There’s an abundance of video game companies known for one game or series. Some make nothing else but that one successful thing, like Mojang or Santa Monica Studio. But there are the ones that made many other games, like FromSoftware with Armored Core, King’s Field, and Tenchu games, or Gearbox with Duke Nukem and Brothers in Arms, yet everyone knows them for Soulsborne and Borderlands.
Game Freak is a company like that. There was Giga Wrecker, Little Town Hero, and Drill Dozer for GBA. There’s a chance you haven’t even heard of those if you haven’t opened the company’s Wikipedia page. Everyone knows that Game Freak makes Pokémon.
This year, the company decided to change this.
Pocket monster of reincarnation
Even before I started playing Beast of Reincarnation, I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s an additional meaning to the title beyond a simple descriptor of what we’re up against inside the game.
It felt symbolic, somehow, as if the company itself wanted to reinvent, reincarnate itself into something more than just a studio that prints money by releasing Pokémon. They have that down to a very precise formula, rarely straying from it or experimenting in any meaningful way.
Beast of Reincarnation is a result of several long-time developers at Game Freak feeling that they wanted to explore and do something new and exciting. The fact that the studio decided to do this is quite telling, even if much of it was outsourced (there are more studios in the game’s ending credits than I’ve seen almost anywhere else before). Big studios don’t just make side projects that are totally out of their wheelhouse without a plan. And it wouldn’t be surprising if these plans are to start making more games. Game Freak definitely has the means to do it.
Sword swinging and skill slinging
Beast of Reincarnation is a strange game with many highs and lows, with some of them being very high and very low. On the surface level, it’s a parry- and dodge-based Action RPG, not unlike some of the most prominent games of the last decade. It also borrows a lot from them; or rather, from a shared pool of ideas and elements that have seemingly become inextricable from any project that dares to have “bonfires,” difficult bosses, and salty runbacks.
At the very beginning, Emma, our protagonist, only has one sword combo and one active skill that she uses by spending the Entanglement bar. In addition to this, she has her trusty companion wolf, Koo, who can help her out in various ways in combat, the most important of which is its Bloom skill that can be used by spending another resource – Florescence Points.
The core gameplay loop consists of defeating the enemy golems and Malefacts, the game’s mutated flora and fauna, using these tools.
Though enemies aren’t just standing there and waiting for you to pummel them: often, they have more agency than you, because they don’t really care when you attack, but you do, as even a couple of hits could be lethal. The game offers various ways to prevent your untimely demise, and you are very likely to immediately guess all of them, their effects, and what to do next. Let’s go through them nevertheless.
First, you have a guard. Guarding mitigates the damage, but drains your Entanglement gauge and could leave you open to follow-up attacks. The game pretty clearly lets you know that this should be your last resort and that there are better ways to avoid getting hit.
You can also parry enemy attacks, receiving no damage in the process. You can perfect parry them as well, gaining one Florescence Point for Koo, interrupting some combos, and gaining the ability to perform a riposte. Perfect parries also often energize your sword, activating its inherent effects.
You also have dodge and perfect dodge. The latter allows you to counterattack while closing the gap, but overall, it’s weaker than parry and leads to you getting hit more often. It’s still a required skill, however, because some enemies, especially the bosses, have attacks that can’t be avoided by parrying or guarding. They’re usually marked with a red telegraph.
While none of this is in any way new or groundbreaking, the game does a good job of making sure that gameplay flows well and there’s not a lot of clunkiness in actual combat.
Fighting Malefacts is made more exciting by the addition of a permanent companion, Koo. It’s a corrupted wolf, a Malefact itself, which can learn a wide variety of actually very useful and flashy abilities. Aside from those, Koo can engage the enemies on its own and can use a secondary set of unlockable skills.
Koo can distract and even taunt your enemies, ambush them with you, find, collect, and dig up items, warn you about powerful foes, and point out resting spots. Herein lie some issues, though, but I need to preface them that I have no issues with Koo mechanically or especially narratively.
You share the progression points with Koo, so you must always consciously decide what exactly you’re leveling at any given moment. Functionally, there would be no mechanical difference if the Bloom abilities were acquired and used by you, but performed by Koo.
As a result of this split, you instead have lots of completely uninteresting and filler levelups like +25 skill power and +5% status buildup. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with them, and you can semi-freely respec after a certain point, it’s nevertheless annoying when you have to spend skill points on those instead of much more exciting skills.
Another issue with Koo is that it trivializes exploration. You’re constantly bombarded with notifications that Koo has discovered this, and that, and the third thing. Enemies, stashes, strongboxes, everything is immediately revealed and placed on your map for your convenience. At the same time, you’re also being constantly told to do something, go somewhere, or use Koo’s abilities if the FP gauge is full. It’s overly handholdy and annoying in the very same vein that Atreus and Mimir were in God of War: Ragnarok.
The worst thing about Koo, however, is how it can’t just stand in one place peacefully. It will constantly pop up in front of you or beside you from thin air, giving you mini heart-attacks every time it does this. You’ll see.
Tipping the balance
Many difficult Action RPGs keep a very fragile balance between punishments and rewards. If there’s a great piece of equipment to be procured, it’s often hidden behind a particularly nasty dungeon, or a difficult puzzle. Dying in those games is meaningful, as it either takes something away from you, resets your progression, sends you into the literal shadow realm, or does any of a number of other nasty things.
In Beast of Reincarnation, unfortunately, this balance is fully tipped towards the “reward” part of the equation. There’s basically no punishment for failure. Camps are very abundant, and if you do die, you’re quickly respawned at the nearest one, and you don’t even lose any currency or progress.
Even falling to your demise isn’t immediate death: you’re simply warped to the nearest point with just a little bit of HP damage. This takes away all the tension from the game’s difficulty, as it allows you to be as reckless as you want without any real, meaningful consequence.
Rewards also aren’t given out in the most thoughtful of ways. Aside from the item and loot collect-a-thon that’s happening all the time, you’re also often given a new armor or a sword. Most of those happen very unceremoniously, at seemingly random places, without anything that would make them feel earned.
Weapons themselves feel a little bit weird in this game as well, but I can’t say I dislike the overall approach. Usually, it goes like this: you find a weapon you like, you upgrade it to a certain threshold, and in the very next zone, you find something that’s already better than your enhanced one.
Here, most weapons have very similar stats and only three upgrades. While the latter tiers are locked behind the meta progression and upgrading your two-legged Cleanse Walker, you can reasonably fully upgrade every sword you come across.
What they differ in are the passive and active effects they offer: some stack poison on your enemies, the others help you break them easier, or increase your crit rate. This way, none of them become truly obsolete until the very late game, where you do get several weapons that are outright better.
Difficult variability, variable difficulty
Beast of Reincarnation came with a warning: “It’s a challenging game, you may fail; read tutorials, they may help you.” Fair enough, I love difficult games. So I started the game, put it on hard, and immediately died to the very first enemy. I was happy!
But unfortunately, much of this game’s challenge is front-loaded and spiky. Sure, like in any proper this-and-that-like, you die in a few hits, especially when surrounded, overcrowded, and peppered with arrows from afar. The bosses also hit hard and quick, following up combos with unblockables and AOEs.
The issue is, the very first location shows you almost every type of enemy this game has. Don’t get me wrong: later, they will come in different shapes, sizes, and species altogether, but their patterns will remain similar. And the same goes for the bosses. The first boss hits you with a quick one-two antler swing, a high jump that needs to be dodged, and an enraged state that increases its attack frequency.
The rest of the bosses to the end of the game are just a facsimile of this, altering the visuals, but leaving the cadence of the attacks intact. To add insult to injury, most of these bosses are also repeated several times, through a plot contrivance. You will avoid their damaging moves, deplete their stagger bars, and unload all of your burst with the skills that barely differ from each other. Then do it again. For every boss. Repetitio est mater studiorum.
All of this makes the initial uphill climb challenging, but after that, it’s mostly smooth sailing. And even the enemies’ higher damage on Hard barely matters, as you don’t take damage when you’re not getting hit. Now this is not to say that you will never get hit — you will, and you’ll die.
But coupled with the lack of any meaningful punishment for failure, this just means you will spend two, maybe three more tries to get any particular boss. Most of them you will get first try, as I did. And maybe some people who aren’t used to action games will find Beast of Reincarnation to be quite difficult indeed — but they will also find this lack of variety boring, as their reward for overcoming any particular challenge is generally just more of the same.
The world we live in
The world of Beast of Reincarnation is far beyond the brink of destruction. It’s our world, 2000 years from now, changed and completely unrecognizable after some kind of cataclysmic event a couple millennia ago. It’s completely overgrown and poisoned by Blight, an unknown plague that turns everything it touches into Malefacts, or kills those who aren’t strong enough to turn. It’s as beautiful as it is deadly, divided into various zones with a sort of guardian entity, a Nushi, at the heart of their corruption.
It’s evident and apparent that everything about it was crafted with genuine care, but at the same time, it also feels entirely unoriginal. The game does wear its inspirations on its sleeve, however, and doesn’t try to hide or mask them; there are no attempts at tricking you.
Depending on your level of media literacy, you will have many “DiCaprio-pointing-at-the-screen” moments, as you recognize Princess Momonoke, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Shinsekai yori, Nier: Replicant and Automata, Sekiro, Horizon Zero Dawn, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Stellar Blade, The Last of Us, and even Pokémon, among other works that clearly inspired it.
A lot of this is just clearly derivative, without anything of its own to say about the themes it tries to cosplay. The game raises a lot of introspective topics about the very nature of being human, the weight of every sacrifice, environmentalism, collectivism, and beyond.
But unfortunately, it dangles them in front of you to think about them, then hides them with a smirk and focuses on something else entirely. And while I appreciate (most of) the story the game ended up telling, it left a sour note in my mouth that some of the themes were just unaddressed, almost a bait-and-switch.
If we talk about the physical locations that we have to traverse, those are crafted quite well, with a decent amount of scalability of terrain, verticality, and even visual variety, despite being set in what’s really a very small region of today’s Japan. I really wish that exploration was better and more worthwhile, however, and not undermined by constant and incessant notifications about stuff being discovered without my input.
Our story ends here
The developers of Beast of Reincarnation chose a peculiar way to tell the story. Like most of everything else, it didn’t feel overly original or fresh at any point. Some of the events happened while in the field, but for the most part, big developments and reveals all happened during the transition moments from one zone to the other, with some happening after you beat each zone’s Nushi.
While it helped maintain the pacing, it also made the world feel quite static. Some characters you could meet during your excursions outside, but then they are reduced to background subtitles for your phone interactions. And this is quite unfortunate, as those characters are quite interesting and could offer unique perspectives and some of the information that’s being deliberately withheld from the player.
There’s some force and deliberate awkwardness to most of the character interactions, due to the nature of the protagonist, Emma, and also the somberness of their situation. The voice acting reflects this quite well, both Japanese and English. Though the Golems having Northern British accents is quite hilarious.
It’s difficult to talk about the story without spoiling it, due to how fragmented and piecemeal you get access to any new information until the wheels really start to turn near the end, so I will not even try.
I do, however, want to mention that the devs managed to keep my interest at a decently high level, and I did manage to get some of the parallels they were clearly making to lots of stuff. And I would genuinely praise it even for this peculiar execution, if the ending didn’t happen. It doesn’t fundamentally change the tone or the message, but it’s difficult to take some of the main antagonist’s actions seriously, especially those that happen after the final fight ends.
Otherwise, this is a competently crafted story with lots of heart, and I mean this both literally and figuratively.
Tech has failed us
Game Freak was often criticized for the technical state of their Pokémon games. People felt that there was simply not enough money or effort put into it by a company that makes one of the highest-revenue franchises.
Upon the initial reveal, Beast of Reincarnation looked like a statement that they can actually make a modern game. That statement ended up being too true, as it suffers from a plethora of modern game tech issues.
It runs decent enough, but some areas exhibit some inexplicable framerate drops that don’t happen even during the screen-enveloping boss attacks. Character hair and textures look absolutely horrifying on PC, and light looks even worse. There’s overall fringing around the characters, and this is with any kind of upscaling turned off.
While not being an ugly game by any means, it also looks quite “Unreal-Engine-asset-store-y,” but without the amount of polish Sandfall put into their Clair Obscure: Expedition 33. And while not a major issue in and of itself, it compounds on top of other problems the game has.
Developers released a performance patch before the game’s official release, and while it addressed some of the tech issues, it did nothing to how the game looked overall. Additional patches are also already planned.
Roll the credits
Despite all the aforementioned issues, the game was never unfun or tedious. It never overstayed its welcome, with its playthrough time varying between 30 and 40 hours, depending on your level of completionism.
After I completed it, I kept coming back to its story and world in my mind, constantly thinking about some of the unanswered questions that were handwaved with a curt “and then one day, a thing happened.” On the one hand, when a game leaves you thinking about it after you’re done, it means it did something right. But on the other hand, what do you do when these thoughts are more fun than most of what the game did show you?
Reviewed on PC WITH THE FOLLOWING SPECS: CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X
RAM: 32GB at 6000 MT/s
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB
Storage: NVMe M.2 2TB SSD
7 Beast of Reincarnation review Beast of Reincarnation is a deeply flawed game that still manages to be fun and unintentionally thought-provoking. Pros
- Fluid and dynamic battle system.
- Story that managed to go into surprising places.
- Unorthodox approach to weapon progression.
- Koo.
Cons
- Lack of variety in enemies and bosses.
- Flawed character progression system.
- Lots of underexplored themes.
- Technical state of the game.
- Ending.
A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review. Reviewed on PC.
