LogFAQs > #961981141

19. Scarlet Nexus

It has been a significant amount of time since I kicked my anime addiction. Looking at MyAnimeList.net, it appears I stopped religiously watching anime at some point in the summer of 2018, quitting part-way through shows such as 'Attack on Titan Season 3', 'Grand Blue', and 'Chios School Road'. My official last update was on January 26, 2020 with my viewing of episode 21 of 'Neon Genesis Evangelion'. I am not sure why I stopped watching 'Neon Genesis Evangelion', as it was pretty good. I am certain, however, that anime has a pretty strong correlation with my depression. Something about the common tropes of writing combined with more mature themes, while also presenting as literal cartoons for babies, gives me an obscure form of escapism which no other hobby of mine has ever managed. When I was a high schooler, I yearned for life to be like it was inJapanese anime. When I was an adult, I yearned for the time in my life where my greatest issue was having a life unlike a Japanese anime. Anime became a coping mechanism for me, and one which was profoundly unhealthy, as I would dissociate from my reality the more consumed I became with the medium. There was a point where I literally began writing about anime, and when I begin to write about something, it has become an obsession.

I do not like anime for this reason. I will actively insult anime whenever possible almost solely to remind myself it no longer consumes me. Sometimes I think I play too many video games, and I think that is certainly true, but when I notice how I engage with my gaming hobby versus how I engaged with my anime addiction, I realize just how much better I am doing now. Were talking some wild levels of cringe while on anime. Completely delusional thinking and feeling towards others to an extent where I think I may have implanted false memories into my head. I would think myself to be schizophrenic if I werent able to correlate these mental issues to the one thing I was doing then that I am not doing now with a relatively stable and healthy brain.

I bring all this up to note that I have yet to fully kick this obsession with Japanese cartoons, evident by the fact that I saw 'Scarlet Nexus' and thought it would be fun. And it was! But the anime aesthetic has basically nothing to do with the amount of enjoyment I received from it. It actually hurts it quite a bit. 'Scarlet Nexus' is a game that prides itself far more on its writing than it actually should. The plot and setting are trite nonsense, with abnormal amounts of text and voiced dialogue put forth all for the purpose of saying nothing and doing as little as possible to differentiate itself from a shounen manga which would never receive an anime adaptation. Its possible to argue that the bar is just so low for shonen-style anime games to tell compelling stories, but even if you choose to ignore the popular 'Persona' games, efforts from the likes of 'Tales of Berseria' and 'NieR: Automata' are choosing to push video game storytelling in directions it hasnt yet gone while maintaining those tropier elements found in a standard shounen anime. 'Scarlet Nexus' chooses to bore you with an absolutely absurd amount of plot for a world which changes so little and characters sorely lacking in even the slightest bit of dynamism.

Fortunately, 'Scarlet Nexus' also contains a solid combat experience capable of lasting through its campaign, waiting until the very end to start getting stale. You have various characters in your party, each with a specific power, and the fun part is finding out ways to utilize these powers in unison to create a combat system which, while fairly shallow overall, is a blast to toy around with. They could have made this restrictive by limiting your total powers available to who you have in your party, but they dont. It gets especially neat in the last chunk of the game where you are given access to the powers of every playable character, allowing the experimentation to grow in ways the characters themselves never could. I will probably never be able to watch anime again, but if 'Scarlet Nexus' is any indication of the quality of writing present within the industry right now (Im aware its not), then I appear to be making good decisions.

Scarlet Nexus Score: 3/6