Scarlet Nexus

One of the game pass "leavers" that I kind of rushed to jump in and finish, perhaps not the optimal experience for a game of this length. Especially that I was in the middle of my Tales of Arise playthrough and immediately notice many similarities in some of the systems and most probably the same engine... but as I got more into it, it's clear the games are pretty different and intend to do different things.

Scarlet Nexus has good combat it's a very Action RPG that emphasizes on the Action. The equipments are pretty bare bones with just 1 weapon slot and no armor, a very linear progression on how to upgrade them (buy at vendor or exchange some items for upgraded versions of them). Let's just say you aren't playing the game for that part. But the combat makes it worth it, full 3D battles in big areas with fast attacks, jumping, dodging and combos. Your teammates provide minor support but the best part is using their SAS abilities which all have their own specialty depending on the situation (clairvoyance to see hidden enemies, teleportation to get behind enemies, and so on...), this is really where the strategy of the battles lie on, about using which based on the variety of enemies.

The story went a little over my head, it's not badly written or anything and it's certainly ambitious, but I had a hard time really getting into it. The graphics in the cut-scenes are quite sharp tho, going with like a sort of comic book style with stills (although this is also seen in Tales games), it's perhaps one of the best aspects of the game, just the overall look of things. There's also a sort of "Persona" relationship with your teammates where as you spend more time with them, their abilities will go up. Lots of side stories with each of them, about 20% of the game is basicly spent listening to friendship cutscenes. Or they feel like they last forever anyway.

All in all I had fun with this game. It is flawed and a little limited in some aspects, but the battles are pretty challenging and had me shouting DIE ALREADY a ton of times, as the enemies are sometime pretty hard to kill with their very high health bars. Some of these battles are kind of a methodical grind, getting into the flow of things was pretty fun for me. I'm interested if Bandai will continue in this universe, it seems that there is loads of backstory and lore for it to simply be one game. Not the game of the year, but a quality one that's worth playing if you like fast action games with lite RPG systems.

We're initially grounded in the body of Yuito/Kasane, almost claustrophobically. There's a slight hesitation between pressing the jump button and the character performing it, and awkward movement through alleys and stairways suddenly bring to attention just how little control we ever had over them. We are always gelled to environments that both look good and move us through set paths, deflecting interest. It's in combat that our movement becomes fluid, and this fluidity is, curiously, achieved through the character body being divided into pieces, disappearing from the screen in flashes, and directing present action through inanimate objects. Scarlet Nexus' narrative then matches this play, as it revolves around the merits and ethics of intersubjectivity. It's when we move from Yuito/Kasane and are distributed across others that we feel free, and the rhythms of Scarlet Nexus are felt and capable of being instrumentalised. Our eyes blur across the entire field, moving and shaking, and in the moment that we become one with the chaos everything falls into place.

The spatial logic of the hack and slash dictates that environments operate only as empty stages, and that working through the possibilities of the body-in-action is exploration. Items are given glowing outlines that highlight their functionality as game objects, and during action the beautifully imagined backdrops close in, revealing the illusionism of the grey box models. There's a reason for this — Yuito/Kasane direct their interest solely to the goal at hand, and the game graphically maps itself to this hack and slash intentionality. Unfortunately the telekinetic vision that could make the environments vividly alive with possibility gradually reveals how uniform these stages really are. It doesn't help that they are so fragmented, or that our progression through them is so linear. They lack the circularity of something like Nier, where the repetition becomes akin to madness, and instead dissolve as we depart.

As the game advances the levels get more visually minimalistic and so 'true' to their nature as virtual wireframes — like in the Arkham games' detective vision, there is a kick to being granted access to the world one layer down from graphical representation. And this should compound thematically in a game about recursive timelines and datasets. Early on there's the suggestion that the top 'semantic' layer (cities, people, etc) is a simulation projected onto a ruined Real, but Scarlet Nexus ultimately asserts itself as a political (rather than existential) dystopia. The fish and skies are holograms, but the people and buildings aren't. Memories can be transferred from a central database into clones, but we're to believe in the veracity of Yuito/Kasane. It tones down cybernetic/End of History ambiguities to make the case for concrete history and identities, but so why then does it all feel so dead and empty?

As the game through long static expositional sequences divulges its ultimately straightforward narrative (major players capable of manipulating space-time to their own personal/emotional ends), it's Satori the Archivist who continues to warrant interest. Saving and loading states is performed through this mysterious figure who is always there, at home, in dreams, in protected locations, and whose voice becomes less and less human. Early on the Archivist explains his position as a recorder of events for his employer (the same one as that of the protagonist), and this makes sense as the prevalence of surveillance and news networks is underscored as a fact of life in New Himuka. Before long it's clear that he's not actually working for anyone, and admits that he is 'air, and shadow' — an inhuman force that binds and gives shape to all things. This undermines the character-centric form the narrative takes, and insists on the eeriness of Scarlet Nexus' questions of time and virtuality from the sideline. That is, it is not us as Yuito/Kasane moving through concrete space that drives the game; our experience is only the flow of records kept by the Archivist who personifies the immanent code of the game system. It's the air, the shadows, it's God.

i put up with this hideous, desaturated, beige filter for code vein but im starting to wonder why this is the direction we've gone in two separate games when all it does is make these anime characters look like they exist in a world that desperately needs to be power washed