I love weird control schemes.
Call it masochism, but I'm all about titles that make strange, oblique decisions in how players interact with them. I 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:adored the Wii's immersive gimmicks, VR gaming has changed how I approach survival horr♐or, and even 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cooking Mama's motion controls impressed me. If there's a way of navigating games beyond sitting💎 down with a controller, I want ๊to do it, because there's so much more potential to this medium than we oft give it credit for.
With that in mind, it probably won't surprise you to learn that The World Ends With You is one of my favorite games of all time. Beyo𝓡nd its equally heartrending and uplifting narrative, lush and distinctive visuals, and unforgettable soundtrack, the cult favorite 2008 gem has one of the strangest control schemes in gaming.
In the original release, players are tasked with mashing out combos on the Nintendo DS's D-Pad while frantically swiping away at the touchscreen in certain directions. 🔴Neku always stayed on the top screen, and the touch screen prompts change somewhat throughout the game as different partners join your team. You see your new party additions organically reflected in how you control the game, which is an ingenious decision from a design perspective.
Later releases🅰 of the game would unfortunately muddle those slick, intuitive mechanics. Playing the game on an iPhone or tablet lacked the same tactile satisfaction, and 𓂃the screen was too cluttered to make heads nor tails of. The Switch's port fares a little better when played in handheld with touch controls, but the docked motion control scheme was a waking nightmare to work with - which is a shame, considering good accessibility options would be great. To date, though, no version has managed to capture TWEWY's innovative and ambitious use of its original hardware.
Now, with the announcement of Neo: The World Ends With You, it seems like Square Enix will be doing away with novel control schemes entirely. looks like a straightforward kind of ARPG - cut from the same cloth that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kingdom Hearts III, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy XV and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy VII Remake were. While I could be proven wrong, it looks like a more conventional game than its predecessor - and I think that sucks.
Part of TWEWY's charm, to me, is in its desire to mess with convention. Its developers didn't set out to slap a fancy veneer on old mechanical bones and call it day. Instead, the game actively deconstructed the sacred institution of JRPGs - it recontextualized armor as designer clothes and accessories, and traded sweeping orchestras and dreamy synths for techno and hip-hop. But the designers also went a step further in how they approached combat, and did away with traditional enemy encounters in favor of something more ambitious. B❀y blending touch screen novelties and elements of rhythm gaming, the game achieves a level of tactile satisfaction rarely surpassed in the genre, let alone in gaming in general.
So, then, it disappoints me to see that Neo will likely throw that ambition to the wind in favor of something more palatable. To do that is to lose the very essence of what made the original game so transgressive, so strange, so innovative. The original game wasn't supposed to be palatable. It was supposed to make you wr﷽estle with its controls, struggle to understand them, and eventually have fun with them once you figured them out. For me, that was part of 💧the reason I played far more TWEWY than I did more mainstream DS titles: it used the hardware in ways I hadn't dreamt of.
Of course, I'm still excited for Neo - more excited than I have been for a game in a while, in fact. I'm sure it'll still be another charming game from Nomura, whose penchant for biz💮arre design choices and obtuse narrative threads will never cease to entertain me. Yet, I think, I'll have to temper my expectations. As good as this game might be, it will never be the true sequel I'd wanted, and it almost definitely won't be the deft piece of mechanical innovation that the original was.
Because that world did, in fact, end in 2008.