NintendObs Thinks: 100%'ing Neo The World Ends with You.
This, is my Game of the Year 2021.
That’s it. I got everything done, everything the game tasked me to do for that coveted completion. Every single one of the items including the 333 pins the quasi-totality of which used in combat, all of the 92 enemies defeated in Easy, Normal, Hard and Ultimate, everything every single chapter of the game had to provide in terms of sidequests, all the accomplishments rewarded in the form of street tags and, not shown here, all social connections established. It really was a painstaking experience, but in retrospect one as fun as just beating the game, which is extremely rare to say when it comes to effectively beating a videogame 100%.
The reason I’m so adamant to talk about Neo The World Ends with You again likely for a final time is because, the way this game was designed to encourage completion, and to actually make completion accessible yet still long enough, is a template that I think all videogames should aim for. This is not to say that I’ve actually accomplished every single challenge in the game, I could create my own and further my enjoyment if I wanted to. I could try to get gold rank on the Dive challenges in Ultimate (humanly impossible), I could try the 20-chain battle challenge in Ultimate as well (doable but could be made harder by battling way stronger enemies in a short chain), I could try fighting the superboss in Ultimate at Level 1… (that I could actually achieve with a certain degree of reasonability).
What I mean is, there is always more to a game when you’ve finished it and even finished it completely, but so many games make it so hard to track everything quantifiable you could do in them. First and foremost, they rarely even have a completion counter: Neo The World Ends with You has one from the very start. Now, if they do have a counter, they rarely have it specified in order for you to know exactly where next it is you need to look: Neo The World Ends with You has counters for all of its categories, specifically detailed and then some. As soon as you begin the game, you can already envision and decide that you’re aiming to get it all, making the process sufficiently encouraging so you can strive to get that 100% in a lot more than 100 hours of gameplay.