise in my country , but i just wanna focus on squeenix's bullshit right now .      i preface this by stating that this is of course a westerner's opinion , and i understand that , but it's also an ashkenazi's opinion so ... bare with me .      the most blatant and obvious one to me , at least , has to deal with ff7 , so i'll use that as an example first before once again talking about ff14 .      a lot of ff7 is based off judaism . not all of it is just villians , which is interesting , like for example the ancient's are a peoples that believed in a holy land that would be delivered to them , i think they even called it a land of milk and honey ( which alludes to jerusalum ) . often times if you see an ancient race , that was displaced from their home , and are treated terribly , it's either about indigenous peoples or it's about jewish people .       and then there's the villian , the most famous ff villian i'd say , sephiroth , who is literally based off the sefirot , the 10 emanations of god from jewish mysticism . the sefirot , to simplify it from what i remember , is how god will make himself manifest to his people . which , is kinda semi cool when you think about how sephiroth is the child and a next evolutionary step for jenova , who ... is jehova , one of the names of the abrahamic god .      one of the ways god makes his will manifest is through his messengers , angels . it all comes together in a nice bow .      that would be cool ! if it wasn't as though we were killed ! a lot ! for our varying beliefs . not just looking at the holocaust , not just the spanish inquisition , but like . i can't even begin to describe the history the jewish people have had to endure of persecution . you get what i'm saying ? dkhjbgfdjhf      anyways , back to ffxiv , i'm gunna once again talk about emet . did you know that emet is tied to judaism ? golems are part of jewish mythology , and they're created in times of great need to protect the people by a rabbi . emet , אמת , means truth . a rabbi will carve that into the golem , and it will bring it to life . emet is also where we learn the truth about amaurot .      after the golem's purpose has been fulfilled , interestingly enough , the rabbi will cross out a part of אמת carved onto the golem's head and turn it into met ,  מת , which means death . which , the seat of emet - selch is a role dedicated to someone who can look into the aetherial sea , into death , and ... hades .      so , it's , very easy to see with that information why i think that emet is really jewish coded ? which , like the use of the information once again is pretty cool , if . it wasn't for the history of making jewish coded characters into villians .      it's very conflicting feelings for me , because i love these connections , but i also hate them . becuase square enix has a huge problem when it comes to this stuff , and . sigh . i'm tired .

[lyssafreyguy]

top five bad dr-i cant make myself finish that even as a joke im so sorry. top five favorite final fantasy characters?

Cloud Strife and honestly if anyone is surprised you haven't been here very long. literally as soon as he started his stoic tough guy thing in FF7R I was immediately like "oh you're faking. you're faking. you're faking because you're insecure and have some deep fear going on and I can't wait to eventually see you fucking crack." and I got that in the original game and more and that's how I didn't think it was possible to fall in love with a character twice until this man. I love Cloud Strife so fucking much I wanna cook him a hot meal and blow his back out I'd treat him so right . . .

I'm putting Tifa and Aerith together here because like I can't pick between them and I refuse to. I love their characterizations both in the original game and in the remake I love how fun and spunky they are especially Aerith I genuinely wasn't expecting her to have a bit of an attitude. I also love the dynamic they have with Cloud and the gentleness they bring out in him when he tries super hard to squash it down in order to keep up his facade in their own ways it's so good.

Prompto. Prompto. Prompto Argentum my beloved my boyfriend my boytoy my little meow meow. if you're surprised by this one then man you really haven't been here long. he's a fucking dork with a punk aesthetic how can I not love him. my only wish is that Squeenix did more with him in terms of backstory and like his childhood relationship with Noct that wasn't delegated to his game DLC and his centric episode of the anime respectively AND that they let him be fat!! let your cute anime men be fat while not having their chatacter centered around how they like to eat Squeenix you fucking cowards!!!

Barret Wallace aka Get A Load of That Fucking Dad dude. there's just something about his character that's like . . . despite the sort of rough and tough persona he's got going on brought on by like past hardships and trauma he just kinda makes you feel safe? I don't know how to put it into words mostly just cause he's just kinda so over the top that it might make it hard for other people to get what I mean. either way I can't wait to see Barret's backstory played out in the remake whenever it decides to come out within the next century (assuming we even get to see it cause part 1 made it clear that Nomura ain't fucking around with the timeline).

I'm putting Ignis as my last one here and I kinda feel bad about putting him all the way at the bottom but it is what it is. I don't have a lot to say except that Episode Ignis alongside the base game plot really opened up the respect that I have for his character. I just wish that Squeenix did more of what Episode Ignis did in the main story and that fan content especially fanfiction didn't make me wanna fucking fall asleep with all the weird flowery language they slap onto this man's dialogue.

[katara0524]

Impromptu Ramblings about the NEO:TWEWY Demo

In case y'all weren't aware, I've been a pretty big fan of TWEWY for a couple years now, and with the sequel coming out next month, the excitement I feel for this game is greater than ever :) I played the Demo for the first time yesterday, and following a couple views of some livestreams of others playing it, I felt like sharing my (very ramble-y) thoughts prior to the release of the full game. This post WILL contain spoilers for both TWEWY and NEO:TWEWY, so if you want to avoid those from now on, please block the tags: #twewy spoilers, #ntwewy spoilers, #neo twewy spoilers, #ntwewy, and #neo twewy ^_^ Oh, and if you wanna keep up with any other posts I make about my experience with this game, please refer to the tag "kat plays neo twewy" :)

-First things first: I have not watched the Final Trailer and I don't plan on doing so to avoid spoilers, especially after the pre-release era of KH3 where a lot of the later trailers spoiled a lot of the endgame content. That being said, I've seen some minor screenshots from the final trailer including what many believe to be characters from the original TWEWY, namely Shiki and Joshua. That is all I know about the Final Trailer and I would very much like to remain as blind as possible going into NEO :)

-The very first cutscene was quite ominous in the sense that this game is likely going to be about "changing fate" (a recently common theme in Squeenix games, which I do appreciate), perhaps leading off from the end of A New Day in the OG and trying to stop an Inversion of Shibuya. Also worth noting that A New Day had similar aspects in which the main character experienced "future visions" of tragic events, although in A New Day these events were not able to be changed, while in NEO it seems like one of the main "powers" our protagonist has is specifically to rewrite these events and avoid a "bad ending." Very interesting indeed!

-I really like the revamped comic book style dialogue scenes, it's much more fluid and modern, which is an excellent direction for the series to take!

-I would love to have an actual PokemonGO knockoff of Final Fantasy creatures, please Squeenix that would be incredibleeeeee

-Also the LINE stickers??? Are so cute???

-I would just like to point out that Fret is an absolute treasure throughout this entire demo, he's hilarious and I will protect him with my life

-UHHHH don't like that Fret picked up some Reaper Pins just out of nowhere.....or the fact that they're apparently popular all over Shibuya.............did y'all not learn anything from the OG game or what lmao

-Okay so when I first got the "curry or ramen" scene and heard NPCs talking about the new curry place replacing the old ramen place I became IMMENSELY distressed that Ramen Don was totally cut from the game because....well, Ramen Don is a King okay?? But I'm glad to learn that no, he didn't fall off the face of the earth, he's still in business and he's the one opening the curry restaurant lolol. PHEW, crisis averted!

-.....I don't like the sudden appearance of a Wall Reaper and being able to read NPC thoughts. Wtf happened when they left the ramen place??? Are they playing the Game alive somehow?

-Okay so I have my own theories about this "Swallow" character and what they're up to but considering this is only the Demo and I still Have No Idea What's Happening, I'm just gonna say that I think Swallow intentionally led Rindo and Fret to the Crossing so they could join the Game. I mean, add in the fact that Swallow still communicates with Rindo during the Game and you've got yourself a suspicious character right there lol

-"Hey they're shooting off fireworks!" Fret honey that's not fireworks oof (see also: "*laughs* I'm in danger")

-WOOOOOO way to traumatize Rindo right off the bat like that LMAOO

-The visuals for the intro are VERY GOOD, the song is pretty decent until it gets all "screamo" (which I absolutely cannot stand sorry lol)

-Shoka is every Customer Service employee ever and I respect that

-Susukichi went from being "meh" to "WOW THIS GUY IS FUN" in the span of 10 seconds and I also respect that (he is also built like an Absolute Unit which is hilarious)

-The Wall Reapers (and just Reapers in general) seem.....way nicer and more helpful this time around?? Like in the OG the Wall Reapers were SO RUDE gfhjgjdfkhn and yeah I'm sure we'll get some like that but the juxtaposition of the first Wall Reaper in the OG compared to the first one in NEO is insane.

-The puzzles are quite a bit more entertaining this time around even if it's generally the same "fetch quest" formula lol

-"Rindo's Group" way to go Fret HFKJDGHSDFKJ mans really left the default name in there lmao

-OKAYOKAYOKAY so to those who aren't aware I am a MASSIVE SIMP for Sho Minamimoto, he's my absolute favorite and I think about him daily. HIS INTRODUCTION IS. INCREDIBLE. I LOVE IT SM.

-GOD hearing him actually SPEAK FULL SENTENCES is just SO SURREAL I love this sm

-Also the remix of his theme???? NEO TRANSFORMATION????? IT'S SO GOOD????????? It's like gone from a Boss Theme to a more triumphant sounding theme and I am HERE for it (every version of Transformation is just INCREDIBLE and getting a new one is even better)

-I Love Him, Your Honor

-Also idk how exactly but it's kinda weird seeing Sho in the OG vs NEO, cuz while he's mostly the same Insane Math-Obsessed Catboy, he's.....calmed down quite a bit?? Like OG made a whole point of how poorly he cooperates with others (not to mention just being completely unhinged and trying to kill everyone), whereas here in NEO he's......actually kinda working with others??? HELLO???? Sir what happened to you and Neku during those 3 years I would love to know all about it

-I guarantee you Sho is still probably scheming shite and will likely pull some total insane BS later down the road, and I am very much looking forward to that. Also, is he looking for a certain Pin or something??? Cuz he keeps talking about different Pins and even mentions "this is just another Psych Pin" like he's actively looking for a Pin to do something with. Maybe it also has to do with the "latent powers of Players" thing he mentioned as well??? What is this dude UP TO oml (also is he in contact with Neku at all?? they're both technically fugitives at this point right?? WHAT HAPPENED AFTER A NEW DAY I AM BEGGING YOU)

-I seems like Sho ALSO has an idea of what's going on in this specific game (even if he won't admit it straightforward). Per his quote "The game's 142,857. Factor it out," he's essentially saying, "This game is a neverending cyle, figure out how to get out of it" (or at least that's what I got from his "cyclic number" nonsense lolol)

-I do like how Sho mostly stays out of sight until he's needed for a battle or assisting with a mission, that's kind of on par with his whole "uncooperative" quirk from the OG, plus he might literally have to stay out of sight of other Reapers and Players considering he's likely breaking the rules of the Game (not surprising considering him and Neku broke practically every rule in the book during OG)

-The nicknames for Sho- I can't- They're so FUNNYYYY GFHJSDFKJ

-He goes from being called "Pi-Face" and "Tabooty" in OG to "Mr. Minami" and "M-Teezy" in NEO LMAOO

-(Wowee I just realized I've been mostly talking about Sho oopsies sorry y'all, this is what I meant by thinking about him almost daily he is THAT much of a fav of mine ghfkjsd)

-Okay RIP Fret and Rindo for not getting literally ANY explanation as to how the Game works OOF, that is kinda cringe that whoever gets the Pin earns points, not whoever erases the Noise (which like I understand but also URRRGGHHH I WANNA SEE THE SQUAD SUCCEED)

-"I should be going home now it's getting late" Oh you sweet summer child-

-Also love the mention of parents in this game???? KH you could learn a thing or two from TWEWY (poor Rindo's mom fhgjkdh)

-KUBO IS HILARIOUS I SUPPORT HIM AND HIS GROSS FACE (also thank you Final Trailer thumbnail for spoiling my suspicions about him very cool smh)

-Kaie is a LAD I also support him, go King type those funky texts I believe in you

-FRET PLS STOP SCANNING FHGJKSDHKJFGHFKJ he's like me when I scan in OG during Weeks 2 and 3 and see Taboo Noise coming after me ghfjdshfj

-Also Rindo can you stay off your phone for TWO SECONDS ik you're trying to figure things out but Fret is a jelly boi and I don't want him to be upset with you my guy

-Sho being an actual sorta mentor to the kiddos?? Who are you sir this is so unlike you ghfgskj what happened to the guy who tried shooting children in the face 8 times over LMAO (granted he's probably just using them but it's still nice to see him actually cooperating and sharing knowledge with the kiddos aaaaa)

-EYO EIJI OJI THE TIKTOK INFLUENCER IS BACK LMAO

-hgjkfshgkjf "we aren't glorifying capitalism on my watch" THATS SO FUNNY TO ME GFHJFSDGHJKS (also an all-orange ensemble is disgusting you deserve jail for one thousand years fkn Cheddar Goldfish Cheezit ass woman)

-WICKED TWISTERS NAME DROP EYOOO we love to see it

-gfhsgjf Poor Rindo embarassing himself for the sake of the Game that's incredible

-R e t u r n t o M O N K E. That is all.

-Dialogue during boss battles is HELLA cool i love that

-HHHHH THE KANON SCENE MADE ME A N G E R Y FRET STOP SIMPING MY GUY says the girl with a Literal Simp Encyclopedia and simps for pixels on a screen daily

-Can't wait to see the other Reapers :eyes emoji:

-CAN'T WAIT TO SEE NAGI MY BELOVED YEAHHHH WOOOOOO AAAAND that's about it for the demo lolol, I absolutely CANNOT wait for next month, this game is gonna be INCREDIBLE holy hell Prepare for more simping, more screaming, and more vibing from Yours Truly :) I fully intend on sharing more general thoughts like this on both Tumblr and Twitter so it's not just reblog-retweet-reblog-retweet with the occasional comment fhgskjd

If you wanna witness my insanity up close and personal I have a Square Enix Discord server called Sea Side Dreamers! You can look it up on Disboard, or you can add me on Discord @Katara0524#9244 for a direct link :) We have topics about Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, NieR, and ofc TWEWY (as well as other topics!), so if you want some good ol' chaos and chitchat, you're more than welcome to join!

[olivemeister]

OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

[shiroi---kumo]

Anon Asked: 

What's your history with this anime? What did you love about it, what drew you to Kumo, etc?

My history with FFU is a long one. It’s almost been 20 years now. Back in 2003 FFU came to the states and I gathered up all those DVDs as they dropped just as fast as I could get my little 15 year old hands on them. I remember having the date the DVD with Episode 18 on it (Number 5 I think?) marked in my planner for school.  That was Kiri VS Kumo and it was the one I was most excited about. 

My friend in High School was introduced to the series through Newtype USA’s sample DVD and she bought the first two disks and then passed them around our friend group. I became obsessed with it. I hyperfixated hard.  I became absolutely obsessed. I love this series for it’s quirkness. It’s so bad but good at the same time. There was so much great stuff coming in the season that never was (FF:U After) too.  We got robbed. I will never not say this. 

Squeenix robbed us.  Give me After and After Spiral dammit. 

But this series has such a quirky charm and I just fell for it.  I fell for it. I fell for the feel of it. I fell for the characters and the music. I fell for the concept of the Magun.  I fell for Kumo hard.  I’ve said it on my blog before that he is my dream cosplay of cosplays. He is the ultimate goal and  he has been since I was fifteen. This hasn’t changed eighteen years later. 

The most stereotypical me thing that drew me in to Sir Cloudy is I love white haired characters. If they have white hair, there is a high chance I will love them. Kumo though - fucking Kumo though - the way he carries himself, the way he speaks, the way he acts. His summon(s), his incantations, his neutral / cool toned color palette. (He’s cool toned, you can’t argue me this, his only colors in his palette beyond grey and white are blue, purple and green. He’s a cool toned boy.)  I also love swordsmen and I also love air elements and speed. Hello? Yes? Kumo is all of these things? Yes, he most certainly is. 

Kumo is also the kind of character that can tell you to go fuck yourself in the politest possible way. Absolutely poised and in completely control of himself 100% of the time. (until he isn’t).  I loved him since episode four and I didn’t care that he was “on The Earl’s side” and then shit hits the fan at the end of the series and he finally starts acting of his own accord and properly being himself and there I am going “THAT’S MY BOY!” and I loved him even more. He’s honorable and that’s a big deal in my book. That’s huge.  It made him one of my all time favorite characters ever instantly. 

I also could relate to him with the whole being the younger sibling thing. 

If you haven’t watched FFU, I recommend it. It’s silly and fun and dorky until it isn’t and you see the concept of horror that’s hidden deep between the lines and behind a quirky art style because honestly when  you really understand what Chaos and Wonderland are - it’s... kinda horrifying.  I love FF:U for that. 

[emetkoto]

I don't know anything about... final fantasy? But Eme looks like a bunny, so I'm going to assume she also has bunny tendencies. If not, then.. I guess this is a new AU, where Eme just does things rabbits do.

Its not touched on much in lore but i like to think so, yes! :D i like to go all out with animal tendencies on my characters so ill give eme all the bunny-ness squeenix is too afraid to <3 shes also half miqote so she has some cat things mixed in there too so heres a list of everything for your enjoyment because i can only organize my thoughts into lists for some reason

nice strong legs, good for jumping and kicking and crushing heads between her thighs....she's a natural born dragoon <3 estinien who?

Speaking of the legs she has a habit of bouncing them/doing little kicks when she's anxious or excited....😏 Hell for uriangers back or hips depending but the bruises are worth it ❤️

cute little nose that does that distinctive little bunny movement when shes sniffing something

Tends to eat things kind of slow? Takes little bites and nibbles at a time usually but that doesn't mean her appetite is small she can eat a lot it'll just take her a bit, she doesn't like to rush it

She has claws and fangs from her miqote mom, I personally hc that viera don't usually have those! Also slit pupils bc I like drawing them ok

Capable of purring but only a little? It's quiet and a bit stuttery and fades in and out a lot so she's pretty self conscious about it 💔 only urianger ever gets to hear it

She is Very Fast you will not catch her or beat her in a race on foot, yes even you thancred even if you cheat she will win

I don't care if viera don't canonically have tails I think they should and so she does have a little tail, one of those slightly longer upturned ones instead of just the little poof ball but those are common on other viera too it's my lore I decide the rules

Nimble and pretty flexible, though not as much as a full miqote, she won't be winning any contests for that kinda thing but she can still show off a little to any non-catpeople

Incredibly good at being sneaky and quiet! Having traits from both a prey and predator animal just makes her perfect for it 10/10 could main ninja if I could be assed to play it more

I know more about cats than I do rabbits if you couldn't tell but she is a good bnnuy girl

[goldie-claws]

6 and 11 for any f/o(s)! ^^ (@lilacslovers)

Thank u for the ask @lilacslovers ! Ngl it was tough to pick who so I’ll do Sephiroth bc I have some thoughts about my favourite catboy (also btw when I say Squeenix I mean Square Enix. It’s just my nickname for them lmao)

6) what are some tropes that fan art of your f/o tends to follow? - From what I have seen over the years and through osmosis lmao, is fanart loves making him the dark and brooding type which is arguably completely untrue lmao (even an official Advent Children poster does it! I mean look at this ghdfkg).

Plus since FFVII (his home game which I think is important to add) he was more of a guy who just kept to himself before he became a villain? Which I’d argue gets blown up a bit to make him a ‘Why are we still here? Just to suffer?’ kinda guy by fanart and maybe fans but I haven’t spoken to any FF fans indepth since I grabbed him as an F/O lmao.

And since FFVII even Squeenix have misinterpreted his character (Advent Children being an example of that also, naturally) so imo and depending on who you ask, his original incarnation is the most TRUE version of him (That and the remake! They did a really good job imo in going back to his original character :>).

Sephiroth is just a weird guy obsessed with spending Mother’s Day with his alien madre and also becoming a god on the side. He maybe look like the brooding type because anime sword, long hair, black cloak but in reality he is just a catboy baby! I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen someone perfect the :3 face like he can lmao.

He wants to cause problems on purpose and I’d let him. Just watch out for any glasses of water he plans on knocking over to spite you.

11) do you think it’s better to have a copious amount of content for your f/o, even with the risk of finding a lot of ship art, or better to have a lot less? - Slightly leaning towards less fanart imo. He’s a very particular character to write/draw etc due to how even Squeenix and fans handle him, so finding that pure FFVII characterisation of him may be tough to find.

Especially since he is THE original Sans Undertale eg. popular character every fangirl of any age loved, which then leads to him being woobiefied (eg. made more pitiful/likeable) and like, I’ll agree his past is fucked up and he deserves pity in some places, but not ALL the time (past does not excuse actions) which some fanart may emphasis and forget that he is THE signature villain and very important to the history of games and villains in general.

Sephiroth is a genuinely frightening and scary character for many many reasons (hell, there’s even one scene where Cloud is actually paralysed with fear over seeing Sephiroth in front of him, to the point he can’t defend himself with his buster sword like in previous encounters). It’s very obvious in the remake he completely lacks empathy and a moral compass (eg. he stabs another evil character who is threatening Cloud’s group, only to immediately turn around and stab a good character for no reason other than maybe(?) spite or because he’s a troll lmao), which I think many people have forgotted bc haha hot boy!!! Again, there’s a reason he is THE villain of video game history, and why I make it where my S/I’s form a bond with him BEFORE he becomes evil lmao. Otherwise there would be no hope in befriending him.