Psychic Slickness
While we’ve been hearing a lot about the world, concepts, and characters of Bandai Namco’s upcoming hack ‘n’ slash RPG, Scarlet Nexus, we haven’t seen too much in the way of actual gameplay. Fortunately, a publisher live stream held to “celebrate the release date announcement” contains around 20 minutes of action from the “Brainpunk” adventure.
The video is a little unwieldy, but features multiple short segments that showcase both the action and exploration elements of the upcoming sci-fi title, which follows a unit of psychic warriors – The OSF – as they attempt to take Earth back from an invading force of literal brain-eaters known as “The Others,” drawn to the planet by its sudden radiance of mental energy.
The gameplay footage has more than a touch of Nier: Automata about it – at least in regards to combat and flow – and sees The OSF touring the city of “New Himuka” (1:07), showing off their respective attacks and abilities (1:19), delving into Scarlet Nexus‘ “Bond” system (1:24) and then putting it all to work in a series of chaotic throwdown with several Others, climaxing in a mighty boss battle with a skin-crawly giant (1:28).
Scarlet Nexus might not be a release at the forefront of everyone’s minds, but I can’t help but sense a little Astral Chain about it. That is to say, perhaps the Brainpunk adventure will receive a relatively quiet release, but will fast find favor among anime and action games fans, becoming more successful than many were initially expecting. With the recent announcement of a tie-in anime, produced by Sunrise no less, it does seem that Bandai Namco will be throwing a lot of weight behind Scarlet Nexus from a marketing standpoint.
To be cliched, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and as such it is important to get a physical feel for Scarlet Nexus in action. Hopefully Bandai Namco will see fit to release a demo before the game’s official launch, June 25, on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox platforms.
Scarlet Nexus gameplay video [Gematsu]