Scarlet Nexus is a new action-RPG from Bandai Namco Entertainment, where players control characters who share their energy and abilities with each other through the eponymous "red strings." A previous Scarlet Nexus story trailer revealed a new playable character for the game, and now a new video focuses on the meaning of the game title itself.
This comes from a video on the Bandai Namco Entertainment America YouTube channel, where it's titled as the first part of a Scarlet Nexus Dev Diary series. The new video has the developers directly tackle the question of why Bandai Namco's new "brainpunk" game has its title, and how there's more to it than just a cool name.
The video has three members from the developer addressing the question: Producer Keith Iizuka, Game Director Kenji Anabuki, and Art Director Kouata Ochiai. All three of them cover the game's title meaning in three different ways on how it can be interpreted from their distinct perspectives. Much of which relates back to the game's emphasis on connection and sharing power between the characters through the red lines on their backs, shown off through gameplay clips along with new Scarlet Nexus gameplay and character screenshots in the Dev Diary.
The video starts off asking, "Why Scarlet Nexus?" and goes right into it with Iizuka addressing the question first. He says the title name combines the words scarlet for "red" and nexus for "connections" together and is where the visual art style expression "objects or person connected with red lines" comes from. He mentions it evokes another meaning and passes it onto Anabuki, who brings up the mechanic of players borrowing power from teammates signified with the red lines "stabbed into the character's back" demonstrated with some quick Scarlet Nexus gameplay animation.
He describers it as one of the main features of the sci-fi action game, and reinforces how the red lines are emphasized in the game even in the theme song, "Dream in Drive" by The Oral Cigarettes. The video concludes with Ochiai discussing how another interpretation of the titles is "red bonds" shared between characters. He talks about how the game's development was focused on showing off the game's core concept "kizuna" (bonds) in multiple ways, which why they also call them "red strings" saying they're "lines that connect you with your buddies."
While this seems to be similar to Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding and theme of connections, the difference here is that the titular phenomenon is part of the core gameplay mechanics that players will actively utilize.
Scarlet Nexus is in development for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.