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YMMV / The World Ends with You

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  • Accidental Innuendo: One of Higashizawa's battle cries is "I'll pound you!"
  • Adorkable:
    • Neku has shades of this in the main game, with his social awkwardness and massive fanboyism when it comes to CAT being highlighted. This gets expanded on even more in Another Day, where he is a massive fan of Tin Pin who collects his favorite Tin Pin Weekly issues in an acid-proof scrapbook and also purposely styles his Shonen Hair after manga characters, of all things. This even gets lampshaded by the other characters, who call him a massive geek after learning this.
    • Shiki's upbeat, energetic personality, ditziness, and love for fashion and sewing definitely makes her this. This is compounded even more with her true appearance.
    • While main game Joshua definitely isn’t this, his "A New Day" counterpart, Yoshiya, most definitely is, being a Shrinking Violet who stammers quite a bit when talking to others and is easily frightened, but is also shown to be quite friendly and downright helpful towards Neku and Beat.
    • Between his comical overreactions, Malaproper word play, and genuinely being a huge softie underneath the tough guy act, Beat definitely comes across as this.
  • Angst Dissonance: The intro to the game simply has Neku explain how much he can't stand people in general for no good reason. We see him yelling at a few people, then "I don't get people. Never have, never will." It doesn't really get elaborated on during the main story, but gets an explanation in Another Day's Pork City quest. Neku blames himself for the death of his only friend. This is hinted at in the main story, too. When Rhyme gets erased, Neku thinks, "I feel like crap. This is just like that time... That time? What time? ... I can't remember."
  • Anticlimax Boss: Anguis Cantus, despite looking awesome, is piss-easy in the Remix ports. So long as you don't go Leeroy Jenkins and get wiped out by his headbutt, all he can do while you're on the ground is to use a slow and fairly weak fireball spread (with the occasional big one thrown in). Oh, and then there's his tracking bubble: but it actually works to your advantage to get grabbed, seeing as this lets you wail on him with impunity while he charges a very slow fireball, giving you plenty of time to ready a cross-combo. By contrast, his second form Draco Cantus is noted to be much more challenging in comparison.
  • Anvilicious: While every character grows throughout the game, Neku's antisocial behavior, general apathy and disdain towards others, and his resulting character development from being forced to team up with people, hammers out the main theme of the game—learning to empathize, help, and care about others is essential to survival and growth as a person, and disconnecting from the world around you or choosing not to care only hurts others and yourself.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • In the end, was Joshua a Smug Snake, Magnificent Bastard who enjoyed forcing people to play games and in fact knew he wouldn't destroy Shibuya from the first day, or was he genuinely inspired by Neku's refusal to shoot him? His gentle smile after bringing Neku back to life and noted downcast attitude when seeing Neku and the others interact seem to heavily suggest the latter.
    • Shiki is either cheerful and positive because she's pretending to be more like Eri, or because that's how she is, but she's too shy and unconfident to show it.
    • Neku:
      • He either genuinely hates people, or can't bear to be close to them, afraid he'll get hurt (the second seems more likely, though, given what his exposition about his old friend as he climbs up Pork City reveals). He could also be afraid that he'll hurt them, indirectly.
      • Does Neku have a romantic interest in Shiki, or is it simply the first person he's opened up to that she becomes his fee for the second week? It's implied that Kitaniji made her Neku's "entry fee" to cover up the fact that without the Composer, he couldn't bring anyone back to life, which would mean Shiki doesn't necessarily have to be most important to Neku, but Neku never doubts that she's that important to him after hearing the news.
    • Is Beat so stupid he doesn't notice what's going on, or is he so driven by his goals he doesn't notice?
    • Kariya is either too lazy to get promoted, or he enjoys Uzuki's company so much he doesn't want to leave their partnership. Or he's perfectly aware of how corrupt the higher-ups are and has no intention of joining them. The sequel reveals that Uzuki ended up getting promoted past him, only to get pushed aside when the Shinjuku Reapers took over.
    • Another Day does a number on Rhyme. Is she a genuinely pure, wise little girl, or is that just a façade to obscure her cruel, manipulative nature? The fact that many Another Day characters are similar to their main story counterparts while others are practically polar opposites only complicates matters.
  • Awesome Art:
    • The art direction and character designs are incredibly stylized, with thick outlines and the right amount of shading to help make the environment feel even more lively, giving the game a very pleasing comic book like aesthetic that still holds up even to this day. Especially when looking at the Remix ports.
    • The spritework in battles is also very well made to boot. Done by the same team behind Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, the game has a beautiful pixel art engine, with some of the sprite art for the battle animations even being detailed to look like graffiti to reflect the game’s aesthetic.
    • The pins themselves also deserve special mention, which each of them having highly stylized and unique designs that reflect on each of their brands.
  • Awesome Ego:
    • Sho Minamimoto is an insane Mad Mathematician with a tendency to brag about how awesome he is, to the point that he stacks notes on top of junk heaps boasting about how he’s better than gravity, among other things. Due to his awesome antics and battle prowess, the fans pretty much love him for it.
    • Joshua is also no slouch in this department as well, occasionally referring to his sheer brilliance and constantly talking down to Neku to boot. In any other circumstance, this would just make him a Smug Snake but due to his genuinely crafty nature and Game-Breaker abilities, he becomes more popular for it instead.
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • Joshua. His Jerkassery is either incredibly hilarious or incredibly annoying. The question of whether or not Joshua is gay makes some fans butt heads, too.
    • Neku, pre-character development. Some see his resentment towards society and people in general, along with his reason why he's that way as he blames himself for the death of his only friend as relatable and sympathetic. Others view his attitude as Wangst since it mostly shows him needlessly acting like a Jerkass to random people and Shiki while looking down on them for the most pettiest reasons, they view his reason for his behavior as very weak. Thankfully, his Character Development helps tune down this aspect of his personality a lot, making him come across as much more likable to people.
  • Best Boss Ever:
    • Uzuki and Kariya. Their fighting style is similar to yours, right down to having a light puck and fusion, and the rock music in the background is excellent.
    • Draco Cantus is pretty awesome. It's the only one-player fight in the game, because your partners are part of it, and once you get its health down to zero, Neku and his partners do a four-way fusion, at which point he summons a giant Player Pin symbol and fires a Wave-Motion Gun from it. The aforementioned boss also fires so many fireballs that the DS literally lags a bit trying to keep up. You feel a bit badass just having beaten it... unless you eventually get frustrated enough to hit "retry on Easy" since switching to Normal would have meant fighting the two preceding boss fights again.
    • Higashizawa is also quite the fun boss, with his fight making for one hell of a Wake-Up Call Boss, what with his attacks making it so that you can’t just overwhelm him with brute force. Not only that, but it also takes place in a Battle in the Rain, with him flinging lightning bolts and orbs at you to boot.
    • Sho Minamimoto. Not only will he summon an onslaught of Taboo Noise to try and whittle down your health as well as rapidly teleport across both screens to keep you on your toes, but he will also rapidly transform into his Noise form Leo Cantus to rush at you multiple times. All the while Someday plays in the background.
    • The Giant Bat on Day 2 of Week 3. Mainly because of the hunter/hunted relationship it has with Neku when the bats on the top screen are covering up the stage lights, then the utter pwnage of pummeling it to death once the lights are on. A nice change of pace after getting That One Boss after That One Boss. This one also counts for another reason, since it's an upgrade of the first true 'boss' Noise you fought way back in early week 1. Back then, You had only half a clue what's going on, a few weak pins, no stat-ups, and you were still coming to terms with the combat system, creating a grueling fight out of something you know should be simple. When you see this thing again, you have a full suite of high-level abilities, stats that look much more impressive both on paper and in practice, and you've got combat down pat. Fighting this thing again on proper terms is very satisfying.
    • Megumi Kitaniji. He has one of the highest HP in the game, has several powerful attacks that will test your reflexes, and will even flat out stop time itself just to launch a volley of attacks at you. Not only that, but brainwashed Shiki will also make things incredibly challenging for you.
    • Panthera Cantus in Another Day. A very challenging fight and a test of your skill without being a Marathon Boss.
    • If you decided to fight it at the earliest opportunity, Progfox. It's the introduction to the Fox Noise, which change forms depending on the number of tails they have. They range from a defenseless mushroom to a masked Neku. The Progfox is the only one that can obtain nine tails. If it does, it does a Fusion Attack by itself.
  • Captain Obvious Reveal: Rhyme's very similar outfit design to Beat makes it pretty predictable that the two are siblings. When The Reveal finally came, some people were more surprised by Rhyme's gender than her relation.
  • Catharsis Factor: Konishi’s erasure at the hands of Neku, Beat, and Rhyme. After everything she had put poor Beat and Rhyme through, it is immensely satisfying to pay her back in full with the very same pin (Rhyme’s Noise pin) that she had used to emotionally manipulate you for the whole week.
  • Crazy Is Cool: Minamimoto. Not many villains can claim to activate their ultimate attack by reciting pi.
  • Crosses the Line Twice:
    • In a rather stunning display of Video Game Cruelty Potential, you can use the Rhyme pin, which has the girl in question come out in her surprisingly strong Squirrel Noise form, against Beat, her own brother, in his boss fight. Crowning Moment of Funny or Tearjerker? You be the judge of that.
    • Joshua himself provides quite a hefty dose of this trope thanks to his quips and Jerkass moments. For example, his murder of Neku is mostly definitely shocking and brutal. However, his rather nonchalant attitude towards the whole thing and little fist pump after shooting Neku dead on can make the scene also come off as morbidly hilarious.
    • After coming across Sho Minamimoto’s not-quite-Erased-yet body underneath a trash heap pile, Neku proceeds to make an Pun based off one of the man’s Catch Phrases that wouldn’t look out of place in CSI: Miami.
    " The Grim Heaper got... crunched."
  • Demonic Spiders: The elephants are notorious for being tough fights and are aware of where you place your stylus, can juggle you in the air, and have tons of HP and deadly attacks. Seemingly acknowledging how tough they are, in "A New Day", the final boss is an elephant.
  • Difficulty Spike: Regarding the first Tin Pin Stride challenge in Beat's week. It's devilishly difficult in comparison to the previous one, being the first one with full player roster (four, including Neku) and enemies having superhuman reflexes.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Escapist Character: Hanekoma brews excellent coffee, is a wise, insanely popular graffiti artist who everyone admires, is always two steps ahead of everyone and is essentially both God and Satan with setting up Joshua's development to ensure Neku wins, while also giving Minamimoto the Taboo Noise knowledge. Mostly because of keeping in the background of things, he manages to keep a sense of mystique and interest to keep from being obnoxious about it.
  • Evil Is Cool:
  • Fan Nickname:
    • Jesus Beam/Super Jesus Beam/Jesus Meteor — Joshua's Beam Spam attacks and Limit Breaks.
    • 'Lord Sho' to Minamimoto fans.
    • 'The HP Hax Feather' for the Angel Feather.
    • Hype-chan for the girl from the secret ending of Solo Remix, since her real name, Tsugumi Matsunae, wasn't revealed until eight years later in the trailer to NEO: The World Ends with You.
  • Fanon: The concept of the Music of Shibuya is widespread and largely accepted with no explanation in fanfiction. It's never even alluded to in the game, though it does make sense given the background tracks, Neku's headphones, and fits with the musical theme naming (Noise, Conductor, Composer, frequency, etc). Plus most of the Noise are named after music (Dixiefrog, Pig Samba, Neoclassical Drake).
  • Fountain of Memes: Pick one of Sho Minamimoto's voiced quotes, any of them, and fans of the game just might start having quote-offs or breaking out into math speeches.
  • Friendly Fandoms:
    • With Kingdom Hearts, thanks to the TWEWY cast being involved in some rather notable cameo appearances in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] and Tetsuya Nomura being heavily involved in both series.
    • With Persona 5 (and to a lesser extent, Persona as a whole) due to both games being incredibly stylish Urban Fantasy JRPGs set in Shibuya, Japan revolving around groups of teens fighting and rebelling against the systems in place (the Players against the Reapers in TWEWY’s case and society and corruption as a whole in P5). It’s not uncommon to see crossover work between the two or fans of either game being a fan of the other as well... at least until the sequel was announced and a few comments on Twitter about it being "obviously" influenced by Persona 5" were made, which naturally sent many TWEWY fans on Twitter into a rage.
    • Likewise, it’s also not too uncommon to find fans of TWEWY also being fans of Jet Set Radio due to both works being incredibly stylish depictions of Tokyo with a heavy focus on graffiti art, street aesthetics, and youth culture, along with having incredibly eclectic soundtracks.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • If you use Mingle mode and come across another player doing the same, you can access that player's shop, which consists of what the player's characters were equipped with at the time. Through this, you can, early on in the game, buy pins that you normally wouldn't get for a long time, such as the Anguis and the Darklit Planet set, and quite easily demolish every enemy that comes your way.
    • The LASS thread set, short for "Lapin Angelique Suicide Special," which uses threads which require the SOS condition. The correct set of four grants an insane level of offense and defense, often meaning 0 damage on the user and high amounts of damage to the enemy. There's even pins and threads which automatically inflict SOS at the beginning of battle. Combined with the Darklit Planets, any enemy you face is done for. Sadly, they were nerfed in the Solo Remix. The loss of the light puck hurts your damage potential, and SOS is triggered at 25% health instead of 50%, meaning that the LASS set is now higher risk and lower reward.
    • Neku and Joshua's Level 3 Fusion Attack. It can be used to basically skip the Nintendo Hard Phase 2 of Sho Minamimoto's boss fight by taking almost half his HP off. To put that in perspective, Shiki's level 3 Fusion has an Efficiency rating of 20, Beat's has an Efficiency rating of 30, and Joshua's level 3 Fusion has an efficiency rating of 99.99.
    • Joshua and the Approaching Eden set are a match made in the Higher Plane when playing solo in the Remix versions. Joshua's Partner Pin is activated with a downward slash, and Holy Field now activates on a cross combo and gives Neku a timed invincibility shield. Putting a pin with Shockwave in Neku's last slot and training yourself to trigger Shockwave with down slashes will trigger a cross combo with every hit; this turns sinking your level for Ultimate-difficulty drops into a matter of timing your hits and staying on the evasive when Joshua needs to reboot.
    • The Remix editions buff pins with Lightning Arrester (like Lightning Rook) with more hits and charges, which are now comparable to the Darklit Planets in damage. Even better, Lightning Rooks are much easier to get, plus you can equip two of them and still have four pins of your choice, unlike the Darklit Planets which take up all your slots.
    • In the DS version, combining the Speed Factor pin (reduces pin reboot time by 25%), the Lefty, Brainy, and Righty Cat pins (reduces pin reboot time by 40% when combined), and the Black Uranus pin (has a very fast reboot time of 3 seconds) lets Neku juggle Panthera Cantus with utter impunity on the bottom screen, albeit you still have to manually manage your partner on the top screen to avoid taking damage (Joshua is the most recommended partner for this strategy, as he can quickly teleport up in the air or back down to evade the boss's attacks).
  • Genius Bonus:
    • Some of Minamimoto's references are just random math terms thrown around for fun, but then there's the Level i Flare. In Final Fantasy, Flare is one of the most powerful Black Magic spells; "Level x Flare" targets all enemies with the level divisible by the number given. Since i squared is -1, and -1 squared is 1, then every level that is a multiple of 1 is a multiple of -1, and thus a multiple of i. Meaning that Level i Flare is an immensely powerful magic that targets every enemy (or simply everyone on the screen), including those with imaginary levels.
    • The HP count of both his forms in the Noise Report is a reference to pi.
    • In Another Day, when Beat is trying to become a comedian, it's just plain funny. It becomes funnier if you know that there is a Japanese comedian by the stage name of BEAT Takeshi.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Frogs have small hitboxes and jump around quickly, especially if you use Joshua's floating move. Later, you encounter Frogs that absorb either short-range or long-range attacks. Or a particular kind of frog that absorbs both.Note  The frog that absorbs both get very special notice. You can only fight them in the Shibuya River areas in Another Day, and they're rare. They're also one of six enemies in the game that drop a Darklit Planet pin, meaning you need to fight them on Ultimate and chain a lot of battles.
    • Shrews use bombs and drill attacks for massive damage, and on top of that burrow underground, making them difficult to attack.
    • Wolves, due to their almost-constant dashing.
    • Pork City has battles that pair these attack-absorbing frogs with the ELEPHANTS.
    • Ravens tend to be this too. The big raven boss, Cornix Canor, is very representative in that it stays off screen for 90% of the time and just decides to stop by every once in a while, flying past your silly attempts at hitting it.
    • Any Taboo Noise, because they're stronger, require you to pay close attention to the Light Puck if you want to do any decent damage, and actively seek you out during a Scan. Additionally, the 'Gotta Bounce!' option is disabled during their battles, so you can not escape them.
    • Not to mention the jellyfish. They multiply endlessly. If you try to get the red jellyfish's Hard drop by waiting for it to spawn, the battle can easily take up to 10 minutes just because they spawn faster than you can finish them off.
    • Towards the end of the final week, you'll occasionally and randomly fight brainwashed Reapers as you go from one area to another. The encounters aren't particularly hard so much as time-wasting.
  • Goddamned Boss: Taboo Minamimoto. Not particularly dangerous, but his Teleport Spam is infuriating.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight:
    • Neku wishes that Joshua would meet up with him after the event of the game since he still sees him as his partner despite everything Joshua did to him became this in the sequel where they finally meet again in the ending and after Neku decline Joshua's offer to become his successor as the Composer without a fight, part on much better terms.
    • One of the Secret Reports claims that thanks to Rhyme's erasure during the first week, her entry fee, implied to be her dreams for the future, will be gone forever even if she does get revived. However, it also suggests that given enough time, she may be able to find something new to fill that void in her heart. And come NEO: The World Ends with You she's found a new passion to pursue in the form of programming.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • One of the recipes you can have Ken Doi make to try and attract customers to his failing restaurant is "Dessert Ramen", something that became much funnier in The New '10s thanks to an infamous thread◊ from 4chan's cooking board where an anon prepares "Sweet Sundae Ramen" for a horrified audience.
    • In the bonus chapter, Another Day, Shiki is code named "Green" in the Super Sentai parody of the Tin Pin storyline. Years later, the latter series introduces female green rangers and even Power Rangers has one of their own.
  • Ho Yay:
    • Several of the male shop keepers crush on the players as hard as the females when you get their Friendship up—the le Grand clerk in Cadoi City's offering to help the player slip into his purchases being the most explicit. He will drop several sexual compliments on the party as they shop and there's only a one-third chance that there's even a girl in the party, meaning two times out of three he's hitting on a pair of fifteen-year-old boys.
    • Shiki's most important character arc is her relationship with Eri, while Mina and Ai seem to care much more about each other than Makoto.
    • It's even lampshaded in the bonus chapter at the end of the game, where Joshua's codename is 'Pink', someone comments on how a Rainbow Tin Pin Launcher was 'made for him' and he's the 'Roy G. Biv' of Tin Pin, and Josh himself offers to escort Neku alone down an abandoned drainage river and "spend some quality time". Shiki is torn between shock and Yaoi Fangirl-ism.
  • Iron Woobie: Beat goes through absolute HELL during the game yet he refuses to ever give up and spends his time derailing the bad guys’ schemes and pulling off Big Damn Heroes moments whenever he can. The man even shakes off fading away from existence itself just so he can save his little sister, no matter what.
  • It Was His Sled: The second and third weeks existing was a huge spoiler at the time, but are now widely known.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Neku Sakuraba is the 15-year-old snarky protagonist of the game. At first, he's extremely cold to the party members on his journey through the Reaper's Game because as it turns out according to Another Day, he lost his best friend before dying and couldn't handle the grief so he shunted himself off from people. It's only through Shiki Misaki's coercing that he is able to trust anyone again. When they win the first game, Shiki gets taken as his entry fee because the Big Bad knew her connection to Neku and he is forced to play another game. There he examines Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu, his enigmatic new partner's memories and finds he was killed by Joshua. When he is about to confront Joshua about this, he is ignored and Joshua instead helps him defeat Sho Minamimoto but is supposedly killed by Minamimoto's Level i Flare, revealing that Joshua was shooting at Minamimoto who apparently shot Neku. Later on, it's revealed Joshua is the Composer and the man who Neku stopped was trying to save Shibuya's UG. Then Neku finds out Joshua really did kill him, and after defeating Megumi Kitaniji, Neku is given a game of quick draw. Despite all the hell, Joshua put him through, Neku is unable to shoot Joshua and gets shot instead... again. Afterward, though Neku returns to life and finally has friends again and truly trusts them now, and lamenting that while Joshua was a jerk, he still spared Shibuya.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
  • LGBT Fanbase: A huge portion of the game (and series') fanbase is LGBT.
  • Love to Hate:
  • Low-Level Run: The game comes equipped with a level slider, which lets you go as low as 1 and as high as you have advanced. The more you handicap yourself, the higher the drop rate is. It's practically required to set your level to 1 to obtain several rare pins, especially in the post-game. Fortunately, the only stat that levels influence is Hit Points, so you can still destroy enemies in a reasonable timeframe at level 1; you just have to be careful to not get hit too much.
  • Magnificent Bastard: The World Ends with You is full of cunning sarcastic schemers amongst The Reapers but these four stand out:
    • Megumi Kitaniji is the true Big Bad of the game, second in power only to Joshua. Ruling the underground of Shibuya in Joshua's absence as its Conductor, Kitaniji assigns Game Masters to each week to act as his Proxy while vying for control against Joshua and seeking to give order to Shibuya through the O-Pins. Kitaniji takes non-refundable entry fees—including Neku's memories—and forces Neku to play another Game while holding Shiki as his new fee. As Neku begins the game, he takes Shiki as his entry fee knowing very well how much she meant to the boy. Kitaniji also has Beat hunt his own friends down in an attempt to erase them. In the third week, Kitaniji brainwashes the entire town with the O-Pins and merges with Joshua to become the final threat. Despite this, he has nothing but praise for his minions and even Neku, and gracefully concedes defeat to Joshua once he's proven himself better.
    • Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu starts the game as a helpful if obnoxious partner in Week 2. In reality, he is Shibuya's UG Composer making him the Greater-Scope Villain of the Reaper's Game. Besides handing out orders from behind the scenes he fools Neku, the game's protagonist, into believing he risked his life for Neku and defeated Neku's killer. In reality, he killed Neku to use as a Proxy to win the True Game with the game's actual Big Bad Megumi Kitaniji: the Conductor. While he may have originally planned to erase Shibuya, Neku's reliance on the people around him restored his faith in humanity, convincing all the players—even the ones who didn't make it—a second chance at life. Neku monologues in the end that while he couldn't stand Joshua, he's grateful for meeting him and he trusts him, even being unable to shoot him when Joshua offers to make him the Composer through his own death. Even in the failure of his own goals of destroying Shibuya, Joshua still managed to win in the end.
    • Sho Minamimoto is the rogue Week 2 Game Master of the Reaper's Game. He starts by attempting an assassination on Joshua in the RG, which fails, but he comes out unscathed. As game master, he makes increasingly cryptic clues for his missions, which only Joshua is able to figure out. Then he makes a Tin Pin Slammer mission that nearly gets Neku and Joshua erased, had it not been for two other players, which Minamimoto has erased by Taboo Noise. After unleashing a Level i Flare and then being forced to revive himself with a Taboo Sigil, he reveals his ultimate goal: to dethrone Joshua as the Composer, and were they on a level playing field in their second bout, he might have succeeded. Even then, his intelligence was enough that Coco, Joshua's other adversary revived him to compete in a final Reaper's Game.
    • Sanae Hanekoma is the narrative's biggest and most successful schemer. Upon learning about a month-long game to determine whether the Composer should erase Shibuya, he taught Sho Minamimoto how to use Taboo Noise, which would sacrifice innocents. Hanekoma also teaches Neku to "expand [his] horizons", giving him a Harmonizer Pin to ensure that he survives the Reaper's Game. The events that Hanekoma caused would change Neku enough to resist Kitaniji's offer to join him in making a "new Shibuya". Neku defeats Kitaniji, making way for Shibuya to become untainted for the Composer to spare it, just as Hanekoma had planned.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Minamimoto would like to you know that you are so zetta slow! Anything Minamimoto says is quotable or a meme.
    • Come get some Hot Stuff. Explanation 
    • Must... resist... emo urges! Explanation 
    • There's a party in my mouth! Explanation 
    • Shut up and walk, dear. Explanation 
    • Feel me when you come inside / Touch me when you want me anytimeExplanation 
    • What's a "meme"?Explanation 
    • R.I.P. Joshua's flip phone.Explanation 
  • Memetic Troll: Joshua is heavily regarded as this by the fandom for his multiple Crosses the Line Twice moments and tendency to screw with Neku at almost every opportunity.
  • Moe:
    • Rhyme, an incredibly adorable Nice Girl who is nothing but cheerful, optimistic, and supportive of the other Players, especially Beat. Even her Noise form is a Ridiculously Cute Critter.
    • Shiki is an Adorkable fashionista who is the nicest and most sociable of Neku's three partners, and she becomes even more endearing once she is revealed to be a Shrinking Violet.
    • Some of the shopkeepers in the game are also quite adorable as well, especially when they start to open up to, and develop crushes on, Neku. Princess K and Shigemi Konno are two particular examples.
    • Neku himself has been described to be this due to his rare instances of emotional vulnerability and Defrosting Ice King moments, as well as his social awkwardness. The anime even increases this factor due to the artstyle making him even more expressive.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Mitsuki Konishi crosses it when she painfully crushes Noise Rhyme into a pin in front of her own brother.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The opening bars of "Twister". Whenever you hear it, you just know a Crowning Moment of Awesome is about to happen.
    • The "Noise Erased!" and "Bling!" sounds, particularly after engaging in a long chain battle.
    • The following lines are only spoken as each character recieves a fully-powered Light Puck, which means 5x damage.
      • Neku: "ANY LAST WORDS?!"
      • Shiki: "What a rush!"
      • Joshua: "Now we're talking."
      • Beat: "LET'S STEP IT UP!"
    • BikbokbokBIK!—The sound of landing a full four hit combo will never get old.
  • Narm Charm:
    • Several cutscenes feature stylized handguns—so stylized, in fact, that they look like paint rollers or hairdryers.
    • Many of Higashizawa's lines are some kind of food or culinary pun. Despite how silly it can sound, he still comes across as very intimidating.
    Higashizawa: The proof is in the pudding. The pudding... of their doom.
  • Obvious Judas: Joshua appears under specious circumstances and Neku spends the entire week distrusting him. His debut, as well as the game's interface tutorials, present him as a mysterious wild card. His unsettling and aloof personality does little to foster feelings of camaraderie. He happens to share some of Neku's dim views on society and the concept of friendship, but Neku, who has begun to cherish what he briefly had with Shiki, is beginning to realize this isn't something to be lauded. Neku eventually learns that Joshua killed him in the first place, but keeps this to himself for a while. Eventually, though, Joshua makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save Neku, who learns that Minaminoto was the one who killed him during a dogfight with Joshua; this leaves our hero feeling incredibly guilty for never having trusted his partner, and he leaves this arc considering Joshua a friend. Then, in the end, it's revealed that Neku was right to begin with. Joshua did kill him, and was the Composer all along.
  • Player Punch:
    • Shiki is taken as your Entry Fee for Week 2, and you spend the next two weeks trying to get her back. She comes back right as you're about to fight yet another part of the final Boss Rush... and then she gets brainwashed by the Big Bad.
    • Beat's Start of Darkness, in which Rhyme sacrifices herself to save Beat from a Noise ambush. Made even worse following the events of the third week, when he is forced to watch helplessly as Konishi grabs Rhyme as Beat's entry fee and sadistically crushes her back into pin form.
    • The scene in the third week, when Neku realizes that his entry fee was all the other Players, making it impossible for him to play the game, much less win, prompted a whole "you bastard" sentiment towards the Big Bad.
    • Before you fight Minamimoto, Neku finally remembers how he died—he was shot not by Joshua, but by Minamimoto himself. We even get to see his flashback, in which he is happily looking at Hanekoma's mural, before the man shows up from nowhere to assassinate him. And because Minamimoto is That One Boss, you’ll most likely get to see Neku's death over, and over, and over... Then at the end of the game, you find out his memory was still incomplete. It really was Joshua who shot Neku, and had been manipulating him for the entire game.
    • Just when Joshua finally stops acting like a jerk, he gets killed trying to save you...only for it to then turn out that he was actually faking his Heroic Sacrifice all along and was using you in his plan to ultimately destroy Shibuya.
    • Mid-week 2, the game pulls a 3-hit combo when Taboo Noise start rampaging. After getting rid of the first set, you meet a lone Reaper under attack. You can choose to ignore him and hear him die off-screen or you can choose to save the guy... only to be ambushed by another noise. After the battle, the Reaper is nowhere to be found. Joshua comments that he was erased while they were distracted. In the next area, you come across Sota and Nao under attack. Nao gets promptly erased and, since he is now without a partner, Sota is doomed and can only offer some words of encouragement before disappearing.
  • Polished Port: The iOS and Android port is a really good single screen translation of a dual screen game, and has updated visuals. Along with that, there's also the Sequel Hook during The Stinger. The Switch port bumps the graphics further to HD standards with added visual effects, can be played in handheld or tabletop/docked modes with the Joy Cons, adds co-op support, and features "A New Day" chapter that further ties the game's story to its sequel.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Joshua. As a character, he's quite a jerk, to put it mildly, while Shiki was, in spite of her own insecurities, a Nice Girl who could call out Neku on his more jerkish behavior. As a party member, Joshua's quite difficult to use at first, particularly since he doesn't have his Game-Breaker aerial combo yet, while over the past several days, you've likely acquired some useful upgrades and a good set of clothing for Shiki and his replacement Beat has enough strength, speed, and a difficult, yet potentially rewarding way to gain fusion levels to get by even at his weakest.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • If your deck contains a single pin with an R (rapid-tap) psych, tapping the screen repeatedly will be recognized as activating that pin... and not any T (touch) psychs that might also be in the deck. Sub-decks and pin order cannot override this.
    • It seems like eating food to raise your drop rate should have no detrimental effects; after all, you're only raising your likelihood of getting pins, right? Well, there is one kind of situation where having the drop rate increased is actually bad: the boss Time Trials, including Final Time Attack. Waiting for dropped pins to spiral to your characters counts towards the time taken to defeat a particular boss — about one or two seconds, to be more specific. Even a run at level 100 will yield a good chance of randomly slowing you down with pin drops if you ever eat any drop-rate-increasing food. There's no way to undo the effects of stat-raising food, so unless you start a new file, kiss your serious attempts at record times goodbye. Final Remix partially addressed this by substantially speeding up the pin drop animation, though you still can't lower a food-boosted drop rate.
    • Sub-decks in the Updated Rereleases. You can assign pins to a sub-deck, and then during battle press the sub-deck button to access those pins, which allows you to have more control when using pins that have similar or easily-accidentally-triggered inputs (such as two "tap the screen" pins) in the same deck. In the DS version, the sub-deck buttons are L and R, so that no matter your dominant hand, it's easy enough to use sub-decks. But in the updated versions, there is only one sub-deck button and it is in the lower-left corner, with no option to have it instead or also on the right side, heavily biasing the sub-deck mechanic against left-handed players. The only way to circumvent this is in Final Remix, where you can dock the Switch and use the left Joy-Con, but that has its own problems as mentioned above.
    • The motion controls in Final Remix. Many fans feel as though Square cheaped out with the motion control implementation, as the required precision with which the game is designed around clearly does not mesh with motion controls, but they were added anyway. The result is that motion controls can make the game range from anywhere between extremely frustrating and nigh-unplayable. To make matters worse, because you can only have access to the touchscreen in Handheld Mode, this means that yes, you have to use motion controls in Docked Mode. Have fun trying to play Final Remix on your TV!
  • Scrappy Weapon: The Anguis pin, despite having the highest raw damage number in the game, fails in practically every other way imaginable. It's highly inaccurate, never reboots (meaning It Only Works Once per battle chain) and is a Reaper-class pin, meaning it prevents the player from equipping certain pins that actually offer more utility. The cream of the top is that Anguis takes a ridiculously long time to master and there's a piece of equipment that requires a fully mastered Anguis pin to buy, meaning you will probably be forced to master it TWICE.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: You can lower your level at will, as well as eventually be able to change the battle difficulty on a whim. Turning down your level ups your drop multiplier, though, so it can be downright necessary to get the rarer pins.
  • Shocking Moments:
    • The very existence of the second and third weeks, as well as the reveal of what Neku’s entry fees are for both Games and for the tone shift of the two.
    • The full details of Neku’s death, especially after fighting the final boss. Needless to say, there’s a lot more going on than what it seems.
    • "A New Day" in Final Remix. After having her plans foiled, Coco shoots Neku dead, and Joshua decides that he's outlived his usefulness and leaves him to his fate. Shinjuku gets subjected to something called an Inversion, the mechanics of which are unknown other than that they involve Noise breaching into the RG. And then, Coco resurrects none other than Sho Minamimoto, apparently to serve as Neku's partner in an all-new Reapers' Game.
  • Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Square Enix has a habit of making too many addictive minigames, and it's even acknowledged in-universe. The reason why Joshua was not in the last week up until the final day was because he was too caught up in playing Tin Pin in Another Day. And you can do exactly the same.
  • So Okay, It's Average: The anime suffers heavily from poor pacing and significant alterations to the source material in order to squeeze the entire game's plot into 12 episodes, watering down the game into a serviceable but mostly forgettable adaptation.
  • Spiritual Adaptation: A moody teenager dies and is forced to play a death game to get his life back, said game involves killing monsters that are Invisible to Normals under a time limit, and his teammates consist of a bubbly Nice Girl, a doting older brother, and an Obvious Judas. This is probably the best Gantz video game adaptation.
  • That One Boss:
    • Minamimoto has tons of HP, is lightning fast, hits like a truck, and has really annoying audio cues. So zetta annoying, especially when you have to replay his Hopeless Boss Fight and actually win.
    • Kariya and Uzuki, when fought together. They're both quite nimble, hit hard and have player mechanics like the light puck and the ability to heal themselves. When you face them while they're berserk, they can even use a Fusion attack.
    • Konishi can be rather difficult as well, since she's a very confusing Puzzle Boss who can easily destroy you if you can't figure out exactly what you have to do just to scratch her. The solution is implied before the start of the battle, but it isn't explicitly stated and requires you to do things that you would not have thought about before.
    • After Konishi, you fight Kitaniji. He has the highest HP of any enemy of the game thus far (though Wooly AOR ties him) and has extremely powerful attacks. Not to mention his main ability. And brainwashed Shiki makes it rather hard to attack her, and blocking Mr. Mew completely is hard.
  • That One Sidequest: The six Darklit Planet pins. They're dropped on Ultimate at low percentages by... special enemies. To be exact: The extremely rare Fifenfrog, Taboo Minamimoto, Megumi Kitaniji, Draco Cantus, and Goth Metal Drake and Panthera Cantus. You can bypass the farming for one of the six, randomly selected when you start your file, which will be available for purchase at WildKat once you complete the main story.note  As for the other five... good luck.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some reactions towards the iOS and Switch releases fall under this, due to the revised partner system and use of a divisive graphical technique known as Sprite Smoothing.
  • Unintentional Period Piece:
    • The game is filled with early 2000's street slang, to the point where the Switch version markets it as an actual period piece! This isn't as bad as some examples though, as the vast majority of the game's Totally Radical slang was Played for Laughs even back then.
    • Other elements also show their age. A few of the music tracks like "Transformation" are from genres that were incredibly popular when the game was made, but are now considered Condemned by History in mainstream circles. The fashion items are likewise a time capsule of what was cool in late-2000s Japan, though many of the items would still be considered "hip" to most people.
    • Flip phones and other types of cellphones with ten-key pads are ubiquitous in this game. Had this game been made 10 years later, everyone would be using smartphones with touchscreens instead. When the 2021 anime was announced, the game's creative staff lampshaded this phenomenon by remarking that many people around Neku's age wouldn't even know what a flip-phone is, even though they feature heavily in the plot. Sure enough, the anime adaptation swaps out those "dumb" phones for more modern smartphones (which some interpretated as They Changed It, Now It Sucks!).
    • Likewise, the game's recreation of Shibuya is very faithful to its time period, but it was acknowledged that the anime's recreation of Shibuya would have to reflect a decade's worth of changes to the area.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: Neku can come off this way early in the game. Some players find Neku at the beginning more relateable in not wanting to connect with others, thinking more carefully when alone, and feeling drained by society's expectations, and see Shiki constantly demanding he help out, and not understanding his need for solitude, as annoying or counterproductive. Others find Neku at the beginning a Jerkass Woobie at best, just plain Jerkass at worst whose reasons for angsting and shutting himself off from the world are insufficiently justified, and thus are likely to sympathize with Shiki's exasperation over his frequent attitude and behavior. The game seems to take a middle ground- Neku has a reason for his behavior (albeit one that he doesn't seem to fully remember), but stresses that whatever his reasons may be, he needs to learn how to trust and care about other people. Neku does end up becoming a better person over time, and over that time, Shiki becomes a bit less pushy, whether because she's more understanding of Neku or because he's making progress.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Sho Minamimoto is not very well-liked amongst the characters, Players and Reapers alike, for his confusing ramblings, zero inclination towards cooperation, blatant disregard for authority, and Bad Boss tendencies. It gets to the point that Kitaniji even tries to get him killed as part of a mission that he issues to Neku and Joshua for his creation of the illegal Taboo Noise that had been causing vast amounts of chaos throughout the UG. Conversely, Sho is beloved by the fandom for his Crazy Is Cool antics and highly quotable dialogue.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: If there was no Voice Grunting, and if no one referred to her gender in-game, you'd think that Rhyme was a dude. It's worse in the Japanese version, where she uses male personal pronouns. The Reveal that she's Beat's sister surprised some people with her gender more than her relation.
  • Wangst: Neku gets droves of it early on, as he angsts about people, not getting people, and wanting to be alone. His lack of it once he finds something to believe in shows how much he's changed by the end of the game.
  • The Woobie:
    • Shiki has self esteem issues (to the point she took on Eri's body in the Reaper Game, only to realise this made her feel worse) and feels very guilty over the fact that she's jealous of her best friend.
    • Beat accidentally got himself and his sister killed and is beating himself up about it. He's reunited with her in the UG, only for Rhyme to not remember him. He then watches her die yet again while saving his life. He then tries to revive her by joining the Reapers only for Konishi to crush her Noise form. Plus he's The Un-Favourite to Rhyme and constantly mocked by enemies (and sometimes other players) for being an idiot.
    • Rhyme dies three times. First when she and Beat are killed in a car accident, then when she performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save Beat from a Noise, then again when Konishi crushes her as a Noise. It's also implied that her payment for entering the game is all her hopes and dreams, and the secret reports claim that they'll be lost forever since she didn't make it to the end of the week.
    • Even Neku and Joshua can be seen as this. The former is implied in Another Day to be anti-social because he believes he got his friend killed since he asked the friend to come over and he was knocked over by a car as a result, to say nothing of everything he goes through in the game. The latter is hinted in the secret ending at wanting to be friends with the other players, but being unable to.
  • Woolseyism: The game is just about made of them. Example given: Beat's rough, tough-guy speech patterns in Japanese were changed to African-American Vernacular English for the English version.

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