REVIEW : SCARLET NEXUS (PS5)
Scarlet Nexus has grown a little too large for its boots. Bandai Namco’s latest original game aims high—it’s action RPG mix with Devil May Cry-style swordplay and Monster Hunter weak spot targeting, all wrapped up in an epic storey that seems to explore a new high-concept sci-fi idea with each chapter. A Persona-like relationship system, an interconnected network of psychic powers, and a slew of frilly, decorative customization options may be found in the margins. It’s amazing how close it comes to accomplishing all of that at once.
You play as Yuito Sumeragi or Kasane Randall, two young members of the OSF, a paramilitary fighting team. They’ve been tasked with annihilating these terrifying, eldritch entities known only as “The Others,” who are laying siege to our futuristic, intriguing, and slightly unsettling society. Both characters have comprehensive campaigns that intersect at certain junkets, giving players a lot to think about once they’ve completed their main journey through the plot.
Whatever viewpoint you select, you’ll begin by following orders and cleaning out swarming pods of Others on the limits of human civilisation, before the plot takes a darker, increasingly cryptic turn. Who are these creatures we’re slaughtering? What’s in those shipments that are constantly leaving the city?
You will complete this investigation level by level. Yes, Yuito and Kasane can wander around the map, looting overlooked hallways and uncovering a few sidequests, but the majority of your time in Scarlet Nexus will be spent zoning into a region, killing a tonne of bad people, and enjoying the grave cutscenes that break up the setpieces. This isn’t an issue because Namco has created an outstanding combat system.
Both protagonists are psychokinetic, and by holding the right trigger, you can launch whatever debris is close to an enemy’s face. When you combine it with your melee strikes, you get an elementally satisfying blend of acrobatics and violence that rivals Ninja Gaiden, God of War, or any other mid-2000s button-mash classic. Scarlet Nexus doesn’t have the amount of technique demonstrated by true Bayonetta lifers—there aren’t many combos to learn or weapons to master—but it’s showy enough to keep me going to the end.
Yuiko and Kasane have access to their small travelling band of other psychic youths along the route. Those accomplices aren’t directly controlled, and to be honest, I found them to inflict very little damage overall, but they do play an important part.
By the end of the game, I was shooting off many psi blasts simultaneously, before overloading Yuiko’s brain and shelling my opponents with large chunks of black shrapnel. One of my favourite concepts that Scarlet Nexus finally implements is a “brain crush” gauge that appears beneath The Others’ health metres. It functions similarly to Sekiro’s posture system in that the protagonist can wear down the enemy with a combination of psychic and physical assaults before unleashing a stunning coup d’etat that leaves their remaining HP entirely obsolete.
Those animations are violent and pure anime, the kind of thing that could be combined in a single bloody YouTube video like Mortal Kombat fatalities. After progressing through the talent trees, an action game should make the player feel like a god, and Bandai Namco passes that criteria with flying colours.
Brain overdrive
Yuiko and Kasane spend a lot of time consoling the wounded souls in their squad while you’re not decapitating Others and playing with all your eerie, death-dealing powers. Scarlet Nexus does not move in real-time like Persona, but it does halt at key points in the storey for a brief cooldown period. There, you can offer your crewmates gifts and participate in little “bond episodes” where you discover a little bit more about them. Those experiences usually reward the player with an improvement in their friendship with that NPC, allowing them to be a little savvier in your group.
These subplots are often rather strong, and they contribute to the extremely thick fiction that Scarlet Nexus wishes to construct. Tsugumi, a young clairvoyant who revealed in me some deep trauma on one of our first dates, particularly captivated me. After all, if you’ve been able to see the future since you were a baby, there’s no telling what atrocities you might end up witnessing by accident.
The same can be said for Scarlet Nexus’ overworld, which is portrayed in Fineline anime cartooning and features a superb J-Pop jingle. Unfortunately, the downtown hub is only a few blocks away, and the game has an annoying tendency to repeat previous level layouts for new tasks. A heinous crime! The sidequests are particularly amusing; you talk to a random stranger on the street, and they tell you to go kill the Other archetype in a certain way. Your reward is almost always nothing more than a healing potion. The Scarlet Nexus creative team set out to launch a daring new franchise, but the scale they were working with failed them down.
But, to be honest, it gives me hope for the future.
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