The World Ends With You's Second and Third Weeks: The Worst-Kept Secret in Gaming Plot Twists

 Spoilers for The World Ends Wth You and its sequel follow

Believe it or not, the fact that The World Ends With You and its sequel, Neo: The World Ends With You, don't end after the first week is supposed to be a surprise. Unfortunately, the surprise is spoiled by ample gameplay and story-related evidence, which makes it hard to swallow that the story would end so soon.

The Original

Let's recap the situation on the seventh day of the first week. Neku and Shiki are the only pair of players left in the Reaper's Game; Beat was saved after his partner Rhyme's erasure on Day 4, but his future is uncertain. The objective this time is to fight and defeat the Game Master, Higashizawa. This sounds like a climactic battle, doesn't it?

On closer examination, however, it seems to be a bit too early for the climax. At this point, the player has only played for a few hours, and TWEWY would be a rather short RPG if it were to end at this point. While Higashizawa is a significant antagonist, he's a minor player in the grand scheme of things, since he's merely a subordinate to Kitaniji, the Conductor. Beat's character arc is far from over, since he's planning on joining the Reapers in a bid to revive Rhyme.

Speaking of things the game has yet to explore, the player has yet to set foot in several parts of Shibuya, from Udagawa to Cat Street.

There's also the matter of inventory. Even if the player has been diligent about purchasing all food items and clothes, they will only have a small fraction of the items in the game.

Of course, all this pales in comparison to the last and most important piece of information, one many people are likely to uncover before they even turn on the game for the first time- the fact that the game features multiple partners, and you've only had Shiki in your party thus far. Each partner has a unique playstyle and method of earning Fusion Stars, so it's only natural for the game manual to provide an explanation or how to use each one, but this is a rather glaring hint that you're nowhere near the end of the game at the end of the first week. In fact, the save game screen specifies which partner's week you're on.

The Sequel

For starters, the sequel is like the original, so one can easily expect it to have a similar structure.

Now for the plot. Rindo and his team, the Wicked Twisters, believe that if they defeat the reigning champion, the Ruinbringers, they will win the Reaper's Game and become eligible to leave. Unfortunately for them, they only end up facing off against Susukichi, who isn't even the leader of the Ruinbringers. When they appear victorious, Shiba, the Game Master, declares the Ruinbringers victorious on a technicality, forcing them to go through the Reaper's Game again. Unsurprisingly, when they try again in the second week, something similar happens, but the third time ends up being the charm, for story reasons I won't spoil.

Like in the original, there are more than a few plot threads left unanswered. Most notably, there's the identity of Rindo's online friend Swallow, whom Rindo believes is playing the Reaper's Game on another team.

There are a few places the player has yet to explore, the most notable of which is Miyashita Park. The area is adjacent to the Scramble Crossing(the first area you visit and one of your most frequent destinations), but you don't go there until Day 2 of Week 3.

As you can imagine from those unexplored areas, there are many gaps in the player's inventory. Miyashita Park has the game's final restaurant, and there are several clothing stores and eateries in places the player hasn't explored in the first week. Even many of the shops the player has visited haven't shown all their wares.

To NEO's credit, it avoids spoiling the current week on the save screen. The first seven days are simply called "Day 1" through "The Final Day," and the week is only provided on the second day. It also avoids spoiling the late-game party members' identity in the manual, but the presence of Shoka(a Reaper) on the title screen confirms that she's important, and implies that she will eventually join the Wicked Twisters.

Conclusion

The existence of additional weeks in TWEWY and NEO is a textbook example of a twist that comes as a surprise for the characters in-universe, but is inevitably ruined for genre-savvy RPG players. This is hardly unique to the medium of video games, as it's easy to predict that the story isn't over if you have a more than hundred pages to go in your book, or an hour left in your movie's runtime. This goes to show that, for better or for worse, audiences bring their knowledge about the genre and the medium in to any work that they experience, and that knowledge inevitably impacts what they get out of it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fire Emblem Engage: Fell Xenologue Review Part 3

This blog entry contains spoilers for Fire Emblem Engage's Fell Xenologue DLC  Welcome back to the review of the Fell Xenologue DLC. As a brief recap of last time, Alear was summoned to an alternate Elyos and set out to gather the bracelets and safeguard them from an unknown malefactor. Alear's first destination was Firene, where they reclaimed Hector's bracelet from Alfred and Celine. Alear then sets out for Brodia. The group heads to Brodia by foot, sneaking in due to the country's hatred of war resulting in tight border security. The logic seems rather odd, as a warlike country would be no less willing to defend its borders. Nel remarks that they're already in Brodia, and when Alear complains, she snarkily replies that she hopes they can reschedule the parade. Gregory, who's the counterpart of Griss, arrives. Zelestia reveals that she and Gregory are part of a small band of knights known as the Four Winds, which are counterparts to the Four Hounds, and exist
Read more

Game of Thrones Season 8 Review Part 8: Conclusion

Warning: This series contains spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones Now for the conclusion to this series. The General Problems Part of the reason for the decline of Game of Thrones' qualities are the reasons I stated before. The showrunners no longer had Martin's books to guide them, resulting in their writing's shortcomings coming to the fore. The fact that the final two seasons have thirteen episodes between them is a significant factor in why the show ended as poorly as it did. While Daenerys' fall into evil was always destined to be controversial, having more episodes to cover her development might have made it easier to accept. Additionally, giving more episodes to the war with the Night King would have helped him seem like more of a credible threat than he ended up being. Of course, ending a show like this well was always a difficult prospect for a few reasons. First, the ending would inevitably have been the showrunners' creation, and would thus b
Read more

Shinrai's Kotoba: When the Worst Character is Still Necessary to the Narrative

Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair Spoilers Most of us can think of a few characters we dislike for various reasons, and often, we believe the stories they're in would be better off without them. But sometimes, it's difficult to remove characters the audience dislikes without adversely affecting the narrative. Kotoba Gaikoku from Shinrai: Broken Beyond Despair is one example, as while he seems like an unfunny perverted comic relief character(and to some degree, he is), he plays a crucial role in the story. Who Kotoba Is First, let's explain who Kotoba is and why he's so unlikable. Kotoba is the best friend of Taiko Kikai. He's a notorious pervert who has a thing for both guys and girls, but has especially strong feelings for Momoko Mori, and dislikes her boyfriend Hiro Shiratake for reasons that are not entirely related to romantic jealousy. The first problem is evident- the fact that he's a pervert. It's difficult to write perverts well, since perversion tends
Read more