I like to take things apart. Not literally, of course – I disassembled a broken PS4 controller once in hopes of fixing it, and not only did I not fix it, I couldn’t put it back together – but figuratively, in terms of staring at media and trying to figure out how it works. Every time I play a new game, I have no choice but to ponder what it’s doing, and what I’m experiencing, and how those two things overlap. It’s fun for me, but one thing I’ve noticed is that I generally have a lot more to say about things that don’t work for me than things that do.

When I finished Scarlet Nexus, that tendency toward negativity struck me. It wasn’t because I had issues with Scarlet Nexus, but because I had almost none; I enjoyed the game from start to finish, and I think it artfully accomplished everything it set out to do, and what it set out to do amounted to exactly the game I wanted to play. I loved playing as Yuito, the boring nerd male protagonist who mopes around thinking about his dad and brother all the time, swinging his sci-fi sword and trying to save his equally boring nerd best friend. I loved playing as Kasane, the autistic-coded female protagonist who is orders of magnitude more competent than Yuito, but is so tunnel-vision-focused on protecting her sister that she barely functions. I loved it all.

Me experiencing an acute case of Gamer Euphoria

As a result, I felt like I should write about Scarlet Nexus. Don’t be so negative all the time, I thought, write about the stuff you like, too. Unfortunately, what I find more often than not is that when I want to write about something I like, there just isn’t much to say. I didn’t arrive at any particular aspect of Scarlet Nexus that made it function so well, so much as an amalgam of features that added up to something pleasing. It’s got JRPG hangout vibes in its downtime periods. It’s got a sprawling cast of well-drawn characters with unfolding personalities and motivations. It’s got smooth action RPG combat with a variety of character-based special abilities that ultimately feels like FFXVI, except instead of not liking it, I liked it. It even allows for the joy of a full platinum trophy run in a single playthrough, sort of. What else could I ask for?

That’s not an interesting observation, though. There’s no thesis there, no argument to be made. It’s just a list of positive qualities that I liked, and if a list of bullet points is all I have, I’m not sure if there’s any point in writing about it, as opposed to just shooting out a post on one of any number of rapidly-decaying social media sites that says “this was cool lol.” I’m not really trying to write a review here, after all, not courting the clicks of some lizard-brained product connoisseur who’s just out to get mad when a recommendation doesn’t use an adequately objective scoring methodology or when Jason Schreier causes a game to be delayed.

Who can say no to the directness of BP (Brain Points)?

No, when I talk about what I liked in a game, it’s very often a purely subjective observation, something I can’t argue at all, which feels almost divorced from the whole concept of criticism. For example, I can tell you that Scarlet Nexus tapped into some deep and rotten part of my subconscious by including a feature in which you are encouraged to constantly find, purchase, and craft gifts for your various friends, all of whom are gathered in your underground bunker base. All the gifts flesh out their personalities, and they end up displaying them in their personal space within the base, messing around with them like idiots as idle animations. That pierces my core like a saccharine bullet fired by some Anime Military High School Sniper, and my only regret is that I ever ran out of gifts to buy. It’s a joy, something I truly loved about the game, but I don’t think it functions on any level higher than a rote marriage of pleasing character development earned by Video Game Points. That’s fine. Why not?

I can speak to other things I enjoyed about it, like the fact that despite a lot of tropes feeling similar to other franchises – the Legend of Heroes games, in particular – it never devolves into an anime harem situation the way they do, despite the initial setup looking like it might lead to that. Or I could tell you that the combat actually felt fresh throughout the game, full of a gradually-expanding roster of special teammate abilities that I consistently ended up using. In most games, even some of my favorites, there are mechanics that you see in tutorials and immediately say to yourself, “well, I’m not going to do that.” Scarlet Nexus seemed destined for such an outcome, but they were all intuitive, easy to use, regularly applicable. It felt great.

Checking out my pal's rack of gifts

That doesn’t add up to anything, though. It’s a list of things I like, and it seems to highlight the disparate purposes of games as an art form: I can critique narrative and design all I want, but there’s always going to be a level – a more important level, ultimately – where nothing matters other than the way a particular game plugs into my particular brain at a particular moment in time and makes all the chemicals flow. It’s similar to the way reviews of movies begin to break down in their ability to effectively communicate once you start looking at the kinds of movies one might describe as “genre shlock.” There may be something there to critique, to take apart and examine, but there also may be nothing but pure sensory input, the kind that’s destined to have a wildly different impact depending on individual mood, and appetite, and expectation.

It’s hard to find a way in when you have no grievance, when you have no story to tell about what a game could have been or should have been, and instead can only talk about your own individual and potentially incoherent experience, the result of countless wildly subjective inputs and conditions that you can barely begin to explain to somebody else. But at the same time, it’s something you want to share, and maybe that’s worthwhile even if it isn’t a meaningful interrogation of any particular element of game design. Maybe it’s fair for me to look at something like Scarlet Nexus, a game that didn’t let me down throughout a solid 70 hours of gameplay, and just list off bullet points of the things that I liked. Maybe communicating that subjective experience is all I can really do here. In short:

This was cool lol.