Scarlet Nexus | PS4 Review

I enter the room, and the Others are all around me. These monstrous foes are hybrids of torn muscle, sinew, and household items, assembled into grotesque shapes. But I have no time to be afraid. I launch a slab of concrete at one of them using my psychokinesis, and immediately follow it up with a launcher attack. As we’re in mid-air, I borrow pyrokinesis from my squadmate, and I set the foe on fire. Out of the corner of my eye, I see another Other, and I borrow teleportation from a friend. I appear behind the enemy and shred it to bits. Scarlet Nexus makes one hell of a first impression.

No Rest for the Wicked

Bandai Namco Entertainment has done what few major publishers dare to do these days: started a new IP. Scarlet Nexus is a setting which obviously had a great deal of thought and excitement poured into it. Humanity exists inside walled cities, and horrific monsters dubbed Others (awful name, yes) rain down from the sky via a so-called Extinction Belt. It’s up to the members of the OSF to combat this presence, and they’ve been at it for hundreds of years. The OSF (Others Suppression Force) is comprised of young people with psionic abilities who have decided to take up the fight themselves.

99.9% of the population has at least some kind of low-level power, but only those who volunteer or are scouted as being extraordinary join the OSF. This is where Yuito and Kasane begin their adventures, as new recruits. Scarlet Nexus utilizes a dual-protagonist storyline, and they’ll weave into one another at several points.

Two Sides of the Coin

It definitely gives a major boost to replayability, but I can say even when I had completed only Yuito’s story, I wasn’t left with a great many questions. While their storylines diverge pretty significantly in the middle of the story, the characters’ stay in pretty constant communication and keep one another apprised of what they were up to. Combined with the fact that both Yuito and Kasane share the primary power of psychokinesis, they aren’t as different as they’re made out to be. It’s still incredibly interesting to see story events from a different perspective, but not as essential as Scarlet Nexus wants you to believe. Especially considering the first few and final few chapters bring the two leads together with their respective party members.

These party members are the beating heart of the story. Though they all start out as a handful of anime tropes, you can individually bond with each of them over the course of the campaign. These “bond episodes” reveal much more dimension to your squad of husbandos and waifus. They all appear overly shallow at first glance, but you come to care for these compatriots by the end as you learn their flaws and hangups. The connections you forge are slow and thoughtful, and feel like real friendships being forged. I especially enjoyed how each character will often reflect on how major story beats have affected them.

Talk is Cheap

Where Scarlet Nexus flounders more often is in its core narrative. The setting and visuals are truly excellent, but the story itself is hit or miss. It throws plot twists at a steady clip, but most of these you’ll have long since seen coming. And, honestly, that’s fine. The player may see it coming, but the cast reacts to the beats in honest and exciting ways. The amount of story packed into either of the 30-hour campaigns is pretty impressive, and it doesn’t waste your time in that way. Its presentation, however, is sometimes downright painful.

Scarlet Nexus has opted for visual novel cutscenes, which I can only assume comes down to budgetary restrictions. There’s an exceptional amount of narrative here, and I can understand cutting corners for a new IP. The struggle is that watching two character portraits talk to each for twenty minutes straight is difficult to maintain engagement with, especially with shoddy or repetitive dialogue. Now, you’re occasionally given a treat with a fully animated cutscene, but these seem almost entirely random with when they’re used. It could be a full cutscene to introduce a villain, but then they kill someone during a visual novel-style cutscene.

The visual novel portraits also overlay on top of motion-comic panels. What’s bizarre about these is that the characters move into different poses, so it doesn’t seem too far removed from a full cutscene. It just draws more attention to its weird presentation. I adjusted after a couple hours at first, but when you get to the latter parts of the game watching cutscenes that can go on for a full 45-60 minutes, this presentation becomes excruciating. I would’ve loved if they cut the difference by animating campaign cutscenes, and utilizing visual novel segments for the hours of bond episodes. I understand that describing something so inherently visual is tricky in the written word, but I hope I did my best.

Lost in Translation

Adding to the pain of watching this story unfold is a fairly poor localization effort. A lot of the dialogue is unnatural sounding, as if the Japanese was translated into English without any consideration of how it would sound to English-speaking ears. It’s rough as hell, but I’ll say the voice actors give it their all. Truly, everyone is doing their best with the dialogue given (and in some cases, thankfully, just ignoring the written script) to make it sound normal. But it’s a Herculean and impossible effort on their part. Maybe if the script was localized more ably, the visual novel segments wouldn’t’ve dragged quite as badly.

Now that I’ve ragged on poor old Scarlet Nexus, let me bring things back to a more positive note. This is some of the most fun I’ve had with a combat system in years. I tried to illustrate this with my colorful opening paragraph, but let me reiterate. Combat in this game is unbelievably good and refreshingly unique. Integrating psychokinesis into melee combos is so inspired and works brilliantly.

Work Together or Not at All

You can borrow powers from your party members via the SAS (a system that psychically links the squad) to add fire or electric elements to your attacks, teleport around, slow down time, become invulnerable for short times, or so much more. You can even upgrade to eventually have the ability of using several of these at once. There’s also a rage mode equivalent and a cool super power mode where you can just wail on foes for 30 seconds or so. All of this is introduced to the player at a smart, measured pace ensuring you know all of your abilities and how to use them properly. By the end of the game, you’ll be a free-flowing machine of psionic mayhem, and it never once gets tired or old.

My main takeaway from Scarlet Nexus is that I want a sequel badly. The story wraps in an unexpected, but satisfactory way that leaves just enough room for a follow-up. These characters became my friends by the end of the game, and I want to spend more time with them. It’s easy to think a sequel with refined storytelling methods and an improved localization could be something truly special.

To hear me talk more about Scarlet Nexus, be sure to listen to Episode 352 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 1:01:00 time stamp.

This review is based on purchased copy of Scarlet Nexus for the PlayStation 4. It is also available on Xbox and Microsoft Windows.