Beast of Reincarnation has me torn. It’s an interesting world with a fantastic aesthetic. There’s a fun combat system that makes you progressively feel more and more powerful and a beautiful soundtrack. However, the characters and story all feel like they fall flat despite having so much potential. The game is a mixed bag that I want to love more than I should.
The game seems to take heavy inspiration from the NieR games, both aesthetically and story-wise, as it treads some familiar ground. The game opens up talking about emotions being a burden and how humanity has evolved but the souls have started to rot. Cue our protagonist Emma overlooking a seemingly sick child named Kagura in their walking mech home. The music kicks in, and Emma and her trusty wolf companion Koo head out to fight as you get a brief tutorial of some of the mechanics, a spirit girl named Violet popping out your side and a brief reveal of an antagonist before it shoots you back 5 months where you’re dropped into the first zone of the game.
Here you’re briefly introduced to one of the supporting cast, Brad, and to what your objective is going to be for most of the game: search the area to find and defeat the Nushi. After this, you head to your first bonfire. Here, you rest and upgrade skills, all the usual souls-like stuff.
You have three different stats you can put points into for yourself and for Koo, these stats determine what skills you can unlock in the roots of the skill tree. Yes, the skill tree is an actual tree that grows with each Nushi that you defeat but the roots always remain the same, I found myself throughout my playthrough just rounding out all my stats so I could go to the bottom of each of the roots.
After you’re done messing with your skills, you can then start to traverse the area and movement in this game feels pretty fun, being blight-stained Emma’s hair can extend in a multitude of ways, instead of double jumping, you can raise yourself up off the ground with your hair then whip it towards set grapple points, you can even then extend it out and run along it to cross areas or get the drop on enemies with the ability to assassinate. Emma’s hair makes running around the semi-open areas a lot of fun. I say semi-open as most of the levels give you a decent amount to explore off to the side but they aren’t these massive sprawling maps.
You have different chests, elite enemies, merchants, campfires and weapons placed all over the levels but for the most part the game’s main story will push you towards most of these with some of them just being a hair whip away, which I didn’t mind at all. Gameplay feels great in this game, from traversal and the different combos you unlock to Koo’s abilities, which you can activate mid-fight in a more JRPG fashion. However, you might find if you’re looking for a challenging souls-like experience, this game is not for you. It takes a level or two to get to grips with but once you have the parry window down the game does become fairly trivial to get through.
This gets to the biggest flaw on the gameplay side of things. There is very little variety in enemies and bosses, you’ll find yourself repeating the same fights over and over throughout the game. This didn’t bother me too much but I could definitely see people finding this to be a bit lazy on Game Freak’s part. I think however, this is just one of many little issues the game has that really leaves me torn in the end.
Let’s start with the first dilemma that this game has. The English dub, it seems very clear that the English was very much an afterthought. Firstly, if you go in blind you might not even realise there is English voice acting, the option for this is hidden when checking the options in-game and can only be seen if you quit out to the main menu and check the options again.
The intention was clearly to have people just play with subtitles, which would be perfectly fine but unfortunately at least at launch the subtitles were really small with no option to adjust the size. Not only that, but it does clash with the action combat that some people might struggle to read while also focusing on fights. Because of this and the fact that I was streaming the game, I eventually switched over to the English voices and I think this overall added to the flatness of some of the characters. It very much felt like there was a lack of direction on this side, every conversation has awkward pauses between lines, which leads to the lines feeling much more robotic.
This isn’t helped by the fact that our main character Emma is actually meant to be emotionally stilted to begin with. Emma is definitely a challenging character to bring to life. She starts the game with no memories of her past, an outcast who seems to have no real understanding of emotions, all she knows is she exists for a purpose and the supporting cast throughout slowly teaches her.
Our supporting cast of characters consists of Brad, Kagura, Violet, Kunai, Mikoto and our antagonist Shidou. I won’t delve too deep into spoilers with these characters but I can’t help but feel like a lot of them felt underused. The game is one big unravelling mystery and the majority of the characters seem to all have history and know something that you, as Emma, don’t, but it truly feels like we don’t get enough time to explore these characters before the end of the game. Kunai and Mikoto are relegated to the occasional phone call you have on your walker. Brad spends the majority of the time saying he’ll tell you something and Kagura is just kind of there to cook you food and act like a little sister to Emma. But truly it felt like I didn’t get to explore enough of these characters to form any big emotional connection.
Shidou, our antagonist, like the rest of the characters is really mysterious, being a bit like Emma he has his own companion but despite the multiple encounters you have with him, it feels like we don’t learn enough. I think part of my dissatisfaction here is a lot of what is implied or spoken about throughout sounds really cool in concept but we never fully explore it. They even do something a little meta later on in the game that I really expected would go somewhere but nothing really comes of it, which was super disappointing because they had the setup to do something really interesting with it.
Which is ultimately why I’m so torn on this game. Aesthetically, it’s beautiful, and traversing the world and combat are fun, yet the enemies lack variety. There’s a really interesting world they have built out with some potentially really interesting characters but a lot of the dialogue falls flat and we never get to fully explore them. The meta stuff felt like an idea they had that could potentially do something cool but it feels like they never got the time and scrapped it in the end. So yeah, Beast of Reincarnation is an enjoyable game but ultimately feels like it needed more time to cook.
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