The World Ends With You #01 — Adaptation By Editing Out
April 9th, 2021
Yep, I definitely remember that music.
Impressions:
There's some real irony that a show based on a complex and at times obnoxiously complicated RPG system is just glossing over the gamification mechanics entirely when extended explanation of them has absolutely taken over fantasy series that like to pretend to be RPGs. Then again, I think that the production side of this rightly understands that there is a metric buttload of story in the original, and rather than try to rearrange or combine things, have simply decided to cut out literally everything that is not a central plot scene. It blasts through the first two days (out of the 21 in total in the game) in the first half of the episode. Even speedruns take close to half an hour.
I do think that's also going to be its main weakness though, and the same weakness most of these RPG adaptations have far more than adaptations of comics or novels. What are they bringing new to the table that isn't just a digest version of a Let's Play? Voice acting? Slightly more animation during cutscenes? An excuse to hear the same music from the game? Sometimes the answer is particularly slick fights. They're certainly putting real effort into the animation here, as weird as the CGI-enhanced style is, but with the lightning fast pacing, it goes through about four 'boss' battles, none of them having any actual weight or focus. Mind you, that still compares favorably to Dynazenon, in quantity, quality, and attempt to work in character development in the process, but again, this is just a abridged representation that I'm not sure differentiates itself enough from the original to have much interesting to say about it.
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So, what do you think about the game itself?