I waffle between if this is merely a shelved game or something I've fully abandoned. There's a very simple appeal to this game when the combat is fully clicking, though I personally find that feeling fleeting and often left to chance. I also don't think I was all that far away from seeing the end of Kasane's storyline!

But godDAMN did the animé of it all get on my nerves the deeper into the story I got. Character motivations are absolutely bewildering, to the point it's completely senseless to try and care about any of these characters. Perhaps a less, uh, faithful (?) translation could have helped make this stuff more palatable, but as it stands the dialogue is pretty putrid, often amounting to little more than tepid high school hallway flirtation during the literal end of days.

Which is a real shame because, in a year full of some really fun surprises and story beats, nothing caught my eye and sparked my imagination more than an early beat around the end of Chapter 3, in which a seemingly major character undergoes a horrifying metamorphosis into something, well, Other. Not only was it genuinely shocking in a game that otherwise deploys tropes like railgun fire, the design of the character smashed Nier: Automata's tech-horror into Bloodborne's body-horror so violently that the visage still looms large in my memory to this day. It's incredible!

Unfortunately, from there I couldn't help but slowly, by one thousand cuts, wish I was doing literally anything other than playing Scarlet Nexus. The previous year I'd wound up spending a lot of time with Japanese-made or Japanese-language video games, a first since the RPG boom of the SNES and PS1 era, so when critics began to line up behind this one as an interesting game of the year possibility this summer I thought, sure, I'm game!

But nah, man. This game was ultimately just one tiny disappointment after another. On second thought - yeah, this is definitely dropped for good.