I love JRPGs.
I know as someone who is at least a bit of a gamer that I shouldn’t utter that sentence, but I do. I like it when I get a game that has a fantastical world wrapped up in a sweeping story that carries you onward, held together with freaky random encounters, eons of side quests, and probably duct tape in there somewhere. So, this season we’re taking on an anime that is literally a JRPG, Scarlet Nexus.
And, on the surface, JRPGs seem like the second best kind of game to attempt to adapt into a narrative rather than interactive media format (the best, of course, being Visual Novels). However, good luck finding an example of that actually being done well in practice, because you’re going to need it. That is, however, not what Scarlet Nexus is… at least not exactly. Here, the game and the show have been prepared to release at the same time, as wings of one cohesive multimedia project rather than a source material and an adaptation attempting to use that source material as a script. Typically, multimedia projects like that are at least mixed bags. True, creative effort can be stretched thin or different teams have communication issues, but you’re also not dealing with transitioning a story into a medium it was never meant to inhabit, so there’s theoretically greater freedom and has been, historically, at least some greater degree of success.
And, for the record, I won’t be gaining or using any knowledge from the game while the season is ongoing. I might look at it later, as its own thing, but for right now I am solely concerned with the anime.
We open up in a sort of esper-cyberpunk future where we see high technology (holograms everywhere!) and our lead characters, Yuito and Nagi, sparring with psychic powers (Aerokinesis for Nagi, proper object-lifting psychokinesis for Yuito) until their alarm goes off, warning them that they need to hurry or they’ll be late for the big entrance ceremony for the Scarlet Guardians. Along the way we learn that Yuito is famous – his father is a top-ranked politician and his elder brother is the commander of the Guardians, meaning he’s a person of public interest in a huge way.
At the ceremony, we briefly encounter the Randall siblings, Naomi (who Nagi is drawn to the cuteness of) and adopted sister Kasane (who Yuito feels a strange bond with). The sisters are also highly placed, Yuito having seen them at affairs of state in the past. People are then sorted into their own teams, getting us a bigger starting party for Yuito, and shortly are called out to answer the arrival of Others, the random encounter monsters that meanace mankind like every other gribbly random encounter monster in every other “humanity on the brink” scenario.
The Others we’ve seen so far, I will say, are really creative designs. True a killer bouquet with long legs and stiletto shoes is insane, but the Final Fantasy rejects are at least a little more visually inventive than a lot of cookie cutter monsters (for a particularly bad example, see the Savage from Hundred).
Yuito and Nagi are initially benched for the fight, staying in reserve, but strike out when they receive notice that a civilian (a little girl) is being menaced by the monsters. They protect her, but someone needs to protect them, and the sisters show up to do just that, Naomi working with Nagi and Kasane teaming up however temporarily with Yuito. This causes Yuito to have a flashback to a time he was rescued by a mysterious unknown Scarlet Guardian, filling in Kasane’s present face and form over the dark blur the memory previously was. We don’t follow up yet, whether this is his perception or if we’re heading for a time distorion, but there’s certainly some weird unseen connection between them to be had.
On the debriefing, we learn a little more about the Others, namely that they seem to attack in order to eat human brains. Judging by the fact that this shocks our lead characters, who have trained for years to fight them, we can suspect that’s not public knowledge. Also, we cut to a more elite fighter who declares his intent to the audience and no one else to tear down the nation because it’s somehow twisted. Gruff anti-hero or a villain with a motivation more than just hunger? You decide, but for me, I’m leaning towards the latter.
All in all… it’s a JRPG opening, for sure. The characters are level 1 scrubs, the mysterious side plots are all getting kickstarted, and there are enough freaky monsters for everyone. We’ll see where they go with it next week.