SCARLET NEXUS

ANIME

STATUS
COMPLETE
EPISODES
26
RELEASE
December 23, 2021
LENGTH
24 min

DESCRIPTION

Solar calendar year 2020: grotesque organisms called Others have begun eating people. To take down this new enemy, the Other Suppression Force is formed. Saved by this elite team as a child, psychokinetic Yuito withstands the training to enlist. On the other hand, prodigy Kasane was scouted for her abilities. But Kasane’s dreams tell her strange things, dragging the two into an unavoidable fate.

(Source: Funimation)

CAST

Kasane Randall
Asami Seto
Yuito Sumeragi
Junya Enoki
Arashi Spring
Yui Horie
Tsugumi Nazar
Marika Kouno
Shiden Ritter
Kengo Kawanishi
Hanabi Ichijo
Tomomi Mineuchi
Kyoka Eden
Yumi Hara
Kagero Donne
Daisuke Namikawa
Naomi Randall
Asuka Nishi
Nagi Karman
Yuuma Uchida
Luka Travers
Chinatsu Akasaki
Karen Travers
Nobuyuki Hiyama
Gemma Garrison
Ryouta Takeuchi
Seto Narukami
Hiroki Takahashi
Fubuki Spring
Isshin Chiba
Wataru Frazer
Kengo Takanashi
Kaito Sumeragi
Chikahiro Kobayashi
Joe Sumeragi
Tsutomu Isobe
Haruka Frazer
Tomoyo Kurosawa

EPISODES

Dubbed

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REVIEWS

SpiritChaser
40/100
This series is a dumpster fire that burns brighter with every episode. At the very least it's entertaining trash.
This series is a dumpster fire that burns brighter with every episode. At the very least it's entertaining trash. I grew fascinated with just how bad this series folded out to be as the story continued to be what felt like endless amounts of nonsensical sci-fi plots thrown together into a blender. Instead of reaching any kind of resolve to it's plot, it just keeps on unnecessarily adding and adding more until the very end, on top of a sea of plot twists also.

I sat horrified as a witness to the Others; the most terribly designed CGI monsters I have ever seen. I can't help but laugh and be unable to take giant vases with flowers and legs seriously as they wobble towards trying to kill people. Add to this some of the most lazy animation ever; that being the constant use of still frames during fights with flashy lights and cheap effects added to make it look like "animation." Not only that, this series has a hilarious obsession with having the characters sit down on the couch and talk boring exposition for so long, so many times, it becomes very noticeable. The music is terrible and I couldn't get into any of the openings and endings.

In that giant group of terribly written characters, nearly half of them get no development or barely any, and the viewers are constantly forgetting that some of them exist. Some of them spend 95% percent of their screen time across 26 episodes literally just standing there. But there is one diamond in the rough; that being Arashi. She is the only good thing about Scarlet Nexus. It's tragic that such a great character got stuck in such a terrible series.

The plot is so messy and convoluted I am not even sure how to talk about it without getting a headache. It's about saving the present because everyone died in the future besides the one who caused it. Time Travelling has allowed one of the cast to see who this is and then go back without explaining herself as to why that person must die. Thus, she gets looked upon as if she is out of her mind. A military group featuring kids with super natural abilities has been created to fight the Others I mentioned earlier to protect humanity. There are secret organizations turning humans into monsters, more secret organizations in the snowy parts of the world, and even more secret organizations on the moon. The main cast are constantly splitting into factions and everyone starts betraying each other. This is just the beginning of the story, really.

Then there's the man with the obsession over a woman who isn't even his. Karen is hellbent on bringing back Alice even though her own man told him to stop and get over it. That doesn't stop Karen from resetting time a ridiculous amount of times and throwing tantrums at the main cast. Still, I do respect him for his insanely driven motivation to help her. I find it odd that Fubuki didn't want in on this plan, but he didn't seem to see the need for it and preferred to move on I suppose.

The characters are nearly all annoying, boring, and overall badly written and forgettable:

Yuito is yet another bland protagonist blinded with his naïve feelings of love and friendship. He almost dies several times because his logic is that flawed.

Kasane is the even more annoying version of Yuito. She has the personality of a 60 year old librarian.

Kagerou is the smug, ancient like human that exists for not much rather than to make jokes.

Kyouga has the most inconsistent character model out of all of them and is constantly shape shifting as a result. She was reduced to a piece of fan service meat eventually.

Hanabi's only purpose is to scream out Yuito's name and cry whenever he is in trouble. I think her power was fire manipulation, but they completely abandoned trying to animate her in battle very early on.

Gemma and Shiden have only received seconds amount of screen time and are so insignificant I can't even remember anything about them. It doesn't even matter.

Luka is Karen's little brother that does nothing much than to have to look at his brother's stubbornly psychotic ways. He can teleport the main cast which gives the writers a cheap and easy way to get the team out of trouble.

Tsugumi does nothing other than to use her ability to slightly see the future to give the writers a cheap and easy way to get the team out of trouble.

Arashi is the only character that matters. She doesn't care about all the drama and nonsense in the plot. She knows what needs to get done, and puts in a lot of work herself since she is a hacker that can move extremely fast. She doesn't let things get to her unlike the coward crybaby Yuito, and often takes it easy and eats good food while relaxing. She often lays around and feels to have to put up with the nonsense of the team. She has the most relevant lines in the series and is like a voice of reason.

The Scarlet Nexus ride was amusing, but this is something I want to forget moving forward.
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ThyMrMan
40/100
Go play the game, at least the combat is really fun and enjoyable.
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.
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