One of the best games I have ever played on Nintendo DS was The World Ends With You (Subarashiki Kono Sekai). After years of speculation and ports to iOS and Nintendo Switch, fans of the game were begging for a sequel. At Anime Expo 2020, we were fully expecting Square Enix to announce said sequel. Well… they did… but it wasn’t until much later. Instead, they announced a television anime adaption of the game! Needless to say, I was ecstatic when they announced this, and the wait until April was a long a tedious one. Now that it’s here, does it live up to the hype?
Let’s Go!
First Episode Synopsis
Neku is dropped into Scramble Crossing in the middle of an alternate version of Shibuya. There, he gets attacked by these frog-like beings referred to as Noise. Suddenly, a girl named Shiki shows up and asks Neku to form a pact with her. Without questioning it, he does so and the two of them begin to defeat the Noise.
Once everything is clear, Neku discovers a couple of things… the first is that he is trapped inside of something called The Reaper’s Game. He must survive for seven days or face erasure. The second is that he is in Shibuya but phased into a different reality. It’s the real city but it’s overlapped with a copy that only they can exist in. No one in the real Shibuya can interact with, see, or hear them.
The third thing Neku realizes is that he has amnesia. He didn’t even know his last name, how he got there, why he was chosen, or what’s going on. Shortly after reaching the 104 building, which was the object of their first mission, they encounter two Reapers who possess Neku with noise. While possessed, he almost kills Shiki on the Reaper’s orders until a mysterious man voiced by the ever-talented Kenjiro Tsuda shows up and reminds the Reapers that they need to play by the rules.
They head off to their second mission where they are to free the Statue of Hachiko of noise. Here, they meet two new players: Beat and Rhyme. Beat mistakes Neku for a Reaper and gets in his face until Shiki and Rhyme calm him down. With that ordeal, we move on to Day 3 where they have to go to a concert hall and defeat a monster. There, they meet the lead singer of Death March known simply as 777. For helping out his techie, he gives him a special pin.
The monster shows up but it’s too much for Shiki and Neku to handle alone. Beat and Rhyme show up and with their help, they take it down. At the end of Day 3, it is reported by the Reapers that half of the players have already been erased. We are introduced to the Game Master for this session, Higashizawa, along with various other Reapers. Apparently, there is someone higher than him named The Composer, who approved of Higashizawa’s promotion… as long as he can erase all of the remaining players in the game.
Worth Watching?
YES – If you’ve played the game, this is a no-brainer. If you haven’t played the game, this should be at the top of your list to watch.
Before you say “wait, it’s a 7-day game and episode one covered the first three days!? Are they rushing it THAT MUCH!?”
The answer is no… they’re not. If you haven’t played the game then you won’t know that the first three days go by just as fast. This break-neck speed is a perfect adaptation of the game’s pacing; however, the first episode did kind of speed things up a little bit.
While they defeated the Noise for day 2, we really didn’t get much on the Statue of Hachiko. The mission kind of felt like an afterthought. Also, Neku isn’t as pessimistic in the anime as he was in the game. There was a LOT more resistance from him when it came to partnering with Shiki, his attitude towards her after forming the pact, and just wanting to be an overall loner. Here, Neku feels like he’s part of a team but the writers suddenly remembered that he was supposed to be a loner so they fed him some forced emo lines without him acting upon them.
I think it felt a little rushed in that sense but, then again, fast-tracking Neku’s development doesn’t really hurt the series all too much. I also remember Beat being more apprehensive and wary of Neku for a longer period of time as well but… again… for the anime’s sake… it’s not that huge of an issue. For those who never played the game, it doesn’t have a profound impact on the story one bit.
Things should start to slow down now and that’s because things should be getting good! While the battles were a bit on the short side, there was still plenty of action to be had. I thought they would have ended the first episode with the monster they had to face and saved the battle for episode two but apparently not. Oh well.
Still, it was a nice trip down memory lane and the adaptation has been good enough to be satisfying so far!
