Scarlet Nexus is an anime-styled action game with limited RPG elements. You control a character who is a member of the OSF (Other Suppression Forces), who uses weapons plus psychic powers to fight the Others, horrible otherworldly monsters who have come to Earth to eat the brains of people.
The core gameplay is decent enough. It starts out pretty simple – you have a basic melee or short ranged combo attack, a dash ability (that can also be used to dodge), and a jump ability, along with your psychokinesis power, which lets you pick up (select) objects from the environment to hurl at your enemies. Some of these objects are special interactive objects and will hit the enemy multiple times – like something that breaks in half and then you smash the two halves together on the enemy, or a telephone pole you can make sweeping attacks with.
As the game goes on, you gain allied characters, who themselves have special powers which you can “borrow”. These range from the ability to set things on fire, to making you temporarily immune to damage, to turning you invisible, to letting you see invisible or hidden enemies, to teleportation (which can also be used to navigate through the environment by teleporting through certain barriers).
The core gameplay is decent but not amazing; there’s a decent variety of enemies, though most of them basically boil down to “use the correct power and use your basic combo attacks on them”. Still, they have different attack routines, have pretty wildly varied appearances, and manage to put up a decent challenge. Some of the boss encounters are more challenging, and while I only had a couple game overs, they definitely pushed you at times, especially if you weren’t using your abilities wisely.
As you play through the game, you gain levels and you become more powerful by unlocking abilities from a skill tree, which lets you gain additional moves, improve your combos, use multiple borrowed powers at once, and just get straight up statistical boosts.
The biggest flaw with the game in terms of its gameplay is that it can get a bit repetitive, especially in the side missions; the side missions basically are composed of backtracking through areas to complete kill quests, where you have to kill specific Others in specific ways to complete the quest. As this is all rehashed content, it is not particularly interesting. But even the main story suffers a bit fom throwing a bunch of encounters between you and your goal, where many of the encounters are basically the same thing over and over again; while these segments aren’t overly long, they can at times feel like they’re padding, especially when nothing significant story-wise happens.
The real problem with the game, though, is that it is a pretty heavily story-focused game, and the story is not written very well. You will spend a lot of time on the story, but the story was written by people who end up making everyone act unnaturally to preserve the “mystery” of what is going on.
At the start of the game, you choose one of two characters (a male character, Yuuito, or a female character, Kasane); while you might think this is just a minor aesthetic choice, this is, in fact, a choice between entirely different storylines – the characters not only fight differently (Yuuito being a melee character while Kasane has short-to-mid-ranged attacks) but they experience entirely different storylines and have different personalities. The storylines are in fact the same storyline, but told from different perspectives, so you will see one set of events with Yuuito, and then a second set of events with Kasane, as for the majority of the game the characters are off doing different things in different groups, so rather than doing the same missions with different characters you’re actually playing through the other “half” of the story line, where you get to see a different perspective on things.
Unfortunately, the result of this is that not only do you often not know what is going on, with important events happening “offscreen” with the other set of characters, only to have those events intersect with what you’re doing, but you have little idea that making the choice you do affects who your supporting cast will be for most of the game (though eventually you do gain access to both squads of characters).
The biggest problem, however, is that this is one of those games where weird stuff is going on, events are crazy, and people refuse to explain anything to anyone, even when it makes no sense whatsoever for them to refuse to explain thigs. This is extremely annoying as the “mystery” is really “when will someone tell me what is going on” rather than “there is this mysterious thing going on that I need to investigate.” Indeed, on at least one occasion, you will “investigate” something only for the person who was with you all along to explain it after the fact because they already knew and were just wasting your time for no reason.
The game struggles to make its story feel compelling as a result; early on, it was kind of neat, but when everyone starts acting strangely, it feels very arbitrary. The core idea behind it wasn’t bad at all, but the execution was poor, and some of the “shocking events” were unfortunately predictable due to either interface spoilers (some characters who are ostensibly going to be your teammates don’t have the usual teammate data on them, suggesting you won’t be keeping them as teammates) and just some bits being kind of obvious.
Worse, the characters often don’t act consistently; Yuiito’s dad dies, and he is upset about it for a bit, and then completely goes back to his usual neutral self only hours later in game. They also seem to “forget” some shocking revelations, like asking questions which have obvious answers based on things that they already know (like “Why do you hate this person?” when they already know said person was involved in doing horrible things). While denial is a thing, they didn’t even feel like they were IN denial about it – they kind of accepted it, then randomly derailed, then seemed to accept it again, all without meaningful transitions. People would sometimes go off the rails based on very little for no reason other than to “make the plot work”, and worse, there was often little reason for things to even be that way in the first place – they could have just written it differently.
As a result, events often feel contrived and arbitrary, and the characters feel bizarrely oblivious, but inconsistently, other times showing proper skepticism.
All in all, I can’t quite recommend this game. It wasn’t bad, but it never actively felt great, either.
2.0