Final Thoughts

I was going to give my final thoughts on the game overall, but I'm pretty sure I've already said quite a lot over the course of this project. But if you haven't gotten sick of me talking about this game yet, I did end up writing a fairly lengthy backloggd review! My consensus: TWEWY is an incredible game on basically every level. I am really glad I replayed it.

In fact, I'm kind of appalled at myself for not replaying it sooner. TWEWY is definitely a game that needs to be played multiple times. This is pretty evident from the fact that so much context is locked behind replaying for secret reports, but also from the fact that the game is clearly designed to make replaying it as easy as possible. Usually, games requiring you to play through a postgame or NG+ run in order to unlock whatever feels like a drag to me (and is probably a big part of the reason I put this playthrough off so long). After this playthrough, though, I think the developers of TWEWY deserve a lot of credit for making their postgame as painless as they did. I love chapter select. I love The WEWY.

On the other hand, waiting so long let me come back to TWEWY with a fresh set of eyes! I enjoyed reacquainting myself with Shibuya...a lot. Which should be obvious from the amount of time and effort I ended up pouring into trying to 100% the game after explicitly saying at the start of my replay that I didn't care at all about 100%ing the game. Ahem. Anyway.

The fact that I've now basically exhausted everything TWEWY has to offer does beg the question of whether I'm going to move on to the rest of the Official TWEWY Content. The answer is yes: I actually already started playing NEO during the course of my replay (haven't gotten very far yet), I do want to finish the anime eventually (I watched the first few episodes when they aired, then fell off), and... I guess... I should find out what happens in the bonus chapter of the Final Remix. I'll be honest I vaguely heard that Neku gets put in another game and dies or something and this annoyed me so much I decided to just ignore it. But I suppose I must face it eventually.

The thing about TWEWY, the original game on my beloved Nintendo DS, is that it ties its story up so satisfyingly. It's made so perfectly as a standalone game on the DS, that I've always been kind of baffled by it having ports and remasters and a sequel (to be more specific, I'm less baffled by Square Enix throwing out more content for content's sake, and more baffled by the fact that there is evidently an audience asking for them). NEO has been on my to-play list for years, because at the end of the day I am a fan, but after all that time I still don't know what I'd even WANT from a sequel. It's certainly not for Neku to be thrown back into the Game. So, yes I'm going to play it, eventually, but I don't exactly have any expectations for it to hit the highs that TWEWY hit for me, personally. I don't expect to have as much to say on it, either.

Actually, I'm not sure if I'll be saying THIS much on a game again for a while. This project was something of a test run. When I created this site, my original vision was to do something like this for every game I played. I play a lot of long RPGs, and I usually talk about them a lot while doing so. I thought it would be fun, and maybe useful, to have a better record of my thoughts while playing than scattered discord messages and posts.

I don't regret writing this much about TWEWY. It WAS fun! It was also a lot more intensive and time-consuming than I predicted. I spent over four months playing and talking about a game that's normally only about 20 hours long! Trying to find something to analyze about every single chapter was an interesting experiment. I probably picked up on, or was able to articulate, a couple things that I wouldn't have otherwise. I also probably wrote way more than necessary, and ended up reaching way too far for something to talk about on multiple occassions. So... I'm definitely rethinking my previous plan of doing this for every game.

I think my main takeaways from this experiment are:

• Doing an entry for (almost) every in-game day was a natural choice, given that TWEWY is explicitly broken up into separate chapters for each day. The short length of the chapters definitely contributed to dragging out both the game and my analysis, though. If I do this type of journaling again, I should definitely space entries out a bit more, so that a single entry covers more than an hour or two of gaming.
• The fact that this was a replay definitely added to my ability to actually analyze events, rather than just reacting to them. I think recording live reactions and first impressions also has merits, but my entries would most likely be either a lot shorter or a lot less interesting (even to me!) if I was playing this game for the first time. This type of in-depth journaling is probably best saved for replays of games I already know I can discuss at length.
• Even if I don't record it on this website, or in this format, I do think it was valuable to make more of an effort at taking notes on the game! For further reading on note-taking wrt games, consider these articles from Polygon and Florence Smith Nicholls.
• From a web design perspective, by the end of this project, the drop-down menu definitely got a little unwieldy. If I do make another of this type of page, I should reconsider that system, or at least add "next" and "previous" buttons. I also probably should just default to a more readable font and throw out the font-switcher...
• From a more-personal-but-still-technically-web-design perspective, the novelty of making themed pages may have worn off a bit. I'm no longer jumping for any excuse to make a page decorated around a specific theme. This definitely doesn't mean I'll never do so again...but I might be focusing on content over aesthetics for a while.
• If I'm no longer focusing on doing this type of writing and page design, I might want to reformat my journal page, or reorganize my site a bit, or implement an actual blog format, or some combination of those. The current page will be sticking around for the foreseeable future until I figure out what I want to do, though.

So, what IS next for me? I'm not entirely sure. I have some other pages I want to work on for this site, plus some overdue updates for the TOHD website. I still want to write about games (always), but I'll be focusing on more standalone posts for now. Stay tuned, I guess?!

One last thing...I would love to know if anyone actually read these? Enjoyed it? Didn't enjoy it? Obviously I'm running this site mostly for myself, and not really expecting to cultivate much of a following for my rambling about a Nintendo DS game... but I'm also putting it out there on the internet! And, as we've established, I'm still not totally sure of my goals for this site. So if you happen to have feedback, or just want to let me know someone actually read any of this, I'd be happy to hear from you. Even if not, thank you for reading! Don't forget, the world begins with you!

...For completion's sake, I'll conclude this post with the last secret report (from Another Day). The fact that Joshua ignored Mr. H and his own Game for days because he was having the time of his life playing Tin Pin made me crack up.