Skinypupy wrote: Mon Dec 04, 2023 11:31 am
I bought
Scarlet Nexus ages ago and spent an hour or two with it twice. Bounced off it both times because it felt like the combat would be way to difficult for my old, uncoordinated self to manage. Didn't have anything else that I was interested in, so I randomly fired it up on a whim yesterday...and spent almost 6 hours with it. Once I got past the initial learning curve, I realized that it has one of the most fun combat systems I've played quite a while. The anime sci-fi story is really well done as well, and I am completely hooked. Third time's the charm, I guess.
Finished Scarlet Nexus today and decided that it is 3/4 of a really good game. See, for the first 18'ish hours, it tells a really interesting story, has fun combat, has a simplified Persona-ish social system, and looks great. Unfortunately, the final 6 hours are a
complete and utter disaster.
The story collapses from interesting to a mish-mash of tired anime cliches. The last two zones are boring, mind-numbing slogs where the game doesn't bother to do anything new or interesting, instead choosing to simply throw waves and waves of enemies at you. None of it is particularly hard, it's just hours and hours of repetitive grind. The level design looks like they just...gave up, with one level being nothing but nondescript, dull black and white hallways, and the last level being a mash-up copy/paste of all the other areas in the game. I'm guessing they also ran out of concept art for the truly unique "Others" that you fight against (weird combinations of household objects with human features), because the final hours are simply pallet swaps of previous mobs. The dialog that had been interesting turned completely lifeless, the characters all become one-note tropes, and the whole thing just devolves into a wholly forgettable mess.
I slogged through simply because I had put in so much time already and had enjoyed most of it, and I figured there had to be some sort of redeeming quality (plus, I wanted to add one more completed game to the 2023 list). There was no way a game could
completely fall off a cliff the way this one did. It did very slightly redeem itself with a cool final boss battle, but then veered right back into anime nonsense land to wrap up the story.
If you would have asked me at the 10 hour mark, I would have said this game is an easy 9/10. Now that I'm done, I think a 6/10 would be
really generous. probably closer to 4 or 5.
When darkness veils the world, four Warriors of Light shall come.
But I suppose it's not much different than having a library of books. You needn't read them all, they're just there if you ever want them. Which I think is something Blackhawk previously said.
So that's cool.
