The right shoulder button plus a face button grants you a buff (called Combat Vision) from a party member, like hyperspeed, electric attacks or teleportation.
The face buttons provide your basic attacks (melee sword swings for Yuito, and ranged knife throws for Kasane) and also let you dodge and jump. The d-pad allows you to scroll through and use items. You have a vast array of combat options, and Scarlet Nexus makes great use of the entire controller to grant you quick access. When the crush gauge is reduced to zero, you can activate a flashy instant kill move called a Brain Crush that guarantees an item drop. The basic flow involves beating up enemies to either reduce their health or crush gauge. The bulk of your time in Scarlet Nexus is spent in combat, and this is also where the game shines brightest. This not only looks appropriately stylized, but it doesn’t make the cutscenes feel low budget like other attempts in a similar vein often do. While some cutscenes are fully animated, others are instead presented in a manga style, with each panel featuring minor animations. Bandai Namco has also found a good solution for the more minimalist cutscenes in Scarlet Nexus. Characters and backgrounds fit together well, expressions are emotionally readable, and everything is silky smooth in all its neon glory. Outside of the Others, Scarlet Nexus’s art is more classically “anime.” In my opinion, the game owns this aesthetic and is one of the best examples of the style. His designs are uniquely unsettling (NSFW warning if you plan on looking him up) and fit the alien nature of the creatures within the game, lending Scarlet Nexus a powerful visual impact. They were designed by Masakazu Yamashiro, an independent Japanese artist who has never worked on a video game before and is known for his twisted creations. However, one way in which Scarlet Nexus stands out and claims its own identity is the look of the Others. For example, the standard healing item is called a jelly - a clear reference to the gels of the Tales series, which serve the same function.
SCARLET NEXUS MANGA SERIES
Scarlet Nexus’s development team includes many Tales series veterans, and you don’t have to look hard to notice it. There are characters who struggle with this, such as scarred veterans who are child soldiers that were never allowed to grow up.ĭon’t sweat which protagonist you choose. A lot of anime and RPGs have characters of indeterminate age, and it is something of a meme at this point, but Scarlet Nexus utilizes this as an important in-world concept. Psionic abilities deteriorate with age, so promising young people are scouted into the military and fed anti-aging drugs. So the government formed the Other Suppression Force, a group of powerful psionics trained in combat (whether they wish it or not), to counter the Others. Others come from the Extinction Belt, a mysterious cloud-like substance that encircles the planet. What are soldiers being killed by, you ask? The Others - grotesque creatures that are an amalgam of organic and inorganic matter such as human, animal and plant parts as well as mechanical and household objects.
These powers are used in conjunction with a massive computer network to create a world of telepathic communication, instant data look-up, cyberpunk-esque neon, and jazzy electronic beats.Įarly on, you see how the government uses the network to control every experience of its citizens, even censoring the corpses of soldiers killed in action to protect the mental state of your party. It’s set on an alternate Earth where 99% of the human population has psionic powers. Luckily, we didn’t have to wait too long to have Scarlet Nexus in hand, and it enters the playing field as a unique, strange, sometimes messy, but ultimately worthwhile experience.īandai Namco coined the term “brainpunk” to describe Scarlet Nexus, and the final product does much to live up to this new genre.
SCARLET NEXUS MANGA CODE
Connections were immediately drawn to Bandai Namco’s Code Vein due to Nexus’s art style, and while some quickly wrote it off as just another anime game, a few (like myself) got very excited to see a brand new JRPG. When first revealed at Xbox 20/20 last year, Scarlet Nexus came as a surprise announcement during an uncertain time for video game news and consequently drew many eyes.
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