English Dub Review: The World Ends With You: The Animation “It’s a Wonderful World”

 

Overview


Neku confronts Kitaniji for the final time when the return of a familiar face turns everything he thought he knew on its head! Who is the real Composer? Will the lessons Neku has learned in Shibuya carry him through one last game?…



Our Take

For the big finale, the revelations about Joshua were not surprising at all and I think we the audience all knew it to some extent. The rest of this episode was kinda just alright. The final twists were also pretty nice. Although this adaptation had its fair share of issues, it did do a lot of things better than I expected. I never played the game so I don’t know if it was completely faithful to its source material, but It’s easy to assume that the anime itself kinda works as a jumping-on point to basically tell an abridged version of the story if they wanna play the Nintendo Switch sequel that recently came out called “NEO: The World Ends with You”.

There are times where it’s hard to tell whether Neku was hand-drawn or CG animated. A lot of it has to do with the character designs themselves and how they handle shading. I’ve been able to overlook some of the action scenes in this show on account of the CGI not always being properly executed but at least they’re serviceable for what we were given. And the Noise CG models were also a little jarring, but I think they were meant to be otherworldly, so I guess it works in that regard.

This was honestly a respectable season/series finale. Not every videogame to anime adaptation is going to get everything right when it comes to retelling a story, (“Bayonetta: Bloody Fate” for example was a retelling of the first game’s storyline yet it didn’t stay true to the grandiose ending that the original game had.) But It remains to be seen if they’ll make another one of these in the future. Then again, who knows what Square Enix will do next…