SPOILER-FREE!
This review was originally written in June 2021, published as a YouTube video on my channel.

Make no mistake about it – there is no hard-and-fast series of rules when it comes to adaptation. There are numerous debates that could be had about whether an adaptation has the responsibility to be as faithful to the original material as possible, or if it should carve out something in a new direction to breathe some life into the material. My general condition is that I’m far less concerned with either of those things, and more concerned with does this hold up as a piece of entertainment on its own. Loyalty can work, as can a new interpretation using a different medium.

But what happens when you are almost completely-unfamiliar with the original source? You get what happened to me and The World Ends with You the Animation. There were only two things that I knew about it; that it was based on a video game that I had never played nor seen any footage of, and that the main character was featured in Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance. With no solid foundation to build on, I went in with as clean a slate as could be expected. But there was one other thing I went in with – uneasiness. Video game adaptations don’t have the greatest track record of being high-quality, but at least with a 12-episode television series, there’s naturally more time to allow things to develop compared to a film.
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Neku awakens one day in what appears to be Shibuya, only to come to the realization that he’s dead. In a special plane of existence called the Underground, he meets a girl name Misaki Shiki who forms a pact with him, and they fight off strange creatures called Noise. She explains that they’re both taking part in what’s known as a Reaper’s Game, that something precious was taken from them as their supposed “entry fee,” and that they have a mission to complete every day for one week. If they manage to do that, they’ll be given the opportunity to be brought back to life. Failure to succeed in a mission or survive the Noise or the Reapers results in getting erased from existence. With Shiki and another team of players named Beat and Rhyme, Neku seeks to win the Reaper’s Game, and reclaim his lost memories.

While the “death game” concept has been a bit of a running joke ever since Sword Art Online, there is potential in this specific setup. Forming a pact with a partner effectively means that if they die, you’re completely defenseless. Specific missions to accomplish and in a certain timeframe adds an element of urgency to each day of the week, and considering the presence of Reapers and Noise, there are several ways that you could find yourself in serious trouble. Other abilities, like being able to scan people in real-world Shibuya and collaborate with other players in the Reaper’s Game, work to try and create a more-complex and involved environment that isn’t determined solely by your game stats.

What’s also particularly intriguing is the aesthetic the show is going for. The character designs use a combination of stark colors, punctuated by bold outlines for the figures. The brighter colors are slightly muted, diminishing potential clashes of light and dark. It gives the show a unique stylization overall, and the designs for the Noise are solid for the most part. Background music feels appropriate moody and at times melancholic, or kicks into more of a rock style when fights begin.

But The World Ends with You the Animation runs into a problem almost immediately with too many things happening too quickly. The first episodes breeze through so many explanations and introduces so many characters that it’s slightly discomforting. On the one hand, this makes sense; Neku has effectively been dropped into another world, and discomfort and disorientation are to be expected. He needs time to get accustomed to the laws of this new universe. The problem lies in the fact that even though Neku gets more-familiarized with it in subsequent episodes, I personally didn’t. I was able to get a grasp on things eventually, but when an action show requires you to stop for a minute and try to remember or parse out certain details, it doesn’t necessarily bode well.

Even now at the end of the series, I have no idea why certain characters had the powers that they did, why and how they get more powers later on, and what triggers the larger-scale team attacks. Especially infuriating was characters saying they need to go somewhere, and the show either making them jump-cut there immediately or be shown walking and talking for no significant reason. With any fantasy universe, there are naturally some things that you just have to accept and suspend your disbelief, but push that too far and it does reach a point where you have to stop and ask yourself just what on Earth is going on, or why certain things are happening the way they are. There’s one particular twist with Beat that had me metaphorically throwing my hands in the air and saying, “Well, okay, I guess that’s a thing now.”

And some of the properties that get introduced aren’t utilized to their fullest extent. One particular element is the idea of what happens when you become susceptible to the influence of Noise and your negative emotions. Neku actually ends up losing control and tries attacking Shiki at a Reaper’s prompting, and has to be snapped out of it. It’s a good idea, but doesn’t make any more appearances beyond the first episode, nor is alluded to in a meaningful manner. Introducing various dangers only to disregard them later on makes one of the ways the show could build tension nonexistent.

Speaking of tension, the fights themselves don’t carry that much of it. I spoke before about the The World Ends with You the Animation moving too quickly, and unfortunately, this quality also exists in fights. In an effort to try and get everything in the show finished plot-wise, climactic battles feel like little more than quick skirmishes. As the Noise gets stronger (which, again, doesn’t affect Neku) and the stakes get higher, the fights should be, on some level, getting more tense or extravagant. Instead, fights only last for a handful of minutes because there’s something else in the plot that the show HAS to get to. Since three days can sometimes be crammed into a single 22-minute episode, this is a glaring issue. It’s difficult to feel like Neku or his friends managed to accomplish something great when you never fully feel like they’re on the ropes. To call the fights terrible as a whole though isn’t truthful; the animation does get an uptick in quality as Neku and the enemies move smoothly through space. Some of the cel-shaded style looked just a touch blocky, but the soundtrack definitely helps add to the atmosphere.

But the actual core of the show, Neku, doesn’t make for a particularly-compelling character. His closed-off nature in the beginning does gradually get defrosted, but his growth doesn’t feel so justified because of the rapid pace. A part of this could also be due to the Reaper’s Game’s structure – he is bound to Shiki by necessity rather than coming to the decision to be with her entirely on his own. Transitioning from being a loner to someone who can grow to trust and accept requires time and development, which the show’s twelve episodes are not equipped to handle. It’s telling that Shiki was my favorite character because the time given to her actually allowed for meaningful introspection and motivation, which I didn’t feel from just about anyone else.
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The World Ends with You the Animation doesn’t give itself enough time to maximize its potential, its characters, or its universe. The action scenes feel too brief to carry the tension they seek, and too many details are quickly thrown at the viewer that you’re expected to remember or simply accept with little explanation as the series goes on. If the series had instead made each day or half-day its own episode, it would have allowed not only cautious world and character-building, but also would have given the battles more focus. While that means that not everything in the plot would have been reached, I’d rather take a solid 12-episode season and cliffhanger and use that as motivation to play the original game. As the series exists now, any compulsion I have to play the original game or its sequel has more to do with my love of RPGs, not anything that the series itself gave me. Perhaps fans of the game would like the series more than I did, and I do hope that the show provided entertainment for them. It just wasn’t for me.