With its demo releasing last week, the wait is almost over for NEO: The World Ends With You. After almost 14 years, the sequel to Square Enix's beloved Nintendo DS RPG will finally release next month for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. As fans prepare for NEO: The World Ends With You's release, Square Enix has revealed how long it will take to complete the long-awaited action RPG.
NEO: The World Ends With You was first announced in November 2020 after the announcement of an anime adaptation of the 2007 game. The game serves as both a prequel and a sequel to the original game and will transition the original dual-screen battle system into fully 3D action RPG gameplay. A sequel to The World Ends With You had been highly requested from both fans of the game and its original development staff, with Kingdom Hearts creator Tetsuya Nomura returning as creative director and character designer for the follow-up.
After such a long wait, fans will be relieved to hear that NEO: The World Ends With You will be a substantially longer game than the original, with the series' director claiming it could take some players over 100 hours to beat the game. In an interview with 4Gamer (as translated by Nintendo Everything,) series director Tatsuya Kando and game director Hiroyuki Ito revealed that NEO: The World Ends With You will take around 50 hours to fully complete. Kando later claimed that "If you’re the type of player to do everything a game has to offer, expect your hour count to reach the triple digits."
For comparison's sake, game length aggregator site HowLongToBeat claims that the original Nintendo DS version of The World Ends With You takes 25 hours to finish, with a further 10 hours added by playing the Switch version's "A New Day" epilogue. Some characters from A New Day will return in NEO: The World Ends With You, which follows a new cast of characters as they fight their way through a new "Reaper's Game" set, once again, on the streets of Shibuya.
The sequel will be accessible to newcomers and longtime fans of the series, as Square Enix set out to tie up loose ends from the original game with the Final Remix version's A New Day epilogue. The sequel will also mark the series' debut on PC and PlayStation 4.
A demo for NEO: The World Ends With You is available now on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, and allows players to experience the first two hours of the game ahead of its launch on July 27th, 2021, the 14th anniversary of the original game's first release in Japan. The game will also come to PC as an Epic Games Store exclusive later in summer.
NEO: The World Ends With You will release on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 on July 27th, 2021. The game will release on PC later in summer 2021.
Source: Nintendo Everything/4Gamer