Sunday 23 May 2021

TWEWY the Animation: Joshua week impression

Among all of Josh's smol faces, his T-pose still impresses me the most.


Week 2 occupied 4 episodes instead of 3 or even 3.5 episodes. This is making sense because we see the most developments and basically all characters in the week. Considering the nature of week 3 which is more like a team solo that part it should be easily covered in 3 episodes (with one episode solely for the final fights), unless they want to introduce more NEO hypes (which they did also this week).

Again I will focus on the difference between OG (the original DS game) and the anime. It is apparent at this point that covering the story with like, half the detail is already impossible (when you also want to display the fights). One particular example this week is that Sho's math meme is really weird in contrast to what we saw in the OG dialogues because it's simply coming out of nowhere. The story focused on interactions among people and their feelings which is so delicate that most dialogues are relevant to the main plot. As such the producer have already done a satisfactory job to cover what should have been covered. My critics are again mainly on how the anime could have been closer to OG in terms of game mechanics.

Let's start again with pins and monsters.

On Ep.4, they finally got the monsters right: Carcinofolk appears on W2D1. Neku used Burning Melon here which is effective against crabs, but not much use against the rhinos. Instead of a fire sphere bouncing on the screen it was shown as ordinary fireballs only. He also used Pop Pendulum against kangaroos, which of course failed because this pin is too damn slow to hit them. I always preferred JoM slashing attacks as it stuns the enemy, and I have no idea why they never used those pins.

Nothing too much about Ep.5, but they have once used the ordinary Pyrokinesis pin again. Starter pin should not be used at this stage anymore! And since your Burning Melon was shown as fireball last episode, the Pyrokinesis pin can easily be replaced by some other random fire pin anyhow. Oh and taboo noises firing cannons...

On Ep.6 the game started with Garage Wolf and Doom Metal Drake...the former only appears on week 1 and the latter only on W3D7. This is just inappropriate. They finally used Frozen Cool instead of the Ice- pins, but this is the unevolved pin (cf. Blizzard Cool) so we should see one icicle instead of three. Swift Storm, Swift End is another new pin introduced and it seems like they really like Dragon Coulture. The other new pin introduced was Crackle Pop Barrier, which was shown as a weak barrier instead of time-limited invincibility. Joshua also exhibits his levitation + angel beam ability on day 6 (instead of day 5 in OG) this episode...his attack is always my favourite.

Ep.7 started with the scramble crossing mini-boss fight. In the anime Neku faced Jungle Boomer and Grindcore Minks, but there were two red minks instead of the red-gold duo! There were Mosh Grizzly around which is also untrue to OG as it should have been Wall of Grizzly (black wolf) instead. In the boss fight Neku also (explicitly) used the starter pin Thunderbolt pin for the first time...again why? Storm Warning and the Spider series are similar but much better. Thunderbolt-type attacks are effective against Sho since he evade attacks so swiftly though.

*Edit: it seems like Superfine beam were used in Ep.7 but I couldn't recall any attach like that...anyway.

Other OG related

Sho's missions started with [Game I(/II/III)] which is the same as OG. I now realized it looks like [Maths I/II/III] for Japanese's high school maths curriculum, but I am not sure if there are any relation between the two. The stupid 30+74 was also modified into sqrt(10816). 

Even before the anime we already know that many regions are renamed into their reality name as SE got the consent from the property owners. We saw the Tsutaya O-East last time, and this time it's Shibu Q-front (instead of Q-head). Then later in Ep.7 Pork City was renamed to Mark City. Back in 2008 I have not visited Shibuya so I wouldn't have react to Mark City even if that was the name in OG, but since now I have been there many time and also that the Mark City was shown explicitly (Pork City was never shown in OG -- you just enter a mall from Dogenzaka) I immediately understand the way the game describe Pork/Mark City as "where emotion gathers" -- for those who don't know, Mark City is a large complex above the Tokyu-Tokyo Metro Shibuya station...and one of the shopping malls loaded with top restaurants in Shibuya.

At a point Mr.H helped Joshua and Neku by adding new functions to their phones. This is making less sense on smartphones as they have a much more compact designs comparing to phones in the 00's. That reminds me of the time when there were shops specializing in amending the hardware of phones and GBAs adding weird functions on it.

In OG we never saw the movement of characters other than the protagonist team. Apparently the reapers can fly. Another difference in Ep.6 is that Joshua explicitly mentioning the isolated UG area, in particular the existence of Shinjuku UG.

A map was shown when Joshua talked about route 5 and that is the exact same map in OG and I loved that. 

The mission on day 7 was not issued by Sho but by the conductor himself. In OG this is reckoned by the way the mission was written. The mission started with "Game 7" instead of "Game IV/VII", but this was not delivered in the anime which is slightly disappointing. 

The representation as in Ep.7 clearly deviates from OG more than the previous episodes. Firstly we have spider noises that never appeared in OG, then we have imaginary space appearing much earlier than Sho's fight (and visually it is so different -- I wonder now how Konishi's fight would be). The fight is a bit weird though, Joshua and Neku never managed to hit Sho effectively at least on screen but the fusion attack somehow did the job...

Impressions

- Shiki's emotion was close to the OG emotions most of the time, but Joshua's smug-ness is much clearer in the anime than in OG. He simply has so many different smol faces in the four episodes.
- Tin Pin's gone. Natural choice but I hope it will at least be in NEO.
- Mr. H calling Neku correctly in anime.
- Joshua talking about they need to attack the taboo noises to deal effective damage: a possible reference to puck relay.
- The N---d Prey shown on Ep.6 after Neku's flashback

*

I can hardly say the anime met my full satisfaction so far, but I will rate it a 9/10 regardless. Let's see what would happen on the Beat week!

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