Most video games are inherently selfish. The biggest games can demand upwards of 50 hours of your time, and often place you on a very singular quest. The Last of Us and its sequel, while not as selfish in terms of time demands, star protagonists on very driven quests - Part 2 especially sees Ellie and Abby place their own ambitions, thoughts, and goals above everyone else's. God of War is equally focussed on Kratos and Kratos alone. Even games where you help other people through various side quests still usually establish you as the mighty hero, the person who alone can save the day. We need that power fantasy sometimes, especially when our own place in the world can seem so small. NEO: The World Ends With You goes against this ethos, and its free spirit is incredibly refreshing.
You are still on a personal quest in TWEWY. You play as Rindo (or Rindude, as the zoomers like to call him), a teenager who ends up in a pseudo-purgatory version of Shibuya with his best friend Fret, and his goal is very simple - escape. He soon meets Nagi, a teenage girl in the same situation, and they team up. To do this, they need to win the Game; a deliberately complex competition with nebulous rules that change at the whims of those far beyond Rindo and co’s reach. If you finish last, you die. If you finish first, you escape. Despite the rules, the two ways to exit the game are very simple - apart from the fact the weekly winners of the game choose not to escape each week, but instead to go around again so they can continue to cheat and torture the rest of the players.
TWEWY isn’t groundbreaking. It embraces actually being a video game, but it feels like a more precise, less subtle version of Persona 5. Yes, I know the original TWEWY came first. While it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, it is something we only see rarely in the medium, and this youthful rebellion is something games should be embracing more often. The audience of gaming hasn’t changed so much as it has grown. You still get about as many teenagers playing games as you had when I was a teenager a decade ago; if anything, there are probably a few more kids into gaming nowadays. But you also have a lot more adults, because people like myself - and presumably, you - have grown up with games and stuck with them. This newer audience of adults means gaming has more reason to tell mature narratives that reflect our current society, while the still heavily populated youth audience provides the demand for relatable, forward thinking games that embrace young-Millennial and Zoomer culture.
Our own Jade King has already written about how NEO: The World Ends With You embraces the political struggle of modern youth, and she’s right - but it’s not just in its politics that TWEWY understands youth culture.
There are some great games out there starring teenagers, but I’m not sure the teenagers themselves are that great. For example, in the aforementioned Persona 5, while they do tease each other, bicker, and have the awkward exchanges we all associate with our teenage years, many of the cast feel more like young adults. Futaba, the youngest of the lot, swings wildly from being a social misfit to a cool and composed hacker wise beyond her years. We can all remember the kids that thought they were grown-ups already from our school days, but none of them took it as far as Yusuke or Makoto. As great as those characters are, Yusuke is not 16 years old - I simply do not believe it.
Some games go the other way, shaka brah. I love Life is Strange, and I appreciate its attempt to invent slang a la Heathers and Mean Girls, but it hella failed. In trying to create a version of teenagers that don’t exist, all you create is realistic teenagers. Even Heathers and Mean Girls weren’t entirely successful. ‘Fetch’ is only ever used in the meme movie quote sense, and - tragically - nobody ever says “fuck me gently with a chainsaw.”
NEO: The World Ends With You strikes a perfect balance. Its teenagers feel true to their ages without desperately trying to land buzzwords to show how hip and cool they are - so hip and cool that they’d never say “hip and cool,” in fact. Part of this is because the game frequently breaks the fourth wall, and so the characters become more relatable by talking directly to you. It’s also in the stylized designs - we instantly know who a character is from looks alone, and that takes the pressure off them needing to try too hard in their verbal exchanges. It gives the game the sort of freedom we haven’t seen too often in this medium.
Rindo and co. aren’t quite rebels without a cause, but then neither was James Dean - Jim Stark actually has quite a few causes in that film. But there’s an authenticity to the counterculture vibes on display in TWEWY, right down to the threads. More games could do with its spirit.