SCARLET NEXUS REVIEW
Scarlet Nexus, a new IP from Bandai Namco, creator of the Tales Of series, fills a few niches. For one, it’s a heavily sci-fi action RPG, albeit one with a distinctly anime flavor. For two, it features psychokinesis, an underexplored combat mechanic. And finally, it has two distinct campaigns (one for the everyman goodie-two shoes Yuito and the other for the mysterious and taciturn Kasane) and they play out considerably differently, unlike many other games that promise two distinct campaigns but instead give you the same campaign twice with minor alterations. To be sure, these three things alone make Scarlet Nexus an attractive prospect and the game does deliver on many of its promises. The world and its aesthetic are a lot more interesting than most games in the genre, the differences between the two campaigns make the game worth playing twice, and the psychokinesis is well done. In fact, between the psychokinetic abilities, the diversity of powers that you can augment the melee combat with, and the fast and thrilling game feel, the battle system can be downright electrifying and is the game’s best argument for itself. Unfortunately, the game’s convoluted and overstuffed story, rife with on the nose anime cliches, doesn’t quite hold up its side of the bargain, resulting in a game that is incredibly good at being a game but stumbles a bit as a full multi-faceted RPG experience.
The story has a simple set up but quickly weaves an entangled tapestry that could have been more had it been less. Yuito and Kasane, the two heroes you can play as, are OSF officers in training. OSF officers protect the city of New Himuka from the Others, very cool and avant-garde looking monsters that descended to earth from a mysterious breeding ground called The Extinction Belt. OSF officers are kind of like X-Men in that they have special powers like pyrokinesis or teleportation or invisibility. Kasane and Yuito wield psychokinesis, the ability to control objects with their minds to pulverize enemies. What starts as kind of a superhero boarding school narrative soon turns into a dizzyingly complex struggle to close the Kunad Gate, a black hole that threatens to swallow the world, and stop the government from rehabilitating people’s personalities and transforming them into Others. Along the way, the story takes on such topics as time travel, surveillance, and memory. Which all sounds awesome, and it is in theory. But the execution is questionable for a few reasons. The first is the presentation. There are a few fully rendered cutscenes but most of the story is delivered through comic panels that recall the skits of the Tales Of series. The preponderance of these type of story sequences makes the otherwise epic story feel smaller and cheaper than it needed to. And for a storytelling device that constantly rears its head, the comic panels don’t look particularly nice. They are packaged in ugly red borders and the panels never seem to show you the action from the most interesting angles. Furthermore, I didn’t find the voice acting compelling to listen to. Some characters sound fine, but others have grating dialed up anime voices that make their tropes even more obvious. None of the voices rise above being blandly serviceable.
The more immediate problem with the story is the characters. They’re just not very interesting. If you’ve watched even a little bit of anime or played a decent amount of JRPGs, the tropes the developers use to stand in for actual characters are eyerollingly familiar. Granted, the characters do show some amount of depth during the bonding scenes, which are activated in the Hideout, a small hub that you are sent to after each of the main story phases. During these resting phases, you can take a break from the story to bond with your teammates (or give them gifts). These bonding scenes easily have the best writing in the game and show you the character’s more relatable moments, the moments when they’re being a person rather than an anime archetype. But because the real character development is relegated to the resting phases, the main story is bereft of interesting character development to the point that it often feels like it’s mostly plot. Sometimes huge traumatic events happen to the characters, and they easily and quickly move past them because the plot does. There are no lasting effects or emotional consequences, which is partially a result of the story moving too damn fast. The developers seem to constantly be throwing crazy shit at the player in an effort to land on something profound. But these moments can’t very well be profound if the emotional resonance isn’t there. And it’s not. The events are interesting and sometimes shocking and wild, but I didn’t find myself caring and at times I was annoyed by all the twists and turns. If the developers had thrown in less of these and simplified the story, there would be more room for what really matters. Honesty, I also started to resent the character interactions because I had to experience them consecutively with no breathing room. I soon came to dread resting periods because it was all talking and no combat. And while some of that conversation was good, it wasn’t so good that I wanted to endure bonding scenes one after the other after the other after the other.
With a story that’s already on shaky ground, the aggressive blandness of Yuito (the hero that I played as because I prefer close range melee combat rather than far range melee combat) doesn’t help matters. He’s ridiculously kind and he displays too perfect behavior without the grit to make his saint-like tendencies seem even remotely believable. Such a bland goodie two-shoes protagonist made some of the already sappy interactions unbearable at times. Kasane, for her part, seemed much more interesting, with an air of intriguing mystery, and I sometimes found myself wondering if my experience would have been better had I played with her. To the game’s credit, I could tell that the two campaigns are entirely different just from the way the story played out. Which is impressive given the number of games that advertise two campaigns when there’s just one with slight differences. I actually wanted to watch Kasane’s campaign via a Let’s Play since there were many things about the story that I found intriguing. Yet, for all that, it doesn’t come together as a whole and feels more like a plot outline than a multi-faceted narrative experience.
The combat fortunately fares much better. For anybody who has played a fair amount of action RPGs, the basics are familiar. You string heavy and light attacks together to create combos, regardless of who you choose to control (you cannot control party members, though you can lightly customize them and their AI). Yuito is a melee sword fighter that gets up close while Kasane attacks with flying knives at range. You have a nice dodge, though no parry as far as I know. These fundamental moves feel smooth and responsive, but the battle system’s kinetic energy comes from your psychokinesis powers and the enhancements that you essentially borrow from your OSF teammates on cooldown. For instance, Luka can allow you to teleport to attack fast enemies, Hanabi can power up your sword with flames, Gemma can give you a short period of rock-solid defense, Arashi allows you to slow down time, so on and so forth. These power ups also help you progress through the environments, though none of these moments rise to the level of actual puzzles. In any case, your own psychokinetic powers enhance your combat suite quite a bit by allowing you to pick up objects in the battle arenas and hurl them at enemies (you can also follow this up with melee attacks). It seems simple but it really does add a new dimension to the combat, especially because there’s a lot of variation in the type and amount of damage the objects inflict. Throwing a bicycle at an enemy might only yield a bit of additional damage while throwing a subway train can pulverize several enemies at once. Some objects require the player to pull off a series of unobtrusive button prompts to maximize the hurt. It’s a whole lot of fun and the way various systems work together makes the battle system feel fresh and unique. Like the final areas of many other games, the final dungeon is probably too long, but no stretch of gameplay ever feels tedious or painful because the combat always feels so cool. It’s stylish and has a lot going on while still feeling intuitive.
The level design is never that imaginative, but it also doesn’t get in your way, allowing the game to do what it does best. Most combat encounters take place in temporarily walled off areas ala Devil May Cry. Much of the time, you must beat the enemies to progress. The piles of random throwable trash just laying around feels a bit unnatural but the environments at least all have a cool vibe to them and don’t wear out their welcome. That being said, the environments feel a bit disconnected, especially since they are accessed through fairly bloodless menus. The developers could have put more effort into making the world feel cohesive, but as merely locations in which to engage in thrilling combat scenarios, the levels do the job. And I think the combat scenarios themselves bring out the best in the battle system. While there’s not a whole lot of variety in the enemy visual designs (a lot of reskins), there’s more than enough variety in terms of enemy mechanics. However, some enemies are easily taken care of by activating a certain OSF power, which unfortunately trivializes those encounters for the whole rest of the game. Luckily, this only applies to a handful of enemies and most of the fights keep the player on their toes, even if the game’s not difficult save for one very cheap early boss. In general, the boss fights are quite good, forcing the player to make use of the mechanics on offer. Psychokinesis in general is a must.
Character customization is not too complex, but the Brain Map, the game’s version of the obligatory skill tree, is one of the better customization systems on the market. I like how it doesn’t waste your time with negligible upgrades. Rather, each node on the skill tree gives you something substantial and useful. It’s also well organized, allowing you to easily identify what group of skills to enhance without having to search for what you want. I was always excited to pore more points into the skill tree. Furthermore, I like how simple the equipment system is. There are only a few slots for each character and not that many things to put in them, which I appreciated. Too many games have a lot of what I refer to as “JRPG clutter” and Scarlet Nexus keeps that to a minimum. In the same spirit, items are basically hot keyed to the d-pad and there’s not many of them, eliminating the need to scroll through menus to find an item in the heat of battle. This simplicity and elegance should be the norm for action RPGs.
The audio/visual package is the strongest aspect of the game after the combat. The game has a hip and fresh cyberpunk look that is brought to life with a tasteful quasi cell-shaded style. Colors are vibrant and saturated while also being muted enough to convey a dystopian atmosphere. While very anime-inspired, the character models are well designed and deserved more interesting characters to go along with them. As should be the case for any action RPG, the framerate and performance are rock solid and pop up only occurred sparingly in some of the later levels. Even stronger is the sound design, particularly the music. I thought the game served banger after banger, somehow making what is largely an electronic “synthetic” type of soundtrack diverse and interesting. For every high-octane electronic piece, there was something ambient and organic, which recalled the mechanical/organic duality of the Others themselves. Then sometimes the soundtrack would throw the player some lowkey j-pop sounding stuff. Between the visuals and the music, the game has a very cool style, which helps to offset some of narrative sappiness.
Scarlet Nexus is not going to be remembered as a great RPG story no matter how hard it tries to develop intrigue, but that’s okay. Sometimes a game only needs to be fun to play and Scarlet Nexus does that and then some. On top of that, the game is an audio-visual treat that gives the player a glimpse at an interesting sci-fi world, the kind that is too rare in the genre. While the lack of a full-bodied narrative makes the game feel less consequential than it obviously wants to be, an action RPG that leans this hard into the action offers its own kind of catharsis. Hopefully there will be a sequel in the future that will treat the narrative with the care that the premise and world deserve.
STORYTELLING: 3.5/5
GAMEPLAY: 5/5
DESIGN: 3.5/5
VISUALS/SOUND: 4.5/5
OVERALL: 8/10
