Beast of Reincarnation Review

I have a great deal of respect for games that offer a vast RPG experience. It strikes me as the absolute hardest of hard modes for game design – creating an extensive world full of gameplay opportunities to be interpreted and parsed by whatever whim a random player may hunger for. It essentially sets up a buffet table for people you have never met in the hopes that you may meet their madcap tastes and needs. Everyone will feast differently – some devouring top to bottom to make sure they get every bit of value they can imagine, while others will focus on the morsels they already know and adore.

So hearing that Game Freak, the studio best known for decades of cartoony cockfighting games, was doing a big-arse action RPG title, I was intrigued at how they might pull it off. It’s crazy to imagine that the people behind Pokémon could be considered a plucky newcomer in that space,  and after 30ish hours of playing Beast of Reincarnation, I can safely say that they very neeearly pulled it off.

In Beast of Reincarnation you play as a young lass named Emma, an isolated beastslayer who lives alone on the outskirts of one of the last remaining human settlements. Something apocalyptic has happened to the world, but rather than leaving it as a dusty ruin, it is instead a verdant, overgrown space mostly reclaimed by nature. This same rampant nature seems intrinsically linked to an awful force known as The Blight, which has fused itself with creatures in the world, mutating them into monstrous beings known as Malefacts – the biggest of which turn into enormous kaiju-like creatures called Nushi. The Blight is also dangerous for humans, but just like Maybelline, some are born with it, with Emma one of the unlucky ones and cast out of society as a result. But on the plus side, she can use the blight to her to enhance her strength and pull off some killer nature-based super attacks.

Despite not being on the Christmas card list, Emma is often called upon by the local populace to defeat encroaching malefacts, but everything changes one day when she is tasked with dispatching a wolf-like malefact. As it turns out,  the beast is hurt, rather than mindlessly rampaging. On the advice of her imaginary friend (more on that later), she cares for the creature, but it flees several days later after recovering. She doesn’t have long to mourn the loss of her new friend, as she is summoned to the nearby settlement to hear a request from The Administrator, who tasks her with defeating every Nushi on the way to The Capital. The goal? absorb their powers to make her strong enough to defeat the biggest Nushi of all – the eponymous Beast of Reincarnation. Seems this beastly bastard returns every 100 years and needs to be killed again, so this century it is Emma’s turn.

Before Emma can even fully grasp what she needs to do, an enormous Nushi suddenly rampages through the colony and almost kills her as she tries to protect a little girl. Luckily, her wolf friend returns and uses some blight-based plant magic to save her life, allowing Emma and the little girl to escape with the remaining member of the Administrator’s envoy to start their arduous journey to the capital as a fellowship of survivors and outcasts.

Of course, that is how the story develops chronologically. In practice, the game actually starts with a flash-forward, then a flash back, and then a couple of flash further backs, before returning to the flash-forward some 20 hours later. It was my first note when reviewing the title – the onboarding is a jarring mess. I can understand some of the logic behind the design given that some of these sections are clearly just disguised tutorials, but explaining core mechanics to me several hours after I have already figured them out in an early open-world portion of the game is baffling. 

Take for example the game’s unique movement options, where the blight within Emma actually lets her use her vine-infused hair as a means of movement. The game has no double jump, instead these vines will erupt beneath you and grow upwards like a beanstalk to carry Emma to higher ground. This vertical lift is no slouch either, far exceeding whatever weedy expectation you might have for a paltry double jump – entirely changing how you see the landscape and what areas you might be able to access. This is then supported by a separate button press that prompts a tangled natural construct to extend out in front of you, creating an organic bridge that Emma can walk across or even rapidly grapple hook onto. With these tools at your disposal, Emma breaks the back of whatever limitations the world designers feebly tried to implement…short of some good old-fashioned invisible walls.

But now consider that you have all these tools for the opening hours of the game, crossing gaps and shooting into the sky to leap into combat at your leisure. But then the game decides it’s time for a narrative flashback where Emma has not yet figured out these abilities and has to agonisingly wait for it to be explained to her. This interstitial experience betrays your freshly lubricated freedom feels, grinding the gears in such a way that it is hard to focus on what narrative beat the flashback is trying to convey. It just kinda sucks.

Once you get through the bumpy orientation, the game’s cycle begins proper, with Emma and her wolf friend Koo moving from zone to zone chasing down giant Nushi to defeat them and absorb new powers. Your search for the Nushi will often include poking around these immense Soulslike environments, either avoiding (or wiping out) enemy encampments to flip switches or open bulkheads, while dark corners lurk just outside your periphery with the promise of secret goodies for would-be spelunkers. This is punctuated with the Souls staple of resting at bonfires to restore health and ammo, while also providing the option to head back to your mobile base of operations – The Cleanse Walker – to shower, rest and eat for a buff. You can also chat with your companions to raise this affinity level, unlocking their support abilities and providing further access to better buffs.

Every now and then the landscape will also change, as a cloud of blight darkens the sky overhead and prompts the earth underfoot to erupt with enormous trees. During this ‘blighted time’, lesser malefacts will mingle with the dangers of the landscape, often resulting in some fun in-fighting between the Robotic Golem inhabitants and the nature-infused beasts. Tootling about with Koo is a fun experience –  measuring up encounters and figuring out how best to approach them was never rote OR boring, the sandbox nature of Beasts world sinking its claws deep into me.

It is no coincidence that the treasures often found off the beaten path serve as an advantage to an upcoming challenge. Your time exploring the game world has the overtly obvious objective to track down the boss of the area, but dig a little deeper and the world is constantly offering clues on how you can efficiently defeat it. That delightful new sword you found after delving into a random underground dungeon? With the poison-tipped blade? Try sinking it into the flesh of the upcoming Nushi. It’s a lovely bit of organic problem solving for intrepid treasure hunters, and a constant highlight on your journey to the Capital.

I admit that I am shockingly bad at games like Dark Souls and Sekiro, often brute-forcing my way through more finesse-minded encounters. So I was delighted to find that Beast is far happier for you to find your groove and stick to it. If you are the kind to deftly bat away an enemy attack, perfect parries will carry you a long way – generating a resource used to unleash both yours and Koo’s harder hitting abilities. If you don’t quite know the parry timing yet, you can instead opt to stay guarded with your blade, depleting this same resource in exchange for lesser damage. It’s basically a stagger bar for the player, but you can either spend it to survive an offensive or to do flashy super attacks that run the gamut from igniting enemies to rooting them…all the way up to sprouting enormous flowers for you to leap onto.

Your sword serves as the main point of damage, with a simple attack button that can be pressed in certain rhythms to perform combos and instantly deploy some special moves. The act of getting a spectacular parry on an enemy often opens them up to a quick barrage of slashes, where you judge how much time you have before you need to block or parry again. There are times where you can throw in an attack between individual parries, revelling in that audible CLANG slash CLANG slash CLANG as you weave your offensive between the target’s pathetic attempts to harm you. Whereas other moments will have you blocking a relentless string of hits CLANG, CLANGCLANG before you can get a meagre swipe of your own in.

Where this differs greatly from your normal action-RPG flair is in how you choose to leverage your canine companion Koo. A quick press on your controller will slow time to a crawl, allowing you to browse and choose a selected ability from his repertoire. Koo similarly gains charges that can be spent, with the main proviso that your puppy pal cannot use the same move twice in a row. It is the pseudo turn-based option mentioned in the game’s marketing, but its implementation is a little blunt to really fill out that expectation – it is turn-based in the same way Fallout 4’s V.A.Ts system is turn-based, given that you can kinda pause the action to make a decision.

To round out your combat cadence, there is of course the usual case of dodge button for unblockable, unparryable attacks. The dodge starts out a little weedy, but can be upgraded to a proper Souls-roll down the line and becomes quite handy for evading a new target while you figure out its attack pattern. The real mutators of your fighting style comes from the impressive plethora of build options that can be leveraged via levelling up or discovering treasures in the world. Both Koo and Emma will learn new abilities by defeating Nushi, but also by spending attribute points to flesh out a tree of default options – meaning that having a little grind here and there isn’t a terrible choice.

Koo in particular has a very unique set of customisable options in the way of mods, where you can slot a unique effect into all of his abilities. A starter ability will see your wolf pal shooting flaming seeds from his tail, stacking up a burn debuff to stun and harm your opponent. With mods, you can opt to have the debuff metre stack up faster or perhaps deploy a defensive buff on Emma every time Koo uses it. Further down the line, you can even slot in environmental effects like a massive slowing swamp or a healing field, with these mods freely interchangeable whenever you rest at a bonfire. Coupling this with discovered weaknesses of Nushi and emerging fight strategies often saw me dipping into Koo’s build to supplement my failures between attempts, loving that big shaggy friend and the immense amount of support he offered me.

While not identical, Emma also has a handful of loadout options to shuffle her killing power. Every sword you find has some unique effect that can be triggered during a fight, resulting in arcing lightning or splashing poison to keep pressing that elemental advantage. This is echoed with the ammo types for both the wrist crossbow and the longbow, where only a handful of ammo types can be equipped at a time. Eventually, I found a sword that would actually shoot out arcing slashes of flame from its swing and coupled it with a Koo mod to forcefully activate the sword’s power on demand – turning me into a flame-spitting ranged demon that would maniacally laugh as fire sword swings and fire crossbow bolts filled the air.

Once you eventually come toe-to-toe with a Nushi, you can be thankful that boss fights observe and respect the rules laid out in the base combat system. These hulking plant-beasts all employ attack patterns that can be read and reacted to, be it via an enormous parry, block or desperate dodge. The vast majority of these fights will see you learning the patterns like any Soulslike experience, before a second phase kicks in to make it a great deal harder. For a novice like me, I enjoyed the challenge on hand and rated it as accessible enough on the game’s normal difficulty – but I would question how deep these encounters may feel to a Dark Souls super sicko.

One thing I found unforgivable was the brazen choice to recycle some of these bosses past the halfway point of the game. The cycle of tracking down a Nushi and learning it was entirely compromised when a few identical ones trotted into the limelight a little later, sporting the same attack strings but perhaps with a different element attack to not be exactly the same. But those parry patterns? The critical dodges? All the same. Given that the Nushi, all representative of real-world animals – albeit shifted and changed into monstrous plant-riddled things – were such a highlight of my experience, the sudden realisation that I had played these games before sucked my enthusiasm away quick smart.

The other enthusiasm-vampire is the overtly wooden portrayal of the characters. Emma fits the trope of a monster hunter corrupted by the force that creates the monsters, only instead of being a charismatic vampire slayer like say, Marvel’s Blade, she is an ostracised teenage girl with zero social education. She is an emotionless husk, denied any kind of real upbringing and almost wholly treated as a convenient tool that deals with threats to ‘real’ humans. It is genuinely a compelling part of her character, as she quietly and grimly questions her newfound human pals about what makes them tick

However, it is almost entirely impossible to appreciate this character trait when it is undermined by her supporting cast struggling to muster any passion or enthusiasm in their interactions. The rescued little girl, Kagura, is communicated to be a bright-eyed and excited member of this trip – happy to have found purpose beyond the shitty circumstances of her old home. But in interactions, she comes off as quiet and whiny. Brad, the pilot of the Cleanse Walker, is stoic and reserved – clearly hiding something from his past that he fears will cause both Kagura and Emma to judge him. But his reserved nature comes across with such a heavy-handed portrayal, he feels tired and bored of the conversations he is taking part in. I tried swapping the game language between English and Japanese to see if there was a noticeable difference, to no avail. Even Emma’s ‘imaginary’ friend Violet hardly registers a real response when an emotional moment is weighing heavily on poor Emma’s psyche – and she lives in her headspace.

This is compounded by the bizarre design choice to have incredibly verbose dialogue interactions take place with little to no character animation, often resulting in a room full of characters talking with nothing more happening than their mouth barely flapping and the occasional head turn to establish a sightline. That isn’t to say the game is incapable of doing real character animation during moments, because there are times when the stuff happening on screen is absolutely brilliant, but it happens so infrequently that you will be starving for it by the time it comes back around. It also hurts the pacing that some of these conversations retread plot points that have already been long resolved, and if you were to commit the cardinal sin of skipping the dialogue, the camera will still linger for an agonisingly long moment or two on the interrupted party before moving to the next speaker. It honestly made me wonder if just listening to the dialogue was better than the awkward guilt I felt from having to witness the interruption happen.

Some secondary characters did poke their head into the narrative early on, with one of them resembling a great Emma analogue – another beastslayer with her own malefact companion, brimming with confidence and an almost older-sister vibe to Emma. But then she immediately vanished for a massive portion of the game, only to communicate with us via an occasional phone call when we stopped by our home base. There are a great many elements and ideas within the game that lean dangerously close to establishing something narratively fun, only to be oddly shut down or forgotten about a little while later.

Perhaps the hardest thing to parse from the storytelling is how the final act is handled. Many elements of the lore are done in a quiet way, with most of it being a case of show, don’t tell. NPCs and written messages within the world give you glimpses of what led to the ruined world being the way it is, to be carefully filed away in your mental lore bank as a smaller piece of a bigger puzzle. Then suddenly, 20 long hours into the game, it almost feels as if the developers panicked and worried that perhaps people wouldn’t grasp the story they were trying to tell – and crammed an excruciating amount of unescapable lore dumps into the final hours. It felt like being cornered at a party by an acquaintance that wanted to share an obsessive subject matter with you.

Characters will radio you to talk for torturous minutes to clarify their motivations, all while Emma is restricted from running or interacting with anything. Trips to the Cleanse Walker will lock you into long-winded chats about things that you had already grasped hours ago. At one point, a giant hologram of a figure popped up to talk to me as I was heading towards an exciting boss encounter and I actually left the room to go to the toilet and return. I then used my PS5’s capture mode to grab the last 5 minutes, and fast-forwarded through the speech to read the subtitles quickly. Having an absolutely off-the-wall, whacky anime-style story downloaded into your brain in this way does no favours to digesting its oddness in smaller chunks, instead leaving me fatigued and thinking of work meetings that likely could have been an email.

Final Thoughts

Mechanically, there is plenty to like in Game Freak’s ambitious foray outside of Pokémon – with Beast of Reincarnation leveraging inventive movement, extensive build customisation and the ever-dependable companionship of your puppy pal to deliver an engaging and fun sandbox. It’s just so damn regrettable that the storytelling hiccups feel more like savage heart palpitations, relentlessly overshadowing what could have been a fun, mysterious exploration of self for someone forced to be selfless. Souls-lite enthusiasts willing to push through the narrative sludge might find a great gameplay loop here, but it’s a frustrating reminder that Game Freak still has a few growing pains to iron out in the dark fantasy space.