Beast of Reincarnation

Publisher: Fictions

Developer: Game Freak

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Price: $59.99

I can't remember the last time a game frustrated me quite like Beast of Reincarnation. Not because it's overly difficult or has obtuse puzzles, but because there's a great game hidden in there somewhere that just refuses to come out. 

Coming to us from the renowned (and now-infamous) developers of Pokemon (the single most profitable franchise in all of human history), Beast of Reincarnation was a chance to show that they could branch out and learn from the mistakes they've made with recent Pokemon generations.

The results suggest only partial lessons learned. 

I'm far from the first critic to give Beast of Reincarnation the business, and I doubt I'll be the last. But give it the business, I must. So, strap in.

The first major frustration with Beast of Reincarnation is its story. It goes from painfully generic western-game story to painfully generic eastern-game story. At first, it's all about a mysterious blight that destroyed the world and now nature is in imbalance and all that stuff you'd usually find in AAA interactive movies. But by the end, it's a classless twist-greedy nightmare the likes of which you only find in eastern titles. And literally all those twists are the exact same twists you find in literally every eastern title that does the twist-greedy thing. For as much as Beast of Reincarnation loves its story, it doesn't have a single original idea.

As if all that isn't generic enough, you play as a "purifier" named Emma, and I'd like you to guess what her deal is. 

Is it:

A): She lost her emotions

B): She lost her memories

C): She has a little ghost girl inside her who has lost all her memories.

D): All of the above

If you answered "D," congratulations! And yes! Double amnesia!!!

Sadly, Emma is really the best of the human characters...and I think that might just be because she's attractive. All the other human characters have the same lack of depth, but they're an old man and a child, so what other conclusion am I to draw? 

Thankfully, Emma has a constant companion in Koo: a giant white dog with magic powers. Koo is by far the best character of the bunch, but that's just because he's a doggie.

So, the story is painfully generic and even the high points in its character roster are the high points for superficial reasons. Not great so far.

And it gets even worse because Beast of Reincarnation is perhaps more confident in that lame story and those lame characters than any other game this year. Cutscenes are loooooooooong and filled with some of the most banal dialogue you're likely to hear all year (clearly GameFreak didn't learn from Pokemon Sun/Moon!). It does a uniquely eastern thing where half the dialogue is one character repeating what another character just said or saying the name of the character who just finished speaking.

"We need to kill the beast of reincarnation!"

"The beast of reincarnation..."

or

"I'm no help to you at all!"

"Kagura..."

That's legitimately half the dialogue, and the other half is a split between proper noun-spouting or Emma wondering what certain emotional concepts are.

"Then there were the Nushi and there was Shambhala and the Brahman and the blight-touched"

or 

"Home...what's that?"

Towards the beginning of the game, there's an extended flashback sequence where Emma does things like gather fruit and take it to the market and engage in a chase sequence for no discernible reason. I'm inclined to think that went on for an hour, but I'm probably wrong. Either way, this went on for so long that I actively started pulling at my face when a new cutscene started.

What's more, if you try to skip dialogue because you've finished reading the subtitles, you only skip the little mouth animations that accompany it. So if a cutscene has Emma saying "Kagura..." then forlornly looking around for half a minute, skipping the dialogue only skips like 2 of those 30 seconds. I'm not the kind of person who skips cutscenes, but I found myself looking for a way to do that here because I was so caustically bored by every second I had to spend with these characters. 

If there's one positive to be found, it's that I prefer a game to be confident in its story. It's a gamble, though, because if that story is bad, it's all the more painful. But I can appreciate the thought, in any case.

Gameplay is handled notably better, thankfully. Not perfectly, but well enough that I kept coming back in spite of everything else. 

Beast of Reincarnation markets itself as a soulslike, but it isn't. We call way too many things "soulslike." No, this is more of a muted spectacle fighter with soulslike elements. There are checkpoints that respawn enemies and restore a fixed amount of healing items, for example, but that's about as far as the souls genre goes in this gameplay loop. 

Really, it's all about setting up combos for flashy attacks...but in a much more held back way than most spectacle fighters. By which I mean you have one attack style (slashing with R1/RB), and combos consist of using it x amount of times followed by using the otherwise-unused leftmost face button y amount of times. So one combo could be R1-R1-R1-Square-Square, while another could be R1-R1-Square-Square-Square. No matter the combo, it'll almost always be a combination of those two buttons. There are some scattered exceptions, but they're few and far between. Compared to other games in this genre that use more buttons than this, Beast of Reincarnation feels awfully shallow. 

But I said this aspect is handled better than the story, and that largely comes down to the parrying, which feels quite nice. In others words, this game is at its best when you're playing it as if it were a soulslike, which it is not. The parrying really is quite nice, though. You get an immensely satisfying *clang*, and you'll get to hear it often given that there's maybe 5 enemy types that all have the same movesets! But more on that later.

Thankfully, Koo brings a slight wrinkle to the mix. When you parry attacks, you fill up a special gauge for him that has a total of 10 notches. By pressing the topmost face button, you can open up a menu of spells he can use, with each spell costing a certain amount of those notches. These spells contain the kind of variety that Emma's moveset should have come with. Fire darts, electric javelins, body slams, floral eruptions from the ground, etc. Besides the obvious damaging effects, many spells also come with beneficial passive effects that are activated or failed via a quicktime event. One of the default spells, for example, will restore Emma's health by a certain percentage for every piece of the spell that hits the target. Another might grant Emma some more armor points. And no matter what the passive effect is, the act of using a spell in the first place heals Emma a little bit. So you're heavily incentivized to parry and make use of Koo's abilities. And I'll echo that sentiment. I got through the final boss with only one healing item used because I engaged with these systems.

There's one more general piece of the gameplay loop to discuss before we move on. And it's one that I find particularly puzzling. There's an expansive, and I mean expansive resource and research system. You find things like seedlings and fertilized eggs out in the world, and when you're back in the AT-AT walker that serves as your hub, you grow these things into food or chickens (to lay eggs for food). With that food, the little girl accompanying you can create meals when you choose to "end the day." These meals will give you stat boosts when you head back into the map the next day.

And there are so. Many. Meals that little girl can make. It's all handled in an idle timer system, where she looks through all the recipes you find in the world or unlock in other ways and takes x minutes of real-world time to unlock them one-by-one. The same is true of those seedlings you grow or chickens you maintain. Every couple of real-world minutes or hours, a seedling or chicken will yield a bounty, and then the clock will start over again. 

That's nothing new. Plenty of games have sort of Farmville-esque resource systems like this to accompany their main gameplay loops. 

Here's the problem, though...you aren't likely going to "end the day" until you've finished a chapter and are moving on to the next area. The process of "ending the day" involves going to one of your checkpoints and selecting the option to go back to the hub, at which point you'll have to end the day, as it'll automatically set the time to night. 

Thing is...why on earth would you ever do that? 

The hub has physical stations at which you can upgrade your weapons, level up, and gain new skills...but you can do all of these things and more at your checkpoints via an easy to navigate static menu. No need to go back to the hub and painstakingly walk around to do that! 

You can also talk to the npcs in the hub when your "rapport" with them increases...but setting aside my own feelings about that, you can do that at the end of the chapter already. And if you increased your rapport multiple times, you can go through each unlocked bit of dialogue one after the other. So you have no pressing need to go back there to do that unless you're just dying to hear these characters talk some more. 

The only other thing to do in the hub is plant new seedlings or incubate new eggs. You don't need to "harvest" the bounties, nor do you need to physically kick off the process of having the little girl learn recipes you find. It's all done automatically. 

With there being something like 11 or 12 chapters, this means you'll only actually use these resource and meal systems something like 11 or 12 times at most. So I suppose it could be viewed as giving you a choice of a new stat boost for each chapter...but that's clearly not the intention. With how expansive these systems are and with how prominent its bits and pieces are in the world, it's clear that the developers intended this to be a system where you'd spend multiple in-game days in a single chapter, going back to the hub frequently. But as we've established, there's no universe in which that is warranted.

There's only one other motivation I can think of for why they'd push you to go back to the hub so frequently. The hunger system.

Yeah. I know.

Both Emma and Koo have "hunger" meters...that don't do jack diddly squat. I actually spent a fairly decent amount of time in most levels exploring and looking for resources that might actually matter (like for upgrading weapons), so I wasn't just blazing through. Even so, hunger levels seldom dropped to starving. And even when they did, I never noticed any kind of tangible effect on gameplay. I would think you'd start to take more damage or deal less of it when you're starving, and that would be the incentive to return to home base...but nope. It really just seems to be an emotional thing meant to get you back home because you don't want Emma and Koo to be hungry. But there's also no aesthetic or audio feedback like Koo whining or Emma's stomach growling. The hunger meter isn't even on screen. You only see it when you're resting at checkpoints. So there's literally not a single thing to this, and I'm just...so, so confused about it. 

Like, it had to have been so much effort to put as much food and resource and meal crap in this game as there is, and it's all a complete waste.

This is especially true given how unabashedly lazy-on-ice so much else is in Beast of Reincarnation. 

While there are technically 11 or 12ish levels, really there's only like 3 or 4. There's the deceptively open first level, there's "overgrown area with a bunch of cliffs" (which makes up levels 2-9ish), there's "boring desert" (which makes up levels 10-11ish), and there's the actually pretty cool final level. The actual structures and layouts are different between the different zones, but not by much. It'll be boring overgrown area with a bunch of cliffs after boring overgrown area with a bunch of cliffs, and they're always filled with the exact same maybe 5 enemy types. Different levels might give those enemies a different coat of paint, but their attacks are always the same.

And it's not just the levels themselves and the enemies therein that get copy-pasted across chapters...it's also the bosses. At first it's annoying-but-understandable. You load into a level, you fight the level's boss once, they run away, you find their lair, and you fight them again (with one level having you fight three times). Annoying. But understandable. 

But then they start bringing back old bosses as the big boss in later levels with the exact same moveset. Like, there literally won't be even one new attack in these later re-uses. 

Why did we need a ridiculously overcooked (no pun intended) meal and resource system when so much of the game's runtime is dedicated to literally re-used content?

As kind of a side note to drive this point home, one of the levels takes place in Kanto. I get that that's an actual part of Japan, but GameFreak really just can't stay away from the Kanto region even outside of Pokemon, can it?

Sadly, the laziness also applies to Beast of Reincarnation's level of polish. It isn't as technically lacking as the past couple Pokemon games, but it still isn't great. 

By far the most prevalent problem is framerate drops. It never drops down to slideshow levels, but it's just jarring enough and just consistent enough to feel like really bad motion blur. Either that or motion blur never actually turns off when you turn it off. I can't say for sure, having played on PS5 and not PC where I could get a frame counter. But the effect is the same no matter the case: a wildly unpleasant viewing experience.

Equally unpleasant is the musical soundscape. One or two soundtrack pieces are actually quite good, but the vast majority of the music you'll be listening to is just 20 seconds of the least inspiring soft J-Rock ever recorded played on a loop. And just like with everything else, you'll often find that it's the same 20-second track spread across multiple levels. Depending on your mood on a given day, it might actually be like torture.

Then there are the problems that actively get in your way in gameplay.

A lot of objectives ultimately amount to "find a way to get to this marker," and on more than one occasion I found myself up against Black Myth Wukong-level invisible walls while doing this. There's never any logical reason why an invisible wall would be where it is, nor is there any kind of shorthand visual indicator. It's especially egregious in a late-game chapter where you have to walk along a bunch of pipes. 

Because Beast of Reincarnation takes some cues from soulslikes, combat is lock-on driven. But there's quite a lot of inconsistency with that lock-on. It'll generally engage when you want it to, but if you want to disengage or move to another enemy, your results may vary. It's only a problem when you need to disengage the lock on, but that happens fairly frequently since you'll often be up against multiple opponents.

And because this is the case, you'll also come up against this game's camera problems more often than you'd like. I don't quite have the technical jargon to describe what's wrong with the camera equation, but suffice it to say that it's a major problem when there are other enemies offscreen...which will happen frequently.

Another technical inconsistency in Beast of Reincarnation is button presses. In particular, the heal button and the slow-motion mode buttons. 

With the heal button, I would sometimes find myself mashing it upwards of 15 times before I got any kind of result from it. I eventually realized that I was having this problem when I'd accidentally start a "delay" combo. Some combos involve attacking once, then pausing to allow Emma to take a different stance before attacking again, and I would have this issue in boss fights where I'd be wildly attacking and inadvertently pausing in just the right way to kickstart this process. And as it turns out, you can't cancel out of this new stance by healing. So that isn't a glitch, but it's still a flaw. A person is going to pause attacking to heal. That's how it objectively goes. So if you're going to have some combos happen via delays (as most spectacle fighters do), then you need to keep healing available and simply make it a choice between doing that combo and healing (again, as most spectacle fighters do). It isn't rocket science. Spectacle fighters have never had this problem before. 

The slow-motion mode, activated by pressing both thumbsticks at the same time, was a similar story. Sadly, I didn't use it frequently enough to figure out what the problem was. It's entirely possible I was trying to use this mode after accidentally kickstarting the delay combos as well, but I'll never know. 

Folks, I realize I haven't done a great job of expressing why I think there's a great game hidden under Beast of Reincarnation's flaws. Such is the tragedy of games like this. I can say I think there's a great game in there somewhere, but when it comes time to discuss the thing, it's hard not to focus on the negatives. 

So I'll say this...there was something that kept me coming back every night. I'd spend each session groaning and rolling my eyes and getting caught up looking at my phone...but I always found myself strangely..."looking forward to it" isn't the right phrase, but something like that. In the basic, basic gameplay loop, there was something promising that kept me thinking it could get better. Or if it couldn't get better, there was always the promise that a session would be fun for at least a little while. 

I don't know. 

I do make it a habit to try and finish whatever I buy no matter how bad it is, and this wasn't the same as trying to force myself through a bad game. Beast of Reincarnation isn't a bad game. It's just not good, and it's "just not good" in some eternally frustrating ways. 

So, for now, my recommendation is that you steer clear entirely. A couple of patches aren't going to fix what the profits from the world's most profitable media franchise couldn't. Weep not for GameFreak. They'll 100% survive without you purchasing this.

Let us review:

Terrible story and characters - 1.0

Laziness and re-use - 1.0

Expansive meal system taking up budget - 0.5

Unpleasant technical flaws - 1.0

Gameplay-centered technical flaws - 1.0

The final score for Beast of Reincarnation is...

5.5/10 - Slightly Above Average