All four men worked on the original The World Ends with You, and despite their eager desire to return to the series, Hirano said they needed more than just the will to do it to make it a reality. Also back from Final Remix is Tomohiko Hirano, who once again serves in the producer role. Both rereleases were co-directed by Hiroyuki Itou, who returns on NEO as the game’s sole director. In 2018, the game made the jump to Switch with The World Ends with You: Final Remix. In 2012, it was ported to mobile devices as The World Ends with You: Solo Remix. Oh, and then there was Neku and company’s appearance in Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance on the Nintendo 3DS.ĭespite not having the sales and worldwide recognition of Kingdom Hearts, The World Ends with You clearly made an impact with somebody at Square Enix as members of the NEO: TWEWY team were able to revisit the title over the years. Jupiter, the developer behind Chain of Memories, was brought in to assist with development on the title, further linking the two series. Both franchises share some common DNA with work on the original The World Ends with You beginning as development on Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories reached the home stretch and Kingdom Hearts II continued along swimmingly. It should be no wonder that TWEWY managed to keep itself burrowed in the minds of the development team as they work on the Kingdom Hearts series. “Throughout the years, I was busy with the Kingdom Hearts franchise,” Tatsuya Kando, director of the original The World Ends with You, said, “but this was a title that was always somewhere in my head something I always thought about.” There were also commitments to other titles that took precedent over a sequel to a niche Nintendo DS game. The starting and stopping of ideas for the title wasn’t the only thing standing in this game’s way. We’d bring up an idea and then it would be scrapped.” And it was pretty much a continuation of that from there. “There had been discussions that popped up about moving forward with this title, but then, somewhere down the line, it got scrapped. “I personally felt that I wasn’t sure whether this game was ever going to be finished,” Tetsuya Nomura, noted belt aficionado and creative producer for NEO: The World Ends with You, explained. Last Monday, I sat down over Zoom with the creative team behind NEO: The World Ends with You to discuss the game, its characters, its story, and how, after 14 years, we were finally getting one of gaming’s most requested sequels. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one doubting it could happen. Long had we waited, and even with rereleases of the original title on new hardware with new content, the further away we moved from the debut of the original title, the less confident I became that we’d ever return to Shibuya and the Reaper’s Game. For those like myself, it was a moment to rejoice. After more than a decade of fans pleading and Square Enix teasing, we learned last summer a sequel to The World Ends with You was in development. It was one of the biggest surprise announcements of 2020. A brief chat with the creators of the highly anticipated sequel
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