#gamefromthecorner

Never ceases to amuse me that Coco has expressed all manner of emotions at various levels in the time that we’ve known her, many of them aggressive or curt, and Neku just has this warm unbothered smile every single goshdarn time. He must know her so well to just be completely used to her bratty behaviour and even making himself amenable to it without ever expressing even a hint of resentment about it. Their friendship is beyond interesting.

???: Mind giving me a tour of this place?

PFFT!!

Okay, first of all, can I just say what an upgrade it is for this amazing girl to go from spending most of the last game as either a hostage or a Pokemon to being a mysterious supporting background force throughout this game that culminates in her masterminding an incredible plan that brings all our heroes together and allows for the possibility of a complete and total victory that simultaneously defeats the undefeatable apocalypse beasts and undoes a crippling mental health plague across the entire city!? Really puts into perspective how unwise we were to neglect her before now, but better late than flippin’ never!

Seeing her here being a beacon of hope that’s assembling this plan and this team with such love and passion makes me feel such a wave of second-hand pride. Rhyme is awesome!

Secondly, I LOVE THIS PLAN! This is so cool! We really are making use of (almost) everybody’s gifts in a creative combination that makes sense to us players and solves the problem as laid out before us with all the gifts as demonstrated up until this point!

Not only that, but it’s a plan that thematically answers Haz’s earlier question: “What makes this city so special?” Rindo’s answer to that question relied on the presence of his friends, so when he lost them - even when the city was cured of its plague - he couldn’t find anything to like about it. Now they’re going to save the city together by getting everyone in Shibuya to answer that question in their own way and in doing so cure that same plague on their own! Shibuya is practically saving itself, proving its own worth in the process!

It took us a while to get here, but if this plan goes off half as beautifully as it sounds, it was time well spent!

First thing’s first, let’s appreciate Neku doing his dramatic sleeping headphones pose, one-handed, even though he isn’t wearing headphones! This is the kind of thing that makes him a legend. Sure, he saved Shibuya, but then there’s this and really, which one is going to be remembered more?

I love to see him around but RIP to Beat, not getting a main screen pose that shows off his full facial glory even at the end of the game where his best friend, who is himself a much bigger spoiler, gets to be heralded for the rest of time to come. He just looks shy now. Heck, Shoka’s been around since the start and she didn’t even join the team until the end of Week 2. She was a character, fair enough, but being a cover character alongside our main crew was always hinting at something big at the very least.

Anyway, my inability to show new players this game spoiler-free on my own console aside, it has been a while since I was back at the liveblog! I did say I would take a break and I honestly meant that to be like a couple of weeks or something. Now it’s been 4 and a half months. I know I owe no explanations fro my absence, but I still want to say that I just definitely needed some time off from blogging and it really caught me. Plus I got a new job and then Christmas came along and a bunch of other things compounded, etc...

Kariya, are you... talking to us? Genuinely looks like he’s breaking the fourth wall at the end there, which he might as well be, given what he’s saying. He’s calling Sho out on his undesired growth and seems to be admiring him in a certain way. Many a TWEWY fan can relate.

The relationship between these two is minimal and always has been, but it still interests me. They’re fairly big players in both TWEWY games so far. It’d be interesting to see if they ever became more familiar with each other in the future, especially given how different they are from each other.

Kana the shopkeeper here said this to me and it reminded me at once of the system in the last game that literally functioned that way. While all the brands in both games are cool and very artistically put together, I do miss the shifting tides of public preference that we controlled. As a gameplay element, it was admittedly a bit so-so and to have it in this game would likely overcomplicate what’s already a very full game in a story that doesn’t touch on this stuff nearly as much, but I loved how that theme was so well-implemented in both the story and gameplay of the last game. It was such a cool feature.

[Long, arduous and weathered inhale and exhale of breath] Darn it...

I have to admit it...

I really like Coco now.

From her voice acting, to her attitude here, to the nickname “Mini-moto”, to her reaction to his greeting and finally to her genuine and earnest hope in Neku... This whole scene was golden and either pulled me fully over the edge to liking her or possibly just made me fully aware that I already did.

It’s been a process, learning to actually like her character after she shot Neku (which I’ll still hold against her from time to time purely for my amusement), but seeing her here really woke me up to how fun of a character she is. I’m definitely down to see more of her in the future. And did I mention her voice acting!? That actress is so well cast!

I still have, like, a million questions about her and at least, like, five of those questions are about what the deal is with her and Sho. I’m guessing at least some of that stuff will be covered in the secret reports though.

I’ll be honest, I went to type in those numbers that Sho spouted in order to look them up and when I did, it was only then that I saw what he was doing.

Gosh. Flippin’. Darn it.

That was funny. Well flippin’ played, that was funny. Somehow I never expected him to do something like that even though it’s one of the most Sho things he could possibly do. Incredible.