In a bid to finally join everyone in the present, I've finally embarked on my first playthrough of a 2021 game. Yaaay! Scarlet Nexus is the other big RPG to launch from Bandai Namco this year, some months before the seventeenth entry in their long running Tales franchise Tales of Arise (that's a "stay tuned"), and it immediately creates a strong impression with its psychokinetic action and uncommon, anime-fied take on the post-apocalypse. After most of humanity is wiped out by an unknown psychic phenomenon and a horde of bizarre creatures that conventional weaponry is ill-suited to counter, humans with psionic abilities are found and trained to combat this new threat. The OSF - the Other (as these creatures are known) Suppression Force - then becomes humanity's one and only barrier against this encroaching menace. The player, as one of two protagonists, is an OSF recruit capable of throwing objects and enemies around like they were lighter than air; fellow soldiers in the party adopt similar psionic skills, such as pyrokinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance, and so on.

As soon as the game started I was subconsciously hunting for Tales comparisons, but to Scarlet Nexus's credit even if a lot of the groundwork is similar - especially in how it emphasizes character-to-character interactions during the game's regular "standby" downtimes - the game feels markedly different to play. The combat system in Scarlet Nexus superficially similar to Remedy's Control with its use of various psychic powers on cooldowns to support conventional attacks, but with several more layers of complexity on top and one hell of a difficulty curve. If I were to liken these two games to those from the fighter genre, Control would be something like Mortal Kombat - simple to pick up, though with enough nuance that it would take some dedication to master the game - whereas Scarlet Nexus is closer to an Arc System Works joint like Guilty Gear or BlazBlue, in that the complexity and challenge level start prohibitively high and it demands a bit more of a commitment before you're likely to get anywhere with it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and Scarlet Nexus has more than a few shades of a character action game like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta where a second playthrough might prove more compelling than the first with the knowledge and experience you've since acquired. The game is actually designed to benefit from this arrangement, as it has two protagonists with distinct story paths, combat roles, and differing perspectives on the same events which adds useful context you'd miss by seeing one route alone.

A typical combat encounter in Scarlet Nexus would involve sizing up the opponents, recalling what kind of psionic skills work best on them, and then start softening them up with the game's standard combo of using a few regular attacks (the male protagonist, Yuito, uses a close-range katana while the female protagonist, Kasane, has a bit more of a range to her throwing knives) followed by psychically clubbing the enemy with a nearby piece of detritus, the former generating the juice needed to pull off the latter. There's also a deluge of additional mechanics that you're meant to take somewhat in stride as the game gradually doles them out, though you might not need to exploit them all in full unless you're on the higher difficulty setting. A lot of these mechanics are conditional: your "SAS" (trust me, like most JRPG acronyms, it makes even less sense when spelled out) links with your companions, for instance, allow you to temporarily adopt their powers each of which is specialized against certain types of opponent. For instance, there's a quick movement guy who helps with flying enemies that flit out of your melee range, an elemental type that provides a flat damage bonus and can trigger status effects in those susceptible to them, the power of clairvoyance allows you to see stealthed enemies and improve the window on your perfect dodge rolls (similar to the Flash Moves/Guards of Ys VIII), and invisibility to give yourself an opportunity to initiate battles from an ideal position or skip them entirely. It's usually obvious enough when these ally powers are most applicable, though battles are chaotic enough that these synergistic opportunities are easily missed. Then there's the more mercurial Brain Drive and Brain Field modes, both of which can be improved further on the Brain Map (this game sure loves that word), which feel a little too risky to be reliable: the former activates when a gauge is filled, though there's little you can do to control when and where this happens, while the latter is a hyper-powered "Devil Trigger" mode that will kill you if you spend too long in it and needs a few necessary upgrades before its utility is worth the gamble.

All that said, I've been really struggling with this one and for my own peace of mind I'm going to try to delineate why that is. I mean, beyond me just sucking at any game that presents even a moderate challenge after all the coddling open-world games and RPGs I've been playing of late, but let's suggest an alternative explanation for the sake of argument or else this blog will be super short and mostly consist of salty tears.

Some things I think I can blame on the game itself include the limitations of its lock-on system. Many enemies, especially larger ones, have something similar to Monster Hunter's topical vulnerabilities: that is, one part of their body in particular must be targeted to do any real damage. However, the lock-on doesn't allow you to target specific parts - its utility seems limited to keeping that enemy centered on the screen at all times - so it can be tricky to hit those areas with certain, looser attacks. The protagonist's psychokinesis, for instance, will do its best to aim for weak points but can easily be blocked depending on the direction the object is flying in from - given you can't exactly stop the battle and carefully select which piece of rubble to pick up and toss at high velocity, it's a bit of a crapshoot. The other major issue I'm running into is how little feedback there is regarding attacks on the player character. Some are obvious enough - a large haymaker that sends you flying should be enough visual feedback for anyone - but weaker attacks barely register visually and the next thing you know you're getting the low HP warning siren, perhaps too late to do something about it. Exacerbating this is how there's very little knockback to most enemy attacks, which in some ways is good if it means your own attacks aren't being interrupted every other moment but adds to the ambiguity of your current status. Unless you're constantly glancing down at the health bars of you and your active party, drawing attention away from where it's needed most (an enemy charging up an attack, for instance), it's easy to find yourself overwhelmed and defeated out of nowhere. Add to all that the chaotic nature of most fights where targeting one foe usually means there are enemies off-screen doing god-knows-what and it's a tricky game to parse in the moment. I'd like to think my situational awareness and ability to mentally find an oasis in a storm has been tempered by many real-time action games of this type over the years, but those skillsets have been challenged more than ever here.

I will say that the combat system is exceptionally strong when it comes to nuance and variability, the essence of which are frequently lacking from JRPGs that all too often allow the player to fall back on reliable strategies for every encounter. Boss fights in particular have been clobbering me fairly regularly, but then I'd eventually glean the strategy the game wanted me to use and found them much more palatable: the regular encounters, I'd then understand retroactively, were meant to help me understand and experiment with the many approaches I could take in order to instruct me on the specific tactics needed for the game's pivotal battles. There's still frustration here and there - one fight had you taking down an opponent that liked to attach itself to the ceiling and send ground-based homing projectiles at you, the latter you couldn't see coming because the camera was pointing straight up at the boss - but it has been satisfying to struggle my way through all these fights and learn the game's myriad systems in a "baptism of fire," adapt-or-die fashion. The occasional battles with human opponents have been the toughest since everyone moves so quickly and can hit harder than most.

Outside of the hot-and-cold combat, I'm enjoying the game's setting and story quite a bit. I won't argue that it's anime as hell - this is Bamco we're talking about, and after almost a dozen Tales games I'm mostly inured to the anime clichés - but the designs of the Others are suitably disquieting, we've had plenty of surprising deaths and betrayals so far, and the party's "bond episodes" have been delightful. I particularly like familiar touches such as having a hideout HQ that slowly fills with furniture and decorations after you gift them to your companions for extra affinity points - it's a feature I've liked in many other games, including The Outer Worlds, Bully, the Personas, and so on. The way the game breaks up its narrative between mission and standby modes - the latter is when you can spend time watching bond episodes or completing side-quests, which usually involve going back to earlier areas - makes it more convenient for when you've only got the time for a shorter session.

It's fair to say I'm invested in seeing Scarlet Nexus through to its end, and I'm anticipating that the second time through with the alternative protagonist (I went with Yuito, the dude, first) will be much smoother sailing especially with the NG+ carry-overs. I also hope it cements my few reservations as being genuine issues with the game rather than relating to my own inexperience or lack of skill: there's always that worrisome concept that I'm simply not picking up on something obvious, like how livestreamers will occasionally miss vital parts of the UI or a tutorial because their attention is split seven ways and end up giving their viewers conniptions in the process. A tentative thumb wiggling towards the upwards position is how I'd currently rate the game, with an aspiration for it be a little more firm in the near future. (The thumb, I mean.)

I got halfway through my first playthrough and really liked it. One of those games that I'll get to finishing... eventually.

I've finished the Kasane playthrough and it took around 25 hours and while I was fairly underwhelmed and actively annoyed by some of the systems in the game, I did decide to see the Yuito side. After having made it halfway through the game as Yuito I can safely say that anyone who would want to see this game through but doesn't have time to play it twice should definitely choose Kasane. Comparatively Yuito and his entire squad is in the dark much longer as to what is happening in the game, and as per anime standards the story gets ridiculous later on with it's twists and reveals. Also while this might be just because I'm on NG+ but Yuitos chapters seem to be a lot shorter and a lot easier than Kasane's were, even though you are for the most part going through the exact same levels. For instance at one point Kasane enters a facility with her team and after a boss fight she bumps into Yuito's group exploring the same compound - but in both playthroughs you enter this compound from the same direction and collect the same keycards to open the same doors. For a game that tasks you with replaying the same bits in order to get "the full story" Scarlet Nexus fails to really justify this design decision, or at least make it more worthwhile for the player.

Although it's a different team I constantly got really strong Code Vein vibes from this. Both games have a really strong look and seem to have fairly robust systems that get lost in clunky execution. Both games also have very weak level design that ultimately just boils down to square hallways with some funky textures on them. Scarlet Nexus feels clunky as an action game and it really makes me wonder if at some point during development it wasn't something other than real-time combat. For an action game it tries it's hardest to mask the limited moveset by flashy effects but there really isn't all that much to it. The different elements and weak spots suggest a more tactical approach but in reality you can stick to one strategy throughout just fine while occasionally tagging in the right team member for that one unique enemy variant.

Still Scarlet Nexus has become junk food for me. The combat is mindless enough where I can let my eyes glaze over as I put the game on to kill some time as I await bigger releases down the road. It's another one of those games where I think wow theres a lot of potential here but as is everything seems to fall just short and the whole thing seems like a really highly produced budget title.

@humanity: I may be misremembering this, but I think there was a bit of an RE2 A/B thing going on here where the secondary campaign would cut some corners to get to the point a little quicker compared to the primary? In other words, if you'd done Yuito first his would have been the 25 hour game while Kasane would run closer to 12? I don't know for certain, I started with Kasane and couldn't be bothered to finish.

@mento: I think, without more than cursory glance, I mostly agreed with your takes this summer. After a 2020 full of ridiculous Japanese sci-fi via 13 Sentinels, FFVIIR and Nier Automata, as well as equally bonkers affairs like Yakuza Zero, Genshin Impact and, er, Ghost of Tsushima (?!) I found myself playing a ton of games with Japanese (or in GI's case, Chinese) VO and relatively inscrutable lore and was beginning to feel some level of withdrawal when Scarlet Nexus came out to pretty positive reviews.

I really think I should've listened to the people who failed to fully connect with the combat, though, and most importantly the people who couldn't stop pointing out just how animé, as in trope-y, it was. Like you, I found the combat to often reach nigh undecipherable levels of chaos, particularly in the human-on-human boss fights and that frustration was compounded by just how much HP everyone but my guys seemed to have. Like you, sometimes I'd fail a fight, steel myself and suddenly finish it in like six minutes so I'm sure there was more than a little stubbornness to blame me for, but there was something about that rhythm of physical attack -> kenesis -> squad attack that never felt on beat for me.

Still, I probably could've toughed it out if the story hadn't began to feel like a seven year old retelling their day at school with an "and this happened and then this happened and then this happened" avalanche of ideas that seemed to have little regard for what occurred as briefly as, oh, the very same cutscene ago. Seriously, this game's story is beyond hyperactive1 If I'd been hooked on the gameplay perhaps I'd have found that charming (I don't, uh, resent Xenogears Disc 2...) but mostly I found myself longing for the more sober pace of its opening chapters.

If I had a Best Moment vote for this year, the Naomi reveal is pretty much a lock for No. 1 or No. 2, and I think Kasane has a shot at Best Character too! Unfortunately, several characters and moments would compete for worst as well, none more so than Kyoka and Shiden. Absolute nonsense, those two!

Readability is always a problem with these anime games. With constant powers shooting off and tons of visual flares all over the place, it's hard to see through all of it to actually see what the enemy is doing. The game could really use a big flashy indicator on enemy attacks. I don't think it would take anything away from the game. Bayonetta had it, and it's still one of the best action games out there.

That said, I still had a whole lot of fun with the combat. A lot of Bamco's games just don't hit the combat right. Often times because I think their games try to imitate others. But this one is by far the most fun I've had with action JRPGs in awhile.

I think the biggest complaint for me is the pacing of the bond events. Once you return to base, and you plan on talking to your entire party, you could be looking at up to an hour of just going through and seeing everyone's event back to back before you're ready to get back to the main story. I guess you can break up some of that by doing side quests in between, but those side quest aren't ever anything more than "Go here. Kill this thing three times".

All that said, almost assuredly ends up on my game of the year list.

@nodima: Shiden is the absolute worst. I had hoped there would be a typical anime redeeming turn around where he stops being insufferable and turns over a new leaf but this doesn’t happen. He tones it down a bit but still acts like a teenager throwing a temper tantrum at all times.

I would argue that Kasane is the second worst. The “cold and calculated” trope is taken to the nth degree to the point where she basically feels like an alien or a robot that is only learning about human emotions now. This is in a way justified by the big story reveal halfway through.. but also not really? I really hated this almost as much as Shiden.

@humanity: I don’t know if this was what they were aiming at but I never got cool and calculated from Kasane but instead more of a sense of neurodivergence.

So much of her interactions and conflicts are less from being aloof and instead just not really knowing how to deal with anyone outside of her sister and barreling forward anyway. I kinda liked the arc.

Shiden is just a tsundere though, an uncomplicated archetype and always polarizing.