For a bloody god of Shibuya

Shiki gets the name 'Pink' and then Josh objects and says he should be Pink cause Pink is love XDDD and then later he gets that rainbow tin pin thingy xD

Shut up and walk, dear

OVERVIEW
You play as Neku Sakuraba, a whinge-bag emo who happens to be the possessor of both luckiest and unluckiest bastard on the planet. Lucky as in he manages to avoid death, unlucky that he has to compete in a bloodsport to win his life back. Oh, and he has an epiphany about the value of friendship and shit; I zoned out about Week 1, Day 4. The game builds around the dual-screen combat, which has its moments but is ultimately annoying. There's also a Trend system that alters the way the game is played, which doesn't really affect much until the end of the story.

GAMEPLAY
TWEWY does its best to be as fucking annoying as humanly possible. There are two main parts to the battle mode: Neku and his Partner. Neku's combat revolves around collecting pins that have mystical powers, such as shooting lightning or spewing fire from the middle of nowhere. The combat is through the stylus, which can get really annoying because it may mark one line for a seperate one. I've even had parts where I've accidentally healed enemies and had my ass kicked because of it. On the top of the screen is Neku's Partner, which can range from a fashion victim, a gay kid who doesn't hide he's out of the closet (a fact made clearer in the Bizzaro story), and some "hardcore" skateboarder. Each partner possesses a set of attacks. Shiki attacks with a pig/cat doll, Joshua attacks with a phone and Beat attacks with his skateboard. Yeah, not the kind of arsenal you'd expect from a deathmatch, but then again, attacking with magical pins doesn't make sense. The Partners have their own special attack, or Fusion, that is fulfilled by playing a small mini-game with them in combat. Shiki's Fusion is enabled by guessing cards, Joshua's Fusion is activated by trying to get a number higher, lower or the same as a previous one, and Fusion is turned on by playing a bastard form of poker. The Partners are controlled with the D-Pad, which vexxes me to no end since I'm already busy controlling Angsty on the bottom screen. Thankfully, the developers planned ahead of us and gave us the option of having the computer take over the Partners for us. I let the AI take over Ms. Fashion and Mr. Cleargay up until Mr. Internet Tough Guy, where the boss battles became so hard with Neku that I focused on the Partners, who had a good amount of damage that could take out about 7/8 of the bosses (with the exception of the Final Boss).

There's a gameplay factor that can make or break battles: The Trend System. Because the game is taking place in "Fashion Heaven" Shibuya, the clothes you're wearing in the correct districts give your character a boost in battle. Wearing, for instance, Brand A clothes and pins in District A where Brand A is a big trend will give a buff in battle on top of the base stats that Brand A brings. Alternatively, wearing Brand B clothes and pins in District B where Brand B is the least-preferred trend will detract your statistics. I hate myself for saying this, but it's actually important to follow fashion in this game. Because if you don't follow capitalism, you're going to take a hit on the battlefield.

One of my major gripes about the game is in the way it handles unlocking gameplay features. Alright, I can accept having to go through a few battles before trends actually mean something, or unlocking the ability to dash across the stage dodging projectiles, but I draw the fucking line at having to wait until the last boss battle of Week 1 so I can retry battles. I wish I could make this stuff up, but I'm not. Everytime I lost a battle, I was thrust back at the beginning of the chapter. Easy Mode isn't unlocked until you get past half of the first week as well.

Which brings me to my next point, the difficulty. Now, in regular games, the difficulty is designed as a constant level for the game to accomodate the lack of experience for rookies or to give veterans a challenge. But TWEWY spits on common protocol, urinates in its face and takes a Desert Eagle to its kneecaps. The game starts at Normal, and you have to - oh, get ready for this - unlock Easy, Hard and Ultimate as you progress throughout the game. The difficulties will also affect the loot you receive from encounters; Easy is more manageable but you'll receive less loot, Hard is a challenge but you'll get something good out of all the conflict. That isn't the worst part. Even if you're a newbie at it, the game will force you to change difficulties in order to pass several stages.

Here's an example. I was somewhere around Week 2 and I had to get past this roadblock erected by one of the bloodsport's managers. He said that in order to get past, I needed to bring him a pin often found in enemy encounters. 'Fine', says I, scanning for the nearest enemy. Oh, but there's a twist. I need to change my difficulty from Easy to Normal. Worse is that later in the week, I needed to get past another roadblock. Fresh off a Hard Mode challenge, the guy told me I needed to grab another pin in Normal Mode. So I frantically searched around, repeatedly getting my ass kicked because I figured that if Hard Mode was tougher, I might get the pin easier, which actually is true in the game. It wasn't until an hour later when I realised that the specific type of enemy I needed to kill was only on Normal Mode.

This is not innovative, this is frustrating and a complete fuck you to rookies. If I am a novice at the game, I want a difficulty that reflects it. I don't want to have to switch between them so I can progress throughout the game; it is why we have difficulty curves within the difficulty settings. Not only that, but the fact that Easy Mode is less fruitful than its older sister is almost a slap in the face to those who aren't good at it.

Let's move off of the combat and focus on the gameplay that intertwines the combat stages. You control Neku and run around Shibuya. There's stores where you can buy food, pharmaceuticals, clothing, pins and other miscellaneous items; places you'll be visiting fairly often. You can use your Player Pin to scan the screen for enemies and eavesdrop on people's thoughts. I swear, the Thought Fragments are some of the most boring parts in the game. Here's a few I snagged from the Wiki.













Imagine all of this times at least twenty. I was bored out of my fucking mind that the only reason I scanned was to either advance the plot or fight enemies. Cycling through everyone's petty mind is just sad, and makes me question our society. At least make them hilarious, like this one:



I'll give you all a moment to catch your breath.

Back to the gameplay. There's two mini-games that will happen by way of plot out of combat. The first is Tin Pin, which is a Beyblade clone with your pins. There's very little you can say about it; a nice distraction, but ultimately a boring one once you collect the right pins. You can play it against your friends, provided you'll have one that has the game.

The second is Reaper Creeper; Wicca called, they want their Ouija board back. Idiots use this as a means to gain an answer to a question through supernatural means, claiming that something called a Reaper will move it for them (the Reapers are an actual part of the storyline, but not in this way), and that it never lies. You have to move a coin around a triangle and choose from three options: Yes, No, Neither. The trick is to move it slow; too fast will make people lose faith in you. This is rarely useful, and acts more of a Griefing tool that loses immersion when you realise it doesn't really matter whether you play it or not. Having said that, there is nothing funnier than fucking up a schoolgirl's life through this game.

STORYLINE
As I said, you play as a whingy emo who ends up getting himself killed and thrown into the Reaper's Game, a bloodsport that dead people enter. The catch with the Reaper's Game is that, in order to play, you need to forfeit something of yourself that is dear to you. Sometimes, it's physical; other times, it's mental. You get this wierd pin called a Player Pin that allows you to scan the minds of others. Then, you get a partner and you're thrust into the Underground (UG), a seperate universe to the Realground (RG) with the exception that you can see the RG from the UG. By this stage, you start getting attacked by Noise, monsters that feed off people's negative reactions. When you kill these Noise, positive reactions flow into the area. I am not making this shit up. The game is run by Reapers, dead people with magic powers who look like rejects from Birdhouse. There's also a doll of a cat, or a pig, that attacks people. Yeeaahh.

Anyway, so the catch is that you need a partner to defeat the Noise, or else you die within death; an act known as "Erasure". Then you need to survive for seven days, each day completing some challenge the Game Master, the one who runs the challenge for the week, cooks up for you. Neku gets partnered up with this seamstress/whore-in-attire Shiki Misaki, who constantly tries to get Neku to open up to her. In one scene, she even tries to get into Neku's pants. No, I'm serious, she tries to get into Neku's pants. Don't take that as a sexual term; Neku rips his pants and Shiki repairs it. Yeah, it was certainly odd, but I was beyond the point of caring ever since fashion became important. The Game Master of Week 1 is a burly guy named Yodai Higashizawa, who has a cooking fetish. They meet two other players: Beat, the Internet Tough Guy, and Rhyme, an androgynous kid who follows Beat around like some puppy dog. Surprise twist, Rhyme is Beat's Brother and she doesn't know it. Also, around Day 4, Rhyme is killed by some Reaper trap. This is supposed to be emotional, but I felt detached from them. By Day 6, there's another surprise twist, the body we see Shiki in actually belongs to her friend Eri, who she envied. Day 7 comes around, we kill the chef, and we have to do the whole fucking week over again, this time with Mr. Rainbow.

That's Week 1 for you. Let me speak on a general term of the story. The story can be wrapped up like this: "You die. You come back to life to compete for some sadist. You learn lessons about friendship. Shit happens. The end." The story wasn't greatly compelling, and the characters that I did like were given crazy backstories that made me question why I liked them in the first place.

One of the most obvious ones is Mr. Hanekoma, an unshaven cafe owner. He puts Neku back in his fucking place, which is always good. Unfortunately, the character is ruined when we learn he's Joshua's personal assistant/bitch, and he's CAT, the name of some enigmatic graffiti artist who controls people through the awwwesum powaahhh of art.

Another gripe about the storyline is the complete dumbing-down of it. Now, I admit that the storyline itself is quite complex, but the way the game handles important story events and the story itself was catered to the lowest common denominator of the gene pool. Here's an example. In Week 2, I was tasked to locate X = 30 +74. This translates to finding a pretentious shopping outlet named 104. Now, I ended up one district north of there, but a Reaper blocked it off and wouldn't let me pass. So I had to go the long way. As I was walking, I came across a story event where I was told it. I have more than three brain cells, I think I gathered that, you morons. But the game was adamant in telling me the answer, and I was left with a deep-seated grudge against the game. And I know most of you are holding a grudge against me for ripping off Zero Punctuation, but that scene was so annoying it had to be repeated.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This game is unique in its own right, but the massive amount of flaws were just too annoying to spare it the trouble, along with the so-and-so soundtrack. Then again, if you can get past them, TWEWY is a good game. The gameplay is a clusterfuck, but it's manageable if you don't have good reflexes. There's also the Another Day mode, where you get to view a fucked up version of TWEWY solely focusing on Tin Pin where Joshua is openly gay and Neku is doing his best to suppress emo urges; always fun, but you need to beat the main game first. Just don't go scanning people for fun. There's absolutely no point.

choosing the worst possible district to be a holy place

With regards to the storyline, I thought the Joshua/Composer twist was pretty good; I wasn't expecting it, and I always suspected that there was something wrong with him.