Scarlet Nexus is an anime game, which seems obvious if you just looked at the screenshots. But it literally is an anime...uh...game. Apparently they are making an actual anime based off this game's story, and the game plays out in episodes or "Phases" like much an anime would.
Yet it's more than that, from the first minutes of this game all the anime tropes hit you in the face to an almost eye-rolling degree. Kids have powers, they train those powers at an academy, they use these powers to defeat otherworldly enemies that occasionally invade the world (funnily enough called Others). It's a very typical action anime set up, which is unfortunately because I've never been a fan of these types of animes. The concept of a whole world of shit happening at once immediately is often annoying to me, as you get bombarded with different terms and nouns that try their best to get you into the lore but it's so much at once that i get taken out of it.
Scarlet Nexus was like that for me as well, and it didn't help that the combat of the game starts off very poorly. Never have I played an action game centered around fast paced combat that has such sluggish controls. Every hit you take knocks you down and it takes over 5 seconds for your character to get up, which was amazingly bad. Dodge doesn't cancel out of an attack so if you are mid-attack animation and you're about to get hit you are going to fall down and that 5 seconds is long enough to really ruin the pace of combat. The best strategy early is to just bait attacks, dodge, then counter attack, rinse repeat.
The big selling point to the combat is the mind powers that you and your party have. The main character (either boy or girl) both have the same power so it doesn't matter who you pick. Their power is to pick up shit around the level and bash the bad guys with it. Thus every level you can be assured is littered with crap, trash cans, cars, pipes, poles, just shit everywhere for you bash power with. Additionally once you get squad mates they all have their own powers that you can "borrow" to add to your own. For example borrowing the fire lady's power gives all your basic attacks added fire damage which some enemies will be weak to.
Once you get over the hurdle of the combat at the beginning, your character begins to level up and unlocking talents in a skill tree. These talents are things like Air Dodging, and perfect dodge counter attacks, or the biggest thing for me.....Pressing circle let's you dodge out of getting knocked down which removed that annoying 5 second get up animation. The more you unlock the better combat feels it's just a shame that doing so causes the first impressions of combat suck massive ass. Seriously I was really regretting this game pretty quickly.
Thankfully both the anime stuff and the combat improves pretty quickly. By my third hours, I was actually getting to enjoy the characters in my group, and the combat felt much much better. There are still problems in combat, as the lack of attack cancelling is a pain in the ass, but it's not as much of a big deal anymore.
The big selling point about the story in Scarlet Nexus is that both the characters have their own stories. So picking either the boy or the girl will actually change the story and to get the whole picture you have to play the game twice. These stories run parallel with each other so I believe that both characters will have the same major plot hooks, however each character will have a different collection of side characters, and different sub events. The saving grace is that when you beat the game, you can start the other character in NG+ which allows you to basically be overpowered and broken for the second playthrough to see that story.
There is a little Persona in the game too, you bond with your party by giving them gifts and hanging out between missions, and have bonding episodes which have little subplots to let you journey and get to know the characters better. It's not done nearly as well as Persona, but the characters get expanded enough that you might end up liking a character more than you think. It's alright.
There other thing I want to bring up is the level design. It's bad, and many missions take place in the same map, sometimes with a different skin, and sometimes exactly the same. Which is a bummer, it just makes running missions a bit too repetitive for my liking, and considering im just under 5 hours in, I shouldn't already be bored of the repeating levels. Maybe it changes up later, and I'm sure there will be at least SOME new locations, but if this is anything to judge so far it wont be very many.
Im torn on Scarlet Nexus to be honest. It's growing on me, but it still isn't super great and there are niggles that annoy me and bring me out of the experience. If you like this kind of anime, then you'll probably enjoy this game and be all on board despite the jank. But if you aren't much of an anime fan then this might be a harder sell for you and maybe wait for a sale or something.
Yet it's more than that, from the first minutes of this game all the anime tropes hit you in the face to an almost eye-rolling degree. Kids have powers, they train those powers at an academy, they use these powers to defeat otherworldly enemies that occasionally invade the world (funnily enough called Others). It's a very typical action anime set up, which is unfortunately because I've never been a fan of these types of animes. The concept of a whole world of shit happening at once immediately is often annoying to me, as you get bombarded with different terms and nouns that try their best to get you into the lore but it's so much at once that i get taken out of it.
Scarlet Nexus was like that for me as well, and it didn't help that the combat of the game starts off very poorly. Never have I played an action game centered around fast paced combat that has such sluggish controls. Every hit you take knocks you down and it takes over 5 seconds for your character to get up, which was amazingly bad. Dodge doesn't cancel out of an attack so if you are mid-attack animation and you're about to get hit you are going to fall down and that 5 seconds is long enough to really ruin the pace of combat. The best strategy early is to just bait attacks, dodge, then counter attack, rinse repeat.
The big selling point to the combat is the mind powers that you and your party have. The main character (either boy or girl) both have the same power so it doesn't matter who you pick. Their power is to pick up shit around the level and bash the bad guys with it. Thus every level you can be assured is littered with crap, trash cans, cars, pipes, poles, just shit everywhere for you bash power with. Additionally once you get squad mates they all have their own powers that you can "borrow" to add to your own. For example borrowing the fire lady's power gives all your basic attacks added fire damage which some enemies will be weak to.
Once you get over the hurdle of the combat at the beginning, your character begins to level up and unlocking talents in a skill tree. These talents are things like Air Dodging, and perfect dodge counter attacks, or the biggest thing for me.....Pressing circle let's you dodge out of getting knocked down which removed that annoying 5 second get up animation. The more you unlock the better combat feels it's just a shame that doing so causes the first impressions of combat suck massive ass. Seriously I was really regretting this game pretty quickly.
Thankfully both the anime stuff and the combat improves pretty quickly. By my third hours, I was actually getting to enjoy the characters in my group, and the combat felt much much better. There are still problems in combat, as the lack of attack cancelling is a pain in the ass, but it's not as much of a big deal anymore.
The big selling point about the story in Scarlet Nexus is that both the characters have their own stories. So picking either the boy or the girl will actually change the story and to get the whole picture you have to play the game twice. These stories run parallel with each other so I believe that both characters will have the same major plot hooks, however each character will have a different collection of side characters, and different sub events. The saving grace is that when you beat the game, you can start the other character in NG+ which allows you to basically be overpowered and broken for the second playthrough to see that story.
There is a little Persona in the game too, you bond with your party by giving them gifts and hanging out between missions, and have bonding episodes which have little subplots to let you journey and get to know the characters better. It's not done nearly as well as Persona, but the characters get expanded enough that you might end up liking a character more than you think. It's alright.
There other thing I want to bring up is the level design. It's bad, and many missions take place in the same map, sometimes with a different skin, and sometimes exactly the same. Which is a bummer, it just makes running missions a bit too repetitive for my liking, and considering im just under 5 hours in, I shouldn't already be bored of the repeating levels. Maybe it changes up later, and I'm sure there will be at least SOME new locations, but if this is anything to judge so far it wont be very many.
Im torn on Scarlet Nexus to be honest. It's growing on me, but it still isn't super great and there are niggles that annoy me and bring me out of the experience. If you like this kind of anime, then you'll probably enjoy this game and be all on board despite the jank. But if you aren't much of an anime fan then this might be a harder sell for you and maybe wait for a sale or something.
