Part RPG and Part Visual Novel, Scarlet Nexus Is Flashy, Well-Written, and a Little Too Bloated

Each member of the OSF has a power, like turning invisible or summoning a holographic double, as do the vast majority of humans living in New Himuka. Yuito and Kasane have distinct fighting styles, but their power is the same—psychokinesis—and it plays a prominent role in battle, allowing the player to pick up objects on the battlefield and ram them into enemies at Mach 10 speeds. It feels like a smoother take on the Force powers from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Hold the right trigger and an object in the environment will lift up and fly toward your targeted enemy. Hold the left trigger, though, and it initiates a heavy attack that is complicated and time-consuming to pull off. Nailing these harder hits requires inputting distinct button presses in a quick-time event. I’m not generally a fan of QTEs, but Scarlet Nexus wrings flashy fun from a dry mechanic by introducing distinct QTEs for each object. In some rooms, you can pull down the chandeliers that hang from the ceiling, quickly rotate the left stick to get them spinning like a deadly top, and then guide them around the battlefield like massive Beyblades. One level takes your platoon deep into the subway system beneath the city, where you can grab trains with psychokinesis and send them speeding into your enemies. In a level set on a snowy mountain, you can pick up a sheet of metal and ride it through the air for one-hit kill snowboarding action.

Scarlet Nexus slowly introduces you to new squadmates, and each of their abilities can be deployed in combat. The stolid Gemma can lend you his defense, making you invulnerable for a period of time. Borrow the peppy Hanabi’s fire powers and combine them with oil to light enemies up for burn damage. Some powers are necessary during exploration, too. The quick-tempered Shiden can add lightning damage to your attacks in battle, but his power is also useful for channeling electric current into switches to open gates. Scarlet Nexus is playing in the same space as miHoYo’s Genshin Impact; characters, here, serve an elemental function in addition to being key players in the story.

Getting to know your squad mates is just as important as learning to use their powers in combat. In between missions, you return to your hideout and spend time talking to your OSF pals or doling out gifts, which show up as decorations in the hideout after you give them. The bulk of this time is spent on “bonding episodes,” companion quests that can be as simple as a brief conversation or as involved as a combat-focused field mission. These episodes quickly became my favorite part of the game. Though archetypal, the characters are well-realized, and I enjoyed watching these relationships bloom over the course of the 50 hour campaign. The dialogue has its fair share of clunkers, but the main quest and these side stories are interesting enough that I remained invested until the end. Plus, they feed back into combat. As your bond level increases, you gain new cooperative moves with the character you spent time getting to know. It’s a small, smart way to link Scarlet Nexus’ disparate halves into a whole that is at least in the same neighborhood as cohesive.

That said, Scarlet Nexus does struggle, at times, to balance the combat and storytelling that comprise its loop. As I approached the end of Yuito’s campaign, my wife remarked, “It seems like you mostly watch this game.” I can’t give you an exact percentage, but yeah, it’s at least half-and-half. My biggest problem with Scarlet Nexus, though, is that those halves get considerably bigger as the game nears its conclusion. At a certain point, your squad doubles in size, which means that you have twice as many bonding episodes to watch when you return to your hideout between missions. At the same time, the combat chapters are swelling up. While a mission might take an hour to an hour-and-a-half in the early game, many of the later missions are two or three hour treks through multi-tiered dungeons. And while you can skip through dialogue—the skip prompt is, annoyingly, always on screen during cutscenes—there’s no way to speed up the dungeon-crawling.

The fights are long, too. Too long. I was struck by how often a battle would reach a point that felt like it was approaching a satisfying conclusion… and then continue for another five minutes. This feeling was certainly exacerbated by the Game Reviewer’s Dilemma, i.e. the necessity of speeding through a 50 hour game in a matter of days. Regardless of how fast you play it, though, Scarlet Nexus staggers into a strange pace in the latter half. The fights are the best they’ve been, as your roster of moves continues to grow. The companion quests get better and better as character arcs begin to pay off. But, there’s too much of both to fully enjoy either, and the game suffers from the bloat. It almost feels like the ending gets further away the closer you get to it. Maybe that’s fitting for a game about time travel. Scarlet Nexus’ strange structure has somehow bent the laws governing time to its will.

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Scarlet Nexus was developed by Bandai Namco and Tose and published by Bandai Namco. Our review is based on the Xbox Series X|S version. It is also available for the Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

Andrew King is a writer and museum caretaker living in Illinois. His work has also been featured at GameSpot, IGN and Polygon. He’s on Twitter @funnelchest94