"Scarlet Nexus" Review

Available for: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

I don't often come across situations like the one I find myself in with Scarlet Nexus. Normally if I play through a game more than once (or at least try to do so), it means I'd give it a glowing recommendation. But that's not really the case with this one. I mean, I liked Scarlet Nexus well enough, but I enjoyed it in spite of its best efforts to the contrary. I really don't have that much to say to pad out an intro paragraph, so I'll end this bit with a summary of my overall opinion: Scarlet Nexus needed to do literally everything it did better for it to be truly worth your time and money. 

The story in Scarlet Nexus is bad. Really, really bad. And the writing is equally awful. And there's a lot of story....and there's a lot of dialogue. But I'd probably better start from the beginning. In the world of Scarlet Nexus, Earth has largely been destroyed by a race of mysterious creatures known as "The Others," and only a few cities remain. In these cities, special psychic soldiers are drafted into a defense force known as the OSF (Other Suppression Force), but as is always the case with anime plots like these, there's more to this world than meets the eye. Scarlet Nexus is a little bit like Sonic Adventure 2 in that there are two campaigns that cover roughly the same events and timeline from two different perspectives. The first campaign puts you in the shoes of Yuito Sumeragi. Yuito Sumeragi is the son of Joe Sumeragi, the chairman of the main city in which the story takes place. Yuito Sumeragi is also the younger brother of Kaito Sumeragi, who is another son of Joe Sumeragi, and Kaito Sumeragi is another high-ranking official in the city. Funnily enough, Yuito Sumeragi (son of Joe Sumeragi and brother of Kaito Sumeragi), is the descendent of Yakumo Sumeragi, the founder of the city who lived over 2000 years ago, which means that Joe Sumeragi and Kaito Sumeragi are also descendents of Yakumo Sumeragi. When Yuito Sumeragi was young, a member of the OSF saved his life, so his side of this story is about him joining the OSF and the adventures that follow. I want you to remember what it was like to read that blurb about Yuito, dear reader, because it's in service of a point I'm going to make later on. Yuito is your standard anime boy protagonist with a heart of gold who is completely oblivious to the fact that every woman who meets him wants to sleep with him. The second campaign follows Kasane Randall, a Kuudere no-nonsense type whose one personality trait is that she loves her sister. Her campaign is likely the one you'll play second, so basically it only serves as a means to fill in the gaps from Yuito's campaign. That's basically all I have to say. So, right off the bat you can probably tell that our heroes aren't the most interesting or unique characters on the face of the Earth, and this does extend to the supporting cast, but as tropey as the supporting cast is, they're at least likable enough to keep the bad story and writing from being literally unbearable. 

The story in Scarlet Nexus doesn't start off terribly. In fact, I was intrigued for the first couple of chapters, as there was this serious sense of mystery surrounding Yuito and the seemingly random way things progressed. But after a certain point, the point of the story becomes less about that intrigue and more about how many plot twists the writers could shoehorn into the plot before the end. I have never in my life seen more plot twists in a story (keep in mind that I've never played Kingdom Hearts), and after a while, what was at first an entertainingly overindulgent series of ridiculous turns became more and more frustrating. This game literally has plot twists happening right up until the very last second of the story, so evidently insecure this team of writers is. I just can't stand it when anime (and it is exclusively anime) throws out what could've been a perfectly good simple story for the sake of overindulgent plot twists. In thinking about Scarlet Nexus, I can't help but remember an anime simply called Island: An at first mysterious-if-unassuming story that ends with the plot twist of "the reason the main character thinks he's met these people before is because he keeps getting cryogenically frozen for millions of years and reawakening in a time where people almost 100% like the people he originally knew are living in the same place oh and also inbetween times that he returns to the island setting he's frozen for millions of years and reawakens in a version of the island setting that's actually a future fascist dictatorship populated by the same characters." I can't stand that kind of thing, and Scarlet Nexus does it more than any other game I've ever played. Plot twist after plot twist after plot twist after plot twist after plot twist corrupts what could have been a good-if-generic story into a nightmarish mess of convoluted, unnecessary revelations and perpetually dropped story threads. If I had written a story as amateur-hour as this one, I'd never show my face in public.

But what would make me even less likely to show my face in public would be if I had produced something where the dialogue is as bad as it is in Scarlet Nexus. It's within the realm of possibility that the original Japanese writing isn't bad and the localization just made it that way, I'll concede that, but without an understanding of Japanese myself, I can only comment on what I experienced in the English version. Remember that blurb about Yuito I told you to hang on to? Well that's what it's like to play the first couple chapters of this game. Not one character is capable of referring to any other character by anything other than their full name and title for the longest time. "I'm Luka Travers, and I wanted to talk to you about my brother, Major General Karen Travers." "Look, it's Septentrion First Class Major General Fubuki Spring and Septentrion Second Class Major General Karen Travers!" "I heard someone in our class is related to Chairman Joe Sumeragi...hmm...Yuito Sumeragi...I wonder if he's related to Chairman Joe Sumeragi." "You're a fan of Major General Fubuki? Funny, I would've pegged you as a Major General Karen fan!" It's actually maddening, and I found myself internally screaming "I GET IT" at approximately the 500th time someone said both Yuito and his father's full names in the same sentence. It's like the horribly-written opening of Dishonored 2 stretched out for several hours. But it isn't just character names that get repeated ad-nauseum, it's also worldbuilding terms. For instance, early on we learn that the supercomputer that runs the city of Suoh is called Arahabaki. Long after the player has learned this, the characters still link Arahabaki to Suoh every time it's mentioned. "BABE is a lot like Arahabaki in Suoh." "It should operate a lot like Arahabaki in Suoh." It's not nearly as egregious as the full name and rank repetition, but it's still another aspect of the game that gets repeated to death in the horrible writing. Beyond this, nobody seems to be capable of using contractions for the majority of the run time either, but that seems to be a widespread problem with english localizations of japanese games, not something specific to this team of writers. To harp on one last bit of the game's writing, remember how I said that Kasane's one character trait is that she loves her sister? Well, I didn't deduce that through subtle character moments, let me tell you! Kasane says her sister's name, Naomi, about ten thousand times over the course of her campaign. She has lines to the effect of "Naomi! You, what did you do to Naomi? If you hurt Naomi I'll kill you for hurting Naomi!" and the only one of those Naomi's that was sarcasm on my end was the very last one! Would it have killed either the writers or the localizers to replace one or two of those Naomi's with a "her"? If you haven't played the game yet, chances are good you're wondering why I'm harping on the writing so much. Sure, it might sound annoying, you might think, but is it really so bad that it needs a full paragraph of complaining? To answer that hypothetical question, let me put this into perspective: Each campaign is about 20 hours. I'd say 15ish of those 20 hours (per campaign) is dialogue, as there are several cutscenes and bits of dialogue in levels that don't revolve around dialogue itself. So I want you to imagine listening to these people say "Naomi," "Septentrion Second Class Former Major General Karen Travers," "Arahabaki in Suoh," and variations on all of these things over and over and over again for 15 hours of an experience, then having to endure another 15 hours of it when you do the second campaign. It's maddening. It's seriously been ages since I've experienced a game with a worse story and worse writing than this.

So what about the gameplay? I went through this game almost twice in spite of hating the story and dialogue with a passion, so surely the gameplay is good, right? Well, if this were an indie game, I'd say the gameplay was exceptional for its budget. But this isn't an indie game. It's a Bandai Namco AAA budget game with an animated series already beginning to air. With that in mind, the gameplay isn't bad (in fact, in certain circumstances it's pretty exciting), but the amount of poor design choices weighs it down to an unacceptable level. 

Before I discuss how gameplay works, let me just offer this warning: If you play this game on PC like I did, do not use the Keyboard and Mouse configuration. Plug in a console controller. I started out using keyboard and mouse and I can say with certainty that Scarlet Nexus was not made with that in mind. So you've been warned, now let's talk about how the gameplay works. It's pretty much the same for both Yuito and Kasane, except that they use different weapons and have different party members for the first half of the game. With your weapon, you have a standard attack and an alternate attack as well as an upswing that launches you into the air. In addition to your weapon, you also have psychokinetic powers that let you pick up objects in the environment and throw them at enemies. Chairs, traffic cones, slabs of concrete, every arena is littered with different things to throw with your psychic powers. Beyond that, most arenas also contain special items such as statues or construction equipment that can be used as special attacks triggered by various quicktime events. So that's essentially the core of combat, but this being a Japanese game, there's a lot more to it. Every member of your party has a different type of power (fire magic, electric magic, teleportation, super speed, etc), and for lore reasons, you're able to "borrow" any of these powers and add them to your own for a limited time. For all but the most basic enemies, just using your own skills isn't going to be enough to win quickly, so it becomes a matter of borrowing the right power for the job at the right time. If an enemy's weak point is behind it, you might borrow invisibility, duplication, and super speed to get to that weak point and deal as much damage as possible before it can turn around, if an enemy can turn invisible, you might borrow clairvoyance to locate them, etc. That probably sounds pretty great (and again, in certain circumstances, it is), but the reality is that once you've learned how to take care of an enemy type, fighting it again becomes a matter of just going through the motions, and there's nowhere near enough enemy variety to begin with. That means there's only a handful of enemies, and for each of those enemies, there's basically one way you deal with them. I find it hard to communicate why this is annoying to me, so let me give you an example. At about the midpoint of the game, a floating, self-destructing kind of enemy is introduced. This enemy appears in great numbers through staggered spawns, and the way you handle one is either by launching one object at it to knock it down and cause it to self-destruct that way or borrowing the no-damage power and just standing there as it self-destructs on you to no avail. The way to survive the many waves of these enemies is either to run around the arena using your incredibly slow psychokinetic powers to take them out one at a time or just pressing a button and standing there. That's the most extreme example there is, but I think it speaks to the core of the problem. Like, imagine if Pokemon didn't have a variety of typings and immunities or stats, there was just one move per type, and the way to get through the games was just to use the move the enemy is weak to, and you basically have Scarlet Nexus. Combine this with the fact that these borrowed powers only last a couple seconds and are then on a cooldown and you've got an incredibly flawed execution of what could have been a great system. But this is just one of many poor design choices, and it's not even the one that irks me the most. 

That prestigious honor belongs to the fact that you basically have to kill smaller enemies one-by-one 99% of the time. See, most enemies have both a health bar and a kind of stamina bar with a different name. Your attacks whittle down both bars at different rates, and if you deplete the health bar first, the enemy dies, but if you deplete the stamina bar first, the enemy is stunned, and you have to kill it with a special button prompt that triggers a small pre-animated takedown cutscene. But here's the thing: your attacks only drain the meters at different rates if the enemy is a higher-tier kind. For the grunt enemies that you fight most of the game, either the bars drain at the same rate or the stamina bar drains slightly faster. Given that your attacks usually cover a swath of area, with a few attacks, you'll usually "stun" anywhere between 3 and 5 enemies at the same time. That's 3-5 enemies that you now have no choice but to kill with a button prompt and cutscene. And to make matters worse, you can only do that button prompt and cutscene song and dance one enemy at a time. So when you inevitably stun those 3-5 enemies, you have to go through all of them one-by-one, press L2, and watch the takedown. It's infuriating to not just be able to kill them normally, and with very few exceptions, this is how you have to kill the majority of enemies the majority of the runtime. And just to add a little cherry on top of the frustration cake, some numbskull over at Bandai Namco programmed the game so that you can't use the button prompt when the sound cue that signals an enemy has been stunned plays...you have to wait until about a full second after you're prompted with the sound cue to actually do the thing the sound was cuing you to do. Over the course of my 40ish hours with the game, I never got used to this. There's an option to make the takedown shorter, but it doesn't change the core problem. 

Beyond this, there's a whole host of other poor design choices that hold this game back. The one that comes to mind first and foremost is one that's a serious pet peeve of mine in games: there's a problem with closing the gap between you and enemies. You can't really tell how far your sword slashes are going to reach, so if you're the slightest bit too far away from an enemy, you'll miss every hit in your combo. Most games like this compensate for the inherent unpredictability of melee attack range with something like a bit of a lunge animation if the distance is marginal enough (at least, I think that's what happens), but Scarlet Nexus has no such thing. Actually, that's not entirely true. If you play as Yuito, you can borrow the power of teleportation, which acts as a gap closer from anywhere on the battlefield. But I'd like to remind you, dear reader, that borrowed powers only last for a couple seconds and are then on a cooldown. And if you're playing as Kasane, then you have to play half the game with no reliable gap-closer AND with an attack style that actively CREATES gaps (Yuito has a heavy attack, and Kasane's equivalent is a graceful move that pushes her away from enemies). So there's no reliable way to close the gap between you and the always-faster enemies you're up against, what else is wrong? Well, it's also kind of a crap shoot if your character is going to attack in the direction you want. I could never put my finger on what was going wrong or if I was doing something wrong, but it seems like half the time when I turned the camera to pursue an enemy, Yuito/Kasane would just keep attacking in the direction I'd started them out on without adjusting to match my inputs. I would concede that perhaps I was only moving the camera thumbstick and not also moving the character positioning one, but this isn't the only aspect of the game that seems to suffer from a lack of input respect. Well, I say lack of respect, but it's really lack of considerate programming: there's no animation cancelling. This means that once you start an attack, you have no way of backing out if an enemy starts to charge right afterwards or something. In games that are competently made, if you press the attack button but then immediately press the dodge button, the character will stop their attack and prioritize the dodge, cancelling the attack animation in whatever stage it was in order to make the dodge happen. But in Scarlet Nexus, you're SOL. To take a step back to the complaint of "no reliable way to make the character attack where you want," I can see people saying "just use the lock-on!" But the lock-on is unreliable at the best of times and actively gets in the way at the worst of times. You have to do a convoluted button combo to make the lock-on system switch targets, and it never seems to choose the right one at first. So, rather than do the convoluted song and dance of the lock-on, you'd be better off just trying to attack in the general direction of the enemy you want to target. So you can't really be sure that you're going to swing your sword in the right direction and you can't rely on the lock-on to fix that. Sure, that's bad, but surely the lack of animation cancelling isn't that big a deal, right? Well, let me put it this way: If you launch an attack right before an enemy starts charging, you can't dodge out of the way and you'll get knocked down. Once you get knocked down, it'll take you approximately 5 seconds to get up and back into the action...that is, unless you unlock the "doesn't take 5 seconds to get up from being knocked down" upgrade with skill points. It doesn't take much to get that upgrade, but until you do, the lack of animation cancelling is going to cost you 5 seconds of watching your character slooooowly getting up...and even after you get the upgrade, if you don't press the "get up" button immediately when you're about to fall down, you'll still take the 5 seconds to get up. I use this as my last point in the poor design choices section because I think it illustrates my point the best. It's as if nobody sat down and asked themselves if these decisions made the game fun or not. It's been long enough since I last played that I'm sure I've forgotten a couple more poor design choices that made me tear my hair out, but I'm confident you get the picture.

I was already halfway through the technical section when I remembered that the piece of this section you're currently reading needed to be written, so frustrating are the many poor design choices on display here. But it's worth remembering that I've been alluding to certain circumstances in which the combat in Scarlet Nexus is good with no asterisks. So, what are those circumstances? Well, even though the last couple levels are my least favorite from a design perspective, they are a prime example of what could've been. The game is at its best when you're surrounded by exclusively stronger enemies, each of which requiring different tactics to beat. When the game does this, you'll be going through combat swapping borrowed powers one after the other for maybe a second at a time, dealing damage and adapting at a breakneck pace. When combat is flowing like this, the cooldown on the powers doesn't matter because you aren't even using them for long enough to require the cooldown, and because there aren't any small fries, when you have to kill an enemy with the button prompt, it's more of a reward for having felled this giant foe. The design choices, as poor as they are, work when Scarlet Nexus is firing on all cylinders. However, it only really starts doing that in the last couple levels, and it doesn't do so consistently even then. That's part of why this is all so frustrating to me. The first time that combat worked in this way, I was having an excellent time, and it only served to highlight the flaws in the rest of the game.  

That brings us to the technical side of things. Is Scarlet Nexus finally going to get a break from negative criticism here? Eventually, but not yet. First and foremost on the technical front is a kind of technical laziness that you only find in Japanese games. All but a handful of cutscenes (of which there are hundreds) are presented like a visual novel/powerpoint presentation. The game has such excellent character models, but 90% of the time they're just presented as static images. It's not like the team doesn't have the talent or budget, as the handful of actually animated cutscenes are pretty excellent, so it was clearly just a time-saving decision. I have to begrudgingly admit that while this is a technical complaint, it's not a technical issue...but I still hated it and it means that the vast majority of the runtime is just looking at static images, so I'm still taking points off for it. Furthermore, outside of dialogue, the developers clearly just used the combat exertion sounds that the Japanese cast recorded no matter what language you play in. That's not a problem or a complaint, but I think it speaks to the sheer laziness of this development team. But the laziness isn't just present in the presentation decisions, it's also present in the QA testing for everything other than the presentation. I never experienced any audio/visual glitches, any noticeable framerate drops, any texture pop-in, any animation glitches, or hard/soft crashes. So, credit where it's due, QA did a good job on those many fronts. But some of the smaller things seem to imply that QA wasn't done equally across the board. For instance, remember how I mentioned that you need to unlock the quick get-up ability with skill points? Another important thing that needs to be unlocked in that way is the double-jump. This doesn't really play into combat, but it is necessary for exploration (i.e. getting hidden items on top of taller ledges). The developers clearly knew this, as several items are explicitly locked behind tall platforms only reachable with double-jumps...so you'd think they would have tested to ensure that you can actually land on these platforms with the double-jump reliably. Don't get me wrong, you can always eventually make it to the platform, but it'll take 4-5 tries to do so. You'll double-jump and clearly be OVER the height needed to land on the platform, but an invisible wall would be in place until you try a couple more times. I haven't seen the code, so I can't say this with any degree of certainty, but as a programmer myself, here's my thought: If I were a hack that needed to put items in a place only accessible to those with a double-jump, and I needed to also have some kind of protection against people using some kind of speedrunner cheesing strategy to reach those items without that upgrade, and my managers were lazy and told me to have it done in a day, I might put an invisible wall on those ledges that does a check to see if the upgrade has been unlocked, and if it has, the wall disappears. Continuing this hypothetical, if QA wasn't performed equally across the board, it's entirely possible that the aformentioned upgrade check wouldn't automatically be performed when a level loads, and it might just perform the check on an individual basis when the player tries to interact with one of the ledges. Then, the process of checking for the upgrade might be performed slowly as it reads through all the upgrades acquired so far, all the while working against the other processes running in the background (which wouldn't have been a problem if the check was performed as the level loaded), resulting in the individual wall finally disappearing after the time it took the player to double jump and try to reach the platform 4-5 times, a process that would repeat when the player next tried to reach a platform. Now, again, I can't say that with certainty because I haven't seen the code. But if a programmer looks at an "inconvenience" type of bug in your game and can come up with a specific, distinct way that the code could be rushed to result in this bug without much effort, that's not a good sign. I spent a lot of time talking about that minor inconvenience, but I think it's an excellent example of how Scarlet Nexus gets the smaller things wrong in odd ways. Beyond this, within my first hour playing, I had to restart the game almost completely because none of the buttons would work inside of the save menu. Not the save button, not the cancel button, nothing. It didn't happen again after that, but there was a part of me that worried every time I went to save. Then there's the bizarre invisible walls that pop up in the main city at the start of the game and then disappear after a while. I'd guess the developers wanted me to reach my destination by following a specific path, but there was nothing in terms of visual effects or text to suggest that...just invisible walls blocking specific crosswalks in the city. Then there's the sometimes jarring disconnect between plot tone and music. You'll end up at a plot point where there's been a tragic death, and the song playing in the hub area where people are still reeling from it will be the same funky techno track. See what I mean? The things that are technically wrong with Scarlet Nexus are just bizarre and speak to a lack of care. 

But what does Scarlet Nexus get right on the technical side of things? Well, as I've already said, there aren't any glitches in the presentation quality, and the presentation quality itself is excellent. There's not really much one can do to make anime graphics stand out other than make the character models good, and the character models in this game are, in fact, quite good. Beyond that, the environment designs prior to the last few levels, while not particularly beautiful, are given a level of detail that more than makes up for the lack of flashiness. But by far the most impressive technical aspect of Scarlet Nexus is its enemy design. The Others are, by far, the most uniquely-designed monsters I've ever seen. Period. Nothing comes close. I've already spoken my mind about the lack of variety, and I hold firm to that, but what little this game offers is incomparably designed. Flower vases with high heels, corsets, and plug tails? Floating crates with tendrils that can spew out smoke? A church altar type thing with arms and a full kind of gazebo for a head? Come ON! I defy you to find more unabashed creativity anywhere! I've been grilling the developers a lot in this review, but I have nothing but positive things to say about the artists who designed The Others. I don't ever really think that much about enemy design unless it's really bad, but with every new Other that appeared, the expectations I had for creative design set by the previous new Other would be exceeded. So, while Scarlet Nexus's only real technical strengths are on the visual side, it's still something.

Folks, this review took a lot of time to put together, because despite how irritated I might have seemed while talking about this game, it's a kind of dispassionate irritation. It was easy to write about Scarlet Nexus when I was sufficiently agitated, but it was always hard to get started. When I saw previews for this game, it really looked like it was going to be something special, so when I got most of the way through my second playthrough and realized that having the full story picture wasn't going to save the experience, I wasn't so much disappointed as I was done. Scarlet Nexus is perhaps the most forgettable experience I've had this year, and for proof of that, look no further than the fact that as I was typing this sentence I remembered a whole other aspect of the game (the social simulator aspect) that I forgot to write about. I won't be rectifying that because, as I've said of many things I've brought up in this review, I think it serves as a great example of what I mean. One thing many reviews of this game mention is that it's ambitious. I can agree with that, but ambition without effort to back it up is meaningless. In spite of all my criticisms, Scarlet Nexus isn't a bad game. It just isn't a good one. It's a game that swings for the fences with a pencil instead of a bat, and the results are exactly what you expect.

Let us review:

Awful story - 1.0

Cringeworthy writing - 1.0

Poor gameplay design choices - 1.0

Technical oddities - 0.5

The final score for Scarlet Nexus is...

6.5/10 - Ok

Better luck next time, Bandai Namco, better luck next time.