3/5 ★ – Fernofai's review of Scarlet Nexus.

Scarlet Nexus is something between Visual Novel and Action game like Nier Automata. The story is set in a whole new genre called "Brainpunk". And the genre communicates very well with the games world having a very unique visual style (plus that Anime aesthetics which also fit very well into it). The story on the other hand is very complex and it couldn't motivate me enough to dive as deep into it as I had to, if I'd want to confirm my fear that there are many problems with the plot. After every chapter in the game a new twist is thrown at you including all conspiracies which you ever heard of. At some point I need to laugh heavily cause Character A needed to explain why he/she is 2000 years old. Character B: "Cryogenic sleep?" Character A: "Yep." Okay then. Because the game has two main characters, with each of which you need to play the game to get the full story, I thought the overall story would be more clear after I replayed the game with the other character, but nah. The only new thing you get from playing the game a second time with the other character is a better insight in the motivation and background of some of the characters. Gameplay and stuff remains mostly the same besides the characters fighting with different weapons. The combat in Scarlet Nexus is a lot of fun and gets more complex with progressing in the game. As with the plot twists you get a new mechanic like every other chapter and it doesn't stop until the end of the game. I thought maybe this could get too much and too complicated but I actually ended up using most of the mechanics and felt great while spamming the enemies with a bunch of different special moves. Unfortunately there were not that many different enemy types and the boss fights were also not that spectacular because either you fought some of the human characters which would somehow get away after you defeated them anyway, or some huge "Others" (the monsters in this game) which looked really cool but maybe a bit too difficult to describe (search for images in Google and you'll now what I mean) to remember them as with iconic bosses in Dark Souls or so. The Visual Novel part of the game could be very annoying for people who actually wanted to play the Action game Scarlet Nexus. There is a lot of talking and most of these "cutscenes" are only visualized with some Manga panels. But while the games main story couldn't convince me, the characters and the dialogues definitely could. With each of them you can go through so called "bond episodes" to really get close to them and reveal many interesting and memorable twists and turns behind what first seems like the typical Anime stereotypes. In the different areas you can find materials which are named like "Region X A/B/C" and with which you can buy/craft upgrades and stuff. Maybe because of the lazy naming or because I am not the "Looter" type of player I never especially searched for specific items, picked up some of them if I felt like and only used them to buy gifts for the characters. If I could decide I wouldn't have implemented that whole system and instead spent more time on fully animating the cutscenes. If you like games liked Nier or Devil May Cry because of the combat system, you will be very happy with this. But if you don't want to spend half of the game with reading dialogues, you probably don't want to play Scarlet Nexus.