English Dub Review: Scarlet Nexus “Red Strings”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

After being ambushed by a squadron of their fellow Scarlet Guardians, Yuito and Kasane are thrown into a battle for their lives. Things aren’t looking very good, but then Nagi shows up and Yuito breathes a sigh of relief. However, this isn’t the Nagi we’re familiar with, as he seems to have been brainwashed.

He starts attacking his former friends with the goal of wiping them out of existence, but luckily Captain Seto steps in to defend them. Nagi has new powers though, and he ends up stabbing the Captain several times before the Captain is able to zap him into submission. Later on, Yuito and company learn more about what went down and why from Gemma, who regrets helping fight in the attack against them.

Karen’s machinations lead to a battle between comrades until a new threat arrives, claiming all around it. Yuito and company lick their wounds as they learn about Karen’s motives. Others swarm into Suoh, and Kasane and company awake in a strange place.

Our Take:

Scarlet Nexus has played it relatively safe for the first three episodes I’d say, but starting this week things get pretty insane. Not necessarily in a good way, though. There’s a lot of surprises in this week’s episode. Red Strings has a lot of strings going every which way, and for those who haven’t had any experience with the video game it’s based upon, I would imagine things could be pretty confusing.

We pick up right where we left off, which is to say not in a good place for our heroes. Yuito and Kasane have an entire legion of OSF soldiers surrounding them, including some real toughies like Gemma. They’re outnumbered and surrounded, but what’s even worse is that Nagi shows up spewing nonsense about weeding them out and exterminating those who believe Naomi turned into an Other. He winds up killing Captain Seto in the most overdramatic way possible, as Yuito and Kasane look on doing nothing while Seto heroically steps in front of Nagi’s attack. Nagi then waits to attack again while Seto monologues at them all and gets close enough to take Nagi out himself.

Apparently, the government has long been experimenting with out there methods that cause things like slowed aging and personality changes. In the last few minutes of the episode, Gemma informs Yuito and his fellow reminding squad members that Nagi has likely undergone personality rehab and that he himself is really 54 years old. It’s not exactly a startling revelation, but it’s becoming even clearer now that not everything in Scarlet Nexus is quite as simple as it once seemed.

Red Strings really is pretty wild in how much it shakes up the status quo that was already just barely established. Yuito has gone from being a proud OSF member to straight up yeeting a fellow OSF member out of existence without question. Nagi is now a murderer and, oh yeah, A GIANT EYEBALL HAS SWALLOWED KASANE INTO THE SKY. No idea what’s up with that, but it seems to be connected to those red strings that Kasane has been seeing. There’s also the question of General Karen and just how much he’s in league with the government—hopefully next week’s episode will have some answers!