すばらしきこのせかい The Animation S1

Just play SubaSeka instead

This is the anime adaptation of the DS game すばらしきこのせかい / The World Ends With You, made to build hype for the decade-plus-overdue sequel game and familiarize a new audience with the basic premise. To be upfront about my bias, TWEWY has been my favourite game of all time since it was released; the story and characters of the original game deeply influenced me the first time I played it and have remained important to me for over fifteen years, so I hold the anime to a much higher standard than it could ever meet, and naturally I think it did a terrible job of adapting the game. It's only worth watching for fans who are content-starved and willing to sit through an insultingly-mediocre retelling just to see beloved characters fully animated and voiced; otherwise, just play the game instead.

From a learning point of view, it's okay. I watched it as a ramp-up to prepare to play the game in Japanese, and to that end it does well at familiarizing you with the characters' voices and speech styles and the key vocabulary. I wouldn't call the overall language level easy; a lot of the dialogue between the main characters is straight-forward, but a couple characters have rough/slurred speech patterns that could make it difficult to recognize and look up the expressions they're using for those who don't already have practice with them, and the dialogue tends to degrade into complicated strings of long words and high-level concepts any time the villains are talking about their motivations or the nature of the Reapers' Game (to say nothing of the character who speaks exclusively in mathematics terms and mnemonic goroawase). For some reason, I found the voices to be kind of mumbly and difficult to connect to the subtitles during the first episode, but after that was fine, outside of competing with the SFX and music.

Entertainment-wise, it at least respected the visual style of the game and has some nicely storyboarded sequences. The CG was used advantageously to give the city and the fight scenes a sense of space that the DS game couldn't manage, but unfortunately it looks so low-budget and sticks out so horribly as to be distracting. The pacing is awful, as a lot of moments were skimmed, sacrificed, rearranged, and outright rewritten for the sake of cramming the game's events into 12 episodes; I imagine it would be very hard to follow for someone not familiar with the story already. The anime's biggest crimes by far though are against character development, with the core story of Neku's monumental growth being sanded down to nothing due to the writers' cowardice in refusing to show the heroes ever being mean or doing anything bad of their own free will, and other characters likewise having their flaws glossed over and arcs blunted.

Even loving TWEWY as much as I do, the anime was a slog to rewatch. It gets an automatic 3-stars just for what it's adapting, and it certainly didn't do everything badly, but it got enough wrong that it was too frustrating for me to appreciate, outside of the motivation it gave me to play the game and experience the story properly.