Beast of Reincarnation Review | What Went Wrong

Beast of Reincarnation is a new release from Game Freak. Yes, the Game Freak that has spent the last 30 years making Pokémon. I rolled credits on the game after pouring a little over 40 hours into it, and I walked away definitely a bit conflicted. On one hand, I’m glad I finished this. There is genuinely a good game buried in here, almost matching the premise of the story when it becomes fully realized.

However, what went wrong with Beast of Reincarnation had nothing to do with its code. Now, this is a decision the team made in the pre-production phase in how they decided to tell the story. The design philosophy that has been pulled directly from Souls games, and this choice affected the writing, the storytelling, the pacing, the voice acting, and ultimately just neutered the expectations people had for this game going in.

STORYTELLING & PACING

Beast of Reincarnation opened up to a mixed reception online, and for good reason. You play as Emma, known as the sealer, who’s been tasked with reaching the capital in order to eradicate the blight, which has infested the lands you traverse. You travel with a dog companion named Koo, and both of you are infused with the powers of this blight. The game has you traversing from one biome to the next, about a dozen in total, inching yourself closer to the final destination of confronting the beast of reincarnation to set things right.

The premise of the story is severely parsed out to you slowly through the first eight chapters or so of the game. And once you hit that point, then the story starts to unfold. You seriously get about 15% of story across those first eight chapters with hidden conversations of audio with no actual cutscenes, half sentences, and just downright omission of what’s going on.

And then they just tease the rest of it until the very end. By chapters 11 through 13, the idea of the story was starting to uncover and even then not fully until the final boss. I mean, 95% of this game had to be completed to find out what was going on, and then it was just a straight story dump. This reminded me so much of the Souls franchise and how much influence it still has on storytelling in games today. This strategy only works for certain kinds of games. The kind of games where the level design and the world are so intricately designed and fine-tuned to tell the story. Beast of Reincarnation is not that.

The game becomes more of a story about the bond between Emma and Koo, how they work together from biome to biome, how they evolve in their powers and stick together as the journey gets harder. Now, this makes a great side story while the looming threat remains on top, but neither is a dominant feature that really pulls you in. And then there’s the repetition, which makes the whole thing so much worse. Again, there are 13 chapters in this game, and it’s told in the most cookie cutter way I have ever seen.

It was so bad. I broke down the exact sequence of events from a boss dying at the end of one chapter leading into the next, detailing everything down to the animation patterns, the fade to black transitions, the same close-ups of Emma waking up from battle. I mean, it was the same sequence of events every single time in the exact same way playing out in every location of the game. It was so frustrating to see. The pacing inside those chapters is rough, too. Long drawn out pauses between animations, even longer pauses between dialogue. I mean, this game has to be the largest waste of a player’s time, and it all seemed deliberate. And that traces right back to pre-production.

All the long drawn out moments exist because of a decision made before any of this was even built. There was no real concern about how the player should feel moving through it other than just straight annoyance. I mean, this is what a poorly paced story looks like when it didn’t have to be. The cut scenes run long. Most of them are the most basic conversations imaginable. I mean, you’ve got Kagura asking Emma to open up to her for the hundredth time. You’ve got Brad here giving you the cold shoulder for the entirety of the game while you try to pry answers out of him about what the heck is going on. And nobody in this game shows any real expression. Everyone is bland and emotionless like they all went and got Botox shots in their face right before the journey started. And yes, I know Emma’s circumstance is story driven, but come on. Not a single upbeat personality at all in this game was driving me insane. And the conversations got so painful to listen to, I had to switch the audio from English to Japanese. Got to love language options, man.

GAMEPLAY

Which is the tragedy of this thing, honestly, because the game underneath is good and the combat fundamentals are even better. And Koo, your companion throughout this adventure, only adds to this experience. He’s an excellent AI companion who makes good decisions in a fight without you ever having to really manage him. You can bring up his attack menu the way you would in the Final Fantasy 7 remake, which slows down time, and you can chain his abilities into your own swings. Even better, you can set his attack patterns to be more aggressive and venture out, or have him in defensive mode where he stays near you, focusing on healing and buffing you. Regardless of what you do, he always reads the fight correctly.

There’s a lot of Sekiro in the parrying timing of the game, a little bit of wild hearts in the look of the world and enemy designs, and even a little stellar blade in what the music is trying to reach for. Your upgrade progression evolves as you fight the bosses throughout the game and incorporating their moves into yours and coups move sets, which ends up giving you an abundance of moves to consider while traversing. And the world has real verticality to it. Your blight abilities allow you to use your hair to carry you up surfaces, create walkways to bridge large gaps. You can even use your hair as a grappling hook to help you reach harder to reach spots from a good distance.

Problem is, it doesn’t take long before the things to do in the world get stale, and they get stale fast. And this is really because the cookie cutter problem is not just a story problem. You’ve got limited enemy types to the point where all of them are repeated numerous times. That’s what you’re fighting for. 40 hours in the same groupings until the bosses come back around for a second life, which in a game called Beasts of Reincarnation, I was really hoping this wasn’t a trope being used. Seriously, this studio can come up with hundreds of Pokémon, and this game gets what, 10 to 15 enemy and boss types. I mean, make it make sense. And that is what makes all of this sting so much because your side of the fight keeps growing. You’re absorbing new boss moves, your options are expanding, and then there’s nothing new to point any of it at. By the back half of the game, you have this deep toolkit and the same handful of enemies to use it on.

So, you settle into whatever worked in hour five, and it’s easy to never touch the rest. A great combat system needs new problems to solve. And this team didn’t think we needed variety past the initial chapters. The world empties out the same way. building bonds with Ku and Kagura so they can learn their respective skills and combat moves and cooking more recipes maxed out for me very early in the game. Although Kagura was a pretty slow cook for me. I mean by the end of the game she still had like half of her recipes to learn and to actually cook. So there was either an issue with the amount of cooking recipes she needed to learn or just the speed at which she was cooking them.

You’ve also got golems that will inform you of weapons in each map along with beefed up elite monsters and other hidden items which consists of primarily materials, fruits, and vegetables. The game also barely explains itself. 3 hours in, I hit the left trigger by accident and found out that I had a crossbow. So, make sure you hit up the tutorial so you know what you got.

VISUALS

From a visual standpoint, this game also disappoints. If you’re used to your visuals looking like that of Pokémon, sure, this looks like a three generation jump and you will definitely be impressed. However, realistically, this has the look and feel of a base PS4 game. It’s muddy with a washed out color palette. A lot of the detail is soft across the whole image.

Typically, when I edit game footage for videos like this, I try to leave it in the state it was recorded in as much as possible with the occasional tweak and contrast, exposure, you know, your midtones and saturation. For this game though, I really found myself dialing in the color correction and grade a bit harder than I normally would, just cuz the image looked so lifeless. For me, I like a vibrant image with detail that really stands out, and this game did not meet that standard.

SOUND DESIGN

Sound splits clean down the middle for me here. The sound effects are strong. I definitely want to give the team its due here. Between the various sword swipes, parries, coups attacks, and even enemy attacks, every sound has the appropriate weight to it that never felt off-putting. The music, on the other hand, failed miserably for me. I think the original soundtrack for this game has to be a total like four tracks cuz I heard zero variety of music other than this stellar bladelike track that looped over and over again for the entirety of my playthrough. It was so bad I ended up turning the music off altogether a bit way in. Game Freak, you really could have afforded a real soundtrack here.

So, let me tell you what I think this game should have been. A 12 to 15 hour tight experience with a standard 3-act structure which exists for a reason, delivering its story beats at a regular cadence so the player always has a reason to push into the next chapter. Act one should establish Emma coup the blight and the mission. Act two should escalate the narrative with new characters, new story lore that adds tension and raises the stakes. And act three should hit the climax with a big reveal and the ultimate confrontation that ends in its resolution. Sequel reveal or not doesn’t matter. 13 chapters is plenty of room for that if each chapter is actually doing something. This is not a radical idea. It’s one of the oldest storytelling structures we have and it works because it keeps handing the player a reason to continue.

Instead, somebody decided the story should have been told like a Souls game and everything downstream of that decision had to stretch to cover the gap. The chapters get repetitive because there was not enough story to make them distinct. Good combat got asked to carry a heavy loaded run time and that’s made even harder when the rest of the game doesn’t have a lot going on. This is soul food without the soul. No seasoning, no flavoring, nothing that makes you want seconds.

WORTH THE COST?

So, what’s the verdict? Beast of Reincarnation is not worth $60 on day one. It’s definitely not worth $70. And I know Game Freak is committed to updates that are being released, but that does not change my answer here. What’s wrong with this game is structural. You cannot patch story pacing. You cannot patch a chapter structure that repeats itself 13 times or a story that withholds everything from you until the very end because those are not bugs plaguing the game. Solving this means building a different game, not patching this one. A deep sale under $35 is really where this starts to make sense to me. $25 would have been the honest number for what this actually is. Sold as a proof of concept for what Game Freak could do next. And I mean that as a compliment to the idea, not an insult to the work.

But if you have Game Pass, that is ultimately your answer. Find out for yourself whether the combat is enough to carry you, because for some people, it absolutely will be. And it cost you nothing to find out. And I want to say this part plainly. Game Freak is better than this. An almost 40-year juggernaut in the industry with such a well-known and profitable franchise in Pokémon should have known better than this. The combat team proved they can build something excellent. Koo alone proves somebody there is thinking hard about design and implementation of smart AI in combat. They just needed one person in pre-production to look at the pacing of the story and say, “No, this is not a Souls game, and we cannot tell the story this way.”

At the end of the day, I’m glad I finished it. There is a good game buried in Beast of Reincarnation. It’s just bogged down with more bad than there is good. And for that, I can only recommend this game at a deep sale or on Game Pass.