If you talk to people about Beast of Reincarnation, there will likely be two ways it gets pitched. Either “it’s that action game where you’ve got a big dog” or, more frequently, “the soulslike from the devs who made Pokémon.” Neither of these actually prepared me for the game I ended up playing, which pulls from a wide range of influences, while struggling a bit to find an identity of its own.
Centuries from now, the world is in shambles. A plague called the Blight has wiped out much of humanity, leading nature to reclaim the world. People have largely transferred their consciousness into robots called golems, but even those are starting to decay after so long.
You play Emma, one of the remaining humans, who is notable because of her ability to absorb the Blight rather than be killed by it. While many people treat her like a pariah for being different, her ability allows her to defeat Nushi, large corrupted animals that roam the lands, to slowly take the world back from the curse of the Blight.
This is part of a larger quest to make her way to the capital and fight the titular Beast of Reincarnation, which she appears to be destined to kill.
Killing Monsters Remains Fun
There’s simultaneously a lot going on and not that much happening in the game’s narrative, at least early on. Emma meets several NPCs, some of which travel with her in her “cleanse walker” and some that she runs into while exploring. Her big hook as a character is that she doesn’t feel emotions, which is an interesting premise that’s ripe for an arc, but mostly invites repetitive conversations with her companions trying to explain to her what feelings are. Her main bond is with her large Blighted dog, Koo, who fights alongside her. There’s a lot that seems to go on around her as you’re shown conversations between other characters, but her path through the story is mostly just “look for the big monster and kill it.”
Fortunately, killing monsters, at its most basic level, is pretty fun. Heavily influenced by Sekiro, though not quite as demanding, Beast of Reincarnation features parry-heavy melee combat with an emphasis on combos and status effects. You have your standard slash attack on your right shoulder button, and a specialized attack button on a face button (square on PlayStation 5). Various combinations of these two buttons will yield different attacks, and new attacks continue to unlock throughout the game. Enemies have both a health bar and a stamina bar, and breaking their stamina through a combination of attacks and parries allows you to do an execution, which comes with a slick and violent animation.
While this is nice in theory, I had issues making the combo system really work for me. The focus on parrying means that enemies are going to be attacking a lot, so I found that I could not get in longer combos without stopping frequently to deflect incoming attacks. The audio-visual feedback on the parry is definitely satisfying, but fights with normal enemies, which are either robot golems or blight-mutated animals called Malefacts, either feel too easy or slightly punishing, depending on which type of enemy you run into. The gap between the challenge that enemy types present feels pretty wide, making for oddly balanced encounters.
You are presented with stealth options, but they feel largely underbaked. While I enjoyed dropping down on enemies from above for a quick kill, it almost struck me as funny when I ran into an enemy encounter that the game clearly wanted me to deal with via stealth, lining them up all looking away from Emma, making the sequence of kills immediately obvious in a way that took away the satisfaction of figuring it out for yourself. The perception settings also feel pretty tuned in your favor, as I occasionally stealth killed one robot without alerting the one standing meters from him in a way that broke the immersion of the fantasy the game was presenting.
I shouldn’t have been surprised by this based on the foundations of Pokémon, but there was a big focus on elemental attacks in the game, which added an interesting layer of strategy, if nothing revelatory. With various weapons and attacks, you do build up different status effects, such as burn or poison, and when they fill, the enemy will take damage over time for a specific period. New weapons you find throughout the game will be associated with different elements, allowing you to craft builds that focus on one over the other. Some enemies will have specific weaknesses that can be exploited, so paying attention to elements will help you get through some of the game’s trickier encounters.
You have a pair of ranged weapons, a crossbow and a bow and arrow, that run on limited ammunition, which I mostly used to help build up status effects. Much like the pistols in Bloodborne, they don’t do a ton of damage on their own, but they are good in a pinch when you’re trying to finish off an enemy from a distance or do some chip damage against them.
Koo is the Game’s Best Feature
Aside from the parrying, the big hook of the combat is Koo’s inclusion, which provides both mechanical and thematic texture to the fights. Not only will he fight alongside you, attacking enemies on his own, but you can also bring up an attack menu to select specific moves for him to do, each with a little QTE to complete for greater effect. This system runs on fluorescence points, which are recharged by parrying, giving you an interesting rhythm as you do big attacks, parry to recharge, then repeat the cycle.
As someone who loves turn-based RPGs, it feels like a good nod to that in the same way it did for the Final Fantasy VII remakes, if not as complex. Most of these attacks are just various amounts of damage with some elemental or healing properties mixed in, with little to differentiate them. Each of them has its own attack animation, but they rarely feel unique in the way that I had hoped for. You can’t pick the same attack twice in a row, which meant instead of using my full suite of abilities, I often just fell into a rhythm of swapping back and forth between my two go-to attacks and calling it a day. Maybe this is a problem with how I played, but I didn’t feel like the game was incentivizing me to explore in meaningful ways.
As I mentioned before, you unlock more abilities as you go, but they rarely drastically changed the way I played in a way that felt like progression. Both Emma and Koo have skill trees that can be filled out, giving you various buffs to abilities that definitely make you deadlier as you continue to do the same combat loop. I did feel that, while it was cool that you were getting more powerful by adding benefits to existing skills, the fights ended up a bit busy, with popups appearing all over to tell you about buffs that were happening. It wasn’t really affecting my moment to moment, but the JRPG levels of easy-to-confuse statuses being shown on screen were distracting instead of making me feel empowered.
Even with my quibbles, the combat mechanics are generally fun, but I wish the encounter design could rise to meet it. With very few exceptions, I didn’t feel like I was approaching different enemies using different strategies, meaning encounters just felt kinda flat. While there were two types of enemies, beasts and robots, I didn’t feel like there were enough enemy types overall to give the encounters enough variety. The heavy focus on parrying means that memorizing tells and attack patterns is key to success, and the lack of variety means you won’t be having to do it as much as you should. It feels like you have them almost all down by halfway through the game, making it feel like rote execution instead of satisfying mastery.
Boss Fights Are the Highlight
Where the combat shines the most is the boss fights with the Nushi. So much of the narrative focus is on hunting these beasts down in each zone, and they generally don’t disappoint. These are massive versions of animals, but with Annihilation-style plant growth coming out of them, warping them into something that’s equal parts beautiful and horrifying. Aside from being great presentation-wise, they also play well, providing a clever mix of melee and ranged attacks that move them all around the arena to keep you on your toes. These felt like true climactic encounters, combining spectacle and challenge in a satisfying manner.
But they aren’t without their hangups as well. While I found myself having the most fun during these fights, I definitely think they went on for too long. Generally, the pattern of the game has you running into the boss, chasing it off, then tracking it down and fighting it a final time. This final encounter almost always has a second phase, but that second phase mostly changes the creature visually without adding too much new behavior-wise.
This means that for many of the bosses, you’re fighting them three times with nearly identical encounters each time. When you’re doing two phases in a row, boss fights feel like they get near ten minutes in length, making it feel more like a test of endurance than skill. On top of the repetitive phases, occasionally you’ll fight the same boss again in a later zone, which feels pretty disappointing when you’re looking to them as the highlight of the game.
Between these boss fights, you’re generally exploring areas that are littered with various enemies, using Emma’s traversal abilities. Given that she’s absorbed so much blight, she has the power to summon vines in various ways to get around the environment. This includes a grappling hook-like skill, the ability to build temporary bridges, and a vine boost that pushes her up in the air like an advanced double jump. That final skill is the most fun, providing a neat visual twist on a classic skill that feels good to use.
Exploration Feels Too Guided
Unfortunately, I don’t find the space you’re going through all that engaging. The environments are pretty standard overgrown post-apocalyptic fare, with a mix of green natural areas and rusted old industrial spaces, and all of them run together by the end of it. On top of that, I didn’t find exploration all that rewarding. As you walk around, Koo will point out items in the environment, which in some ways deflates the joy of finding them. Occasionally, one will be marked by him, and it will be a little bit of a puzzle to figure out how to get to it, but most of the time it’s pretty easy to track down items when they are on your HUD. I like the fictional nature of him helping you out, but it felt kinda deflating to just be shown where the secrets were.
The levels act as small open worlds, with each zone being small in size and fairly linear. There’s room to explore, but the game has so many methods in place to keep you on the golden path. There’s a big blue line that appears in the air, a representation of Koo’s sense of smell, that will always guide you in the correct direction, as well as little glowing butterflies that highlight specific places you need to go. At some points, there are even big graffiti arrows on the walls and ground that make sure you know that this is the way. While it’s nice that I never really felt lost while playing, that came at the cost of the magic of exploration, which is something I value in games.
Your cleanse walker acts as a mobile base of operations that moves you between these zones, and you’ll need to go back there every once in a while. When I started playing the game, it was not clear to me why I needed to go back, but then I looked at the game’s tutorials and realized there was a whole hunger system that I wasn’t really engaging with, where staying away from your home base can have adverse effects (though it appears those were minor enough as to go unnoticed). At the cleanse walker, you can interact with your crew, who have both narrative and mechanical purposes on board.
Kagura, a girl you saved at the start of your journey, cooks you meals with ingredients that you collect and grow, while also trying to bond with you emotionally. Brad, the grizzled pilot, acts as a merchant while also guiding you through your quest to kill the Nushi. You also have Violet, who doesn’t have a mechanical purpose, but is a weird ghost that only you can see, driving much of the game’s mystery.
Both Koo and Kagura have an affinity meter that allows you to bond with them through interacting, but it felt rudimentary at best. Because it’s always fun to have a dog in a game, it works best with Koo, who you can pet and clean to raise your relationship with, but it was never really clear to me what the benefits were. Even weirder, I hit the maximum bond level with Koo after about 10 hours into the 25-hour campaign, which felt strangely early. While I enjoyed having a place where narrative could be delivered, I didn’t really get a lot out of the systems aboard the cleanse walker, mainly because it seemed unclear what it was doing outside of some minor stat boosts from the meals I was getting.
Pacing and Storytelling Hiccups
Narratively, the pacing of the game feels a bit off as well. After the flashback-heavy opening, the story dies down for quite some time, focused heavily on the act of moving from one zone to another to hunt down Nushi, which don’t really have much story significance aside from acting as boss fights. The recurring NPCs that you come across are largely mysterious and unexplained until the game decides to dump all the narrative on you in the final act. The story feels so backloaded with its exposition, making the beginning feel a bit aimless, and the final stretch feel overwhelming, rather than being satisfying throughout.
The delivery of the narrative was also a bit lacking for me. Aside from the exciting cutscenes that punctuate most of the boss fights, a lot of the narrative sequences feel stiff, with the characters standing fairly motionless as they talk. A decent portion of the story is delivered in conversations where other characters talk to each other without Emma being there, making it feel like the story is happening around her rather than to her. After boss fights, there are strings of cutscenes that just keep coming, and it felt like it was at least ten minutes or so before you were able to get back to the action. For me to sit through cutscenes that long, I need them to be a lot more dynamic than what Beast of Reincarnation was giving me.
Even when all was revealed by the end, I didn’t really feel like there was that much new that the game was bringing to the table with its story and world. It felt too reminiscent of Nier: Automata, with a hint of Death Stranding in there for good measure, but without the oddball charm that those titles have. Perhaps that’s the challenge of having a protagonist that canonically is emotionless, but I just felt like I wanted a little more personality aside from the novelty of having a big, cute dog.
Also hurting my enjoyment was a weird lack of polish overall that, while never gamebreaking, irked me in little ways. The camera would twitch when hitting a wall, sound effects felt out of sync with animations, and bad collision caused me to climb up the environment weirdly or get caught in corners. Attack animations generally looked sharp in play, but occasionally I would catch people clipping through the environment during cutscenes. These are all types of things that could be fixed in a post-launch patch, but given the high fidelity of the visuals, little issues like this felt distracting.
One of the biggest things that bothered me was the language option menu. By default, the game starts with Japanese voice acting with English subtitles, which are pretty small and don’t have a backing on them. Because there was frequent dialogue during the action, I was having trouble keeping up with the subtitles in the middle of fights, so I paused the game and went into the language options to see what I could do. The menu had no way to change the spoken language, and there were no options to adjust the subtitles for visibility. I powered through, dealing with the subtitles the whole game, and when I hit the credits, I saw an English voice cast listed.
Turns out that you could switch the voice acting to English, but it was only available at the main menu version of the settings, not in the pause menu settings. Even if there may be some technical reason preventing them from changing the voice settings while the game is running, they probably at least should have had a little note in the pause menu saying it could be changed from the main menu. While this may be slightly my fault for not checking all menus thoroughly, it speaks to some of the design decisions of the game that didn’t feel fully formed or well thought out.
Final Verdict
It’s hard to review a game like this because there’s something here; I’m just not sure if it’s the game itself or the games it’s reminding me of. Shades of Sekiro and Nier: Automata need to be a starting point rather than the most notable feature, and Beast of Reincarnation never really got out of the shadow of either. The dog companion is a solid hook for the game, but it doesn’t bring enough personality to either the narrative or the combat to make it truly shine.
It’s clear that this is the biggest project that Game Freak has worked on, because a lack of polish both in concepts and execution keeps this from being as memorable as it should. If you love third-person action games, you could do a lot worse than the combat mechanics presented here.
The issue is that it’s very easy for you to do a lot better, as well.
Code provided by publisher. Beast of Reincarnation is available for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and the Xbox Series.
