


If Scarlet Nexus only wanted to tell that story, it would probably be much more successful. The setting is indelible: An uneasy, Shadowrun-ish realm, defended by a military who are augmented with cybernetic tech that lets them leverage their brains as ammunition, holding the line against these grotesque, Escherian demons who are desperate to purge humanity from the streets. This is a very big game that's been forced into a small box. Honestly, that same issue pervades through the rest of Scarlet Nexus' trimmings. Scarlet Nexus, on the other hand, uses most of these engagements to lay on an extra veneer of exposition that the developers couldn't fit in the primary storyline, which is certainly valuable, but I didn't feel like I got to know my battalion as well as I would've liked. One day you might be tending to a drunk journalist in the bar, the next you're campaigning for a Bernie Sanders stand-in outside of Shibuya Crossing. What makes Persona great is how weird and apocryphal those journeys can be. You're almost always hanging out with your comrades at the exact same restaurant, and the plot beats are uniformly focused on a slow interrogation of the manifold injustices that comes with being a high school-aged supersoldier.

Generally though, I wish Scarlet Nexus diversified some of those outings a little better. After all, if you've been able to see the future since you were a baby, there's no telling what horrors you might accidentally witness. In particular, I was taken by Tsugumi, a young clairvoyant who confided some deep trauma with me on one of the first times we hung out. (At one friendship tier, I could summon a chummy teammate into an encounter for a brief onslaught, almost like tagging in a Marvel vs Capcom character.) These subplots are generally pretty good, and they help fill out the extremely dense fiction that Scarlet Nexus wants to establish. Those episodes usually reward the player with a boost in their relationship with that NPC, which allows them to be a little more savvy in your party. There, you can give gifts to your crewmates and embark on brief "bond episodes'' where you learn a little bit more about them. Scarlet Nexus doesn't move in quasi-real time like Persona, but the game does pause at certain junctures in the narrative for a brief cooldown period. In the interim moments, where you're not decapitating Others and experimenting with all your spooky, death-dealing powers, Yuiko and Kasane spend a lot of time consoling the damaged souls in their platoon. (Yes, there's a whole interlocking chain of status effects in Scarlet Nexus, yet another bit of circuity that the game flirts with.)
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I fling a drum full of oil onto a vagrant in the corner, and tap into an ally's pyrokinesis to set them on fire and score some lingering bonus damage. All of these effects can have a drastic impact on the combat an Other in the distance shields its weak spot whenever I draw close, so I borrow my friend's teleportation ability to blink up into striking distance without the beast noticing. Some are sclerokinetic, which grants invulnerability, or electrokinetic, or clairvoyant, and the player can tap into those skills at any time-which is kinda like popping a cooldown in an MMO. The party has a diverse suite of supernatural expertise. Those accomplices aren't controlled directly, and honestly I found them to do pretty negligible damage overall, but they do play a vital role. Scarlet Nexus never approaches the level of technique displayed by true Bayonetta lifers-there are hardly any combos to memorize or weapons to master-but it was flashy enough to sustain me till the final chapters.Īlong the way, Yuiko and Kasane have access to their small travelling band of other psionic teens. Mix that in with your melee strikes, and you have an elementally satisfying mixture of acrobatics and violence that rivals Ninja Gaiden, God of War, or any other mid-2000s button-mash classic. Both protagonists are psychokinetic, and by holding the right trigger you'll send whatever piece of debris is nearby hurling towards an enemy's face. This isn't a problem, because Namco has generated an excellent combat system here. Yes, Yuito and Kasane can traipse around the map to loot overlooked corridors and uncover a few sidequests, but for the most part, your time in Scarlet Nexus will be spent zoning into an area, killing a ton of bad guys, and enjoying the grave cutscenes that split up the setpieces. You will complete this investigation on a level-by-level basis.
