The World Ends With You, or Subarashiki Kono Sekai, it's a great idea with the lack of proper pacing. Now, a word of warning, this anime is based on the videogame for the Nintendo DS with the same name. However, to make it as subjective as possible, I'll not make a comparison on the two, but focus solely on the animation, making the less possible parallelism on the two. Without further to say, let's jump into the review.
Waking up in an unknown world, without any memories and greeted by enemies known as 'noise'. In order to 'win' the game, you must survive 7 days, completing tasks each of the days. What will happen in the course of this story? Basically, the plot in a nutshell. Itself, the story is original and very well made. However, two major factors are what holds me from giving it a higher rate: fights and pacing.
The fights are, to put in a way, the same for the most part. By this I don't mean it's like One Punch Man where every battle ends with the enemy being punched in the face -which is, in fact, good as long as there's something else to this. The battles in TWEWY are mostly "let's synchronize so we can end this fight asap". It even repeats the same animations with a different enemy on the center, so basically if you watch a fight you now known how every other is going to be like.
As for the pace, I can't say for sure if the story is rushed to the point where it could've been better to have more episodes or if 12 episodes are way too long. As for the game, for the most part you are fighting instead of getting cutscenes, so it's natural there isn't that many parts to put on the scene. However, there are key parts that have been completly skipped -as for example, the first fight in the game requires an strategy in order to bait the enemy and make him vulnerable, but for the adaptation they went and said "alright we are going to punch this thing until it dies", missing even the event that should had happen afterwards.
For the characters, there's a comic-like artstyle, not really common in the anime. The animation, mostly for the fights as there's where it requires the most movement, is pretty solid and fluid for the most part. For the enemies, there's an use of CGI instead of hand-drawed frames. This may be a bad choice, as both 2D and 3D animations tends to be bad when mixed. However, in my point of view, this decision made the enemies look way more dangerous, as they look as if they were from another world. The animation on the them probably isn't the best, as they lack proper animations. However, it's decent enough to let that slip.
As someone who enjoyed the game's soundtrack, I feel as if this adaptation lacks most of the good themes from the original source. I'm not saying that the sound choices are bad, but they could've been a lot better. As for example, the ending theme, Carpe Diem, would have worked better for a boss fight or the last episode ending.
Oh boy, this is really what breaks me the most. Besides the MC and a few more, every other character is 'time-limited'. That means that their screen time will be, at most, for 4 episodes. This wouldn't be bad if we didn't count the bad pacing of the show and how they want you to like a character in just 2 episodes. In a personal note, I love most of the characters, but damn it really feels empty when it gives them around 40 minutes to meet you just to disappear afterwards. The character spits their backstory, a few fights in the middle because if not the show wouldn't hit 12 eps, and then they just say "Sayounara".
I started this as I really liked the game. It's not that I hated it -in fact, I also liked it. However, with all the negative points it has, it's almost impossible for me to enjoy it. It's good to rewatch the story and refresh your memory, but if someone who haven't played the game asked me if he or she should try this, my answer would be 'no'.
Are videogame adaptations just bad? No. In all honesty, TWEWY animation had a lot of potential. Maybe because it was meant to 'promote' the game it ended up having a rushed script, but every other aspect of it is decent.
Should you watch TWEWY animation? As I said on the enjoyment part, if you played the game or have a knowledge of how's the story and characters, then yes. It could be good to remember the story and all of that. However, if you have no idea of the original source, then I'm sorry but I wouldn't suggest watching this anime. Thus, I'd give it a 6/10 if you know the source, and a 3/10 if you don't (as I can't give 2 different ratings, I'll stuck with the higher because, as I mentioned, it had the potential to become a better show).
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