Scarlet Nexus

Time for the anime adaption of a video game. And I cannot say ether, the game nor the show, was all that amazing at all. Both have a ton of issues that never get worked out, and it makes me disappointed. Both the game and the anime had potential, but the main issue was the story just let it down really bad. I can give the video game a pretty solid 6, sure the story and characters and pretty much everything outside the combat wasn’t great, but the combat was super fun the entire 60 hours I put into it. But as for the anime, best I can do is a 4. Without the combat making everything worth it, it doesn’t have much more going for it.

Starting with the story, and this applies to both the anime and the game. It is incredibly disjointed and almost random. The writers had all these sci-fi ideas that they wanted to place into a single story, but didn’t know how to make them all work together at all. You have time travel and manipulation, space ships and moon colonies, unexplained extraterritorial events, supercomputers and AI, and supernatural abilities. And I’m sure I am missing something else still as well. But it is just too much, the writers are just not good enough to make it work. So it bounces incredibly quickly between various events and ideas and issues in a way that doesn’t work at all. The previous major story event has barely been solved before they are moving onto the next major event, it just doesn’t feel very good at all. And I’m left constantly playing catch up to keep track of what is happening.

Over to the characters in the anime. This is by far were you really feel the amount of content removed from the game to make it fit in 26 episodes. The game has many individual one-on-one conversations and gift giving events to build your relationship with the team, so by the end of the game you have spent almost too much time learning random facts and doing a pretty solid job of building everyone in the main cast. The anime has cut all of that out completely. And because of that you know very little about these characters, and spend very little time with them at all. Most of them barely even get any lines of dialogue over the course of the show. And it is disappointing cause many of them had some actually pretty good character arcs in the game, but you will never see it in the anime. Instead we get much more generic team mates that we have little connection to.

Visually I think this was incredibly cheap. The CGI scenes during the fights did nothing to impress me. And just looked rather bad. But the rest of the show, I’d call it cheap and generic. It does nothing to stand out from anything else. It doesn’t even have any moments that I would call screenshot worthy. Just an overall disappointment.

Now I will say I think the anime did some small things better than the game. They changed up the locations of various events, giving them unique buildings and rooms to have the discussion in. Or had the characters doing something else at the same time as the conversation, and it is an improve it. They tried to make up for what they are lacking in time to build out the characters and events, but it isn’t enough at all.

My kinda closing thoughts for the show are. Go ahead and play the game if you have the time. How Long to Beat is putting it at around 35 hours, which would be playing through as one of the two playable characters, Kasane or Yuito. While I still don’t think it is amazing, but the combat is really fun and the characters are much better fleshed out.