Like an above-ground swimming pool, Beast of Reincarnation is one of those things that feels like it should be great in theory, but leaves something to be desired once you actually spend some time in it. On a surface level, everything from the aesthetics and otherworldly apocalyptic setting to the battles against giant, diseased creatures has the makings of something really special. In practice though, this awesome collection of ideas only rarely approaches realizing that potential, as nearly every aspect proves to be quite shallow. Combat against both minion enemies and bosses alike is extremely one-note, the story succeeds much more at collecting tropes than evoking any kind of emotion, and there’s an overreliance on indistinguishable areas and enemies throughout the adventure. There’s still a decent action RPG in here somewhere, because when it occasionally does shine with a neat wrinkle in the story or a particularly cool fight sequence, it’s very easy to see how this could have been every bit as awesome as it looks at first glance, but highlights like those are certainly the exception to an action game that’s largely just okay.
Combining elements of a soulslike with a more traditional JRPG, this fast-paced action game feels like what you might end up with if you tried to combine Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice with the Final Fantasy VII Remake. Across the roughly 35-hour campaign, you’ll split your time between exploring levels of ruined buildings reclaimed by wildlife, parrying and dodging in tense combat encounters, and learning about the convoluted backstory of the world and characters that surround your protagonist, Emma. There’s loads of potential in that formula, and in its best moments, Beast of Reincarnation is both beautiful to look at and incredibly badass, as your katana-wielding elemental mage absolutely overloads the screen with over-the-top melee attacks, sending bolts of lightning and fire flying every which way to complement the artful swordsmanship.
That potential is only realized every once in a while though, as you’ll spend a lot of your time fighting the same handful of enemies far too often, plowing through even the most daunting encounters without much friction due to incredibly forgiving parry windows, and quickly mastering every opponent you come across owing to the fact that they all have just two or three attacks they repeat ad nauseum. Conceptually, ninja-dueling your way through this beautiful, destroyed world and its massive monsters should be sick as hell, but it only takes a couple hours for it all to feel quite skin deep, like how in its opening chapter you’re forced to fight the same giant elk boss multiple times, as it assails you with the one attack it seem to know over and over again in a fight that lasts much longer than it should.
There are still plenty of memorable moments sprout up every now and then, like one level where you’re scaling the inside of a creepy, rotating cube machine and fighting against the forgotten experiments left in the creepy structure, but most of your time will be spent in forgettable regions filled with the same robotic baddies, concluding in a boss fight against a creature you’ve already seen (and is in many cases just a larger version of an existing bestial enemy).
One aspect of combat that fares much better is the addition of Koo, your dire wolf companion, who battles alongside you with an arsenal of increasingly destructive magical abilities. Koo mostly does his own thing, but his behaviors and abilities can be customized and upgraded as you go, and it’s important to build him up accordingly since he becomes a vital part of getting through some of the larger combat sequences much faster. He can also be controlled directly, as you pause time to select a special ability for him to use Final Fantasy VII Remake-style – you can even command him to assassinate enemies on your behalf, which really helps speed up some of those repetitive combat encounters and can burn through large chunks of a boss’ health bar as well. Plus, Koo is inexplicably one of the strongest characters, despite being a four-legged pooch with no dialogue. His high energy and unusually expressive face serves as a counterweight to the robotic mannerisms of the majority of the bipedal cast.
Despite Koo’s best efforts though, the paper-thin depth of Beast of Reincarnation only grows the longer you play. Exploring the mostly-linear regions is beautiful and features some truly awesome music, but after just two levels I already felt overly familiar with the extremely monotonous checklist of loot to collect and camp sites to unlock before fighting the boss (almost always twice for some reason), then moving on to do it all again. That formula doesn’t evolve as you progress through levels either, as you only ever unlock new abilities to help you power through combat while exploration and platforming never gain any new tricks. Meanwhile, most of the combat pits you against sword-wielding automatons who have maybe one or two different attacks between them, which means you’ll be parrying and countering the same set of telegraphed attacks a dozen times in a single combat encounter.
Even things like the music (which again, is quite good), becomes stale as you quickly discover they’ve got one whole song playing on a loop for more than ten hours worth of levels. Emma, on the other hand, gains access to a bunch of passive abilities that buff her generally, and a bunch of special arts that unlock new moves and attack combos in combat. Most of this stuff does very little to make fighting feel better, as you’re still going up against enemies that just spam the same attacks for you to parry before countering with an attack of your own. They do help those fights go by much quicker, however, and eventually you’ll be able to take out a handful of enemies all at once with some seriously cool-looking attacks.
RPG mechanics don’t fare much better, as the shallow upgrades available for upgrading your katanas, ranged weapons, and accessories are fairly limited. For example, you’ll find new katanas on a regular basis, but even by the end of the story, you won’t come across any that are definitively better or have incentives to support a specific playstyle than those you found early on. So, you have little motivation to upgrade them except to diversify the special effects and status ailments various weapons offer. Skill trees, on the other hand, fare much better as Koo unlocks a whole host of abilities that blast enemies with tons of high-DPS spells and layer on status effects that do things like bind an enemy in place with magical plant vines.
Boss fights are especially disappointing, because they feel like they should be the major draw here, but instead only serve to magnify combat’s shortcomings (quite literally) as you fight a massive beast whose imposing presence is wasted on them being incredibly thoughtless adversaries who often repeat the same slow-moving attack twenty times in row. Bizarrely, you’re usually made to fight these creatures once partway through a level, only to face them again with zero changes at the level’s conclusion, before they transform into an even cooler-looking final phase that…attacks with an almost identical moveset. Worse yet, in the second half of the adventure, it seems to straight up run out of ideas as it starts sending repeat bosses at you. The fact that all of these fights are followed by the same cutscene of your character passing out then waking up in a bed certainly don’t help, making story progress fall into a predictable cadence.
Like any RPG worth its salt, a lot of the focus here is on the story, complete with cutscenes so lengthy you’ll want to remember to flick the joystick every so often to keep your screen lit up. As an emotionless warrior who also has amnesia (because of course you do), you’ll go around hunting down the aforementioned giant, blighted beasts alongside Koo, so you can stop the end of the world. As is the case with lots of things in Beast of Reincarnation, that idea is much stronger than the execution as Emma and the apocalyptic setting that gives rise to such conflict is poised to deliver a tale filled with interesting mysteries to unravel. Instead, Emma and her companions come with lifeless performances as they tell a story with every single genre trope in the book, including a quiet hero who has been chosen by prophecy, a heavy-handed nature vs. humans/technology theme, a Force-ghost little girl who isn’t actually there, and an amnesiatic character who at one point is stricken with a second dose of amnesia so she remembers even less than before.
None of that would be a deal-breaker for me were it not for the fact that the execution of its trope-filled story isn’t delivered with the kind of punch that can make up for it. It’s on the weaker side with consistently weak dialogue and reveals I saw coming from about 10 miles away. If you’ve played a JRPG in the last twenty years, there’s nothing about this story that hasn’t been done better in numerous other games, and if you’re expecting the quality to be near the level of something like Xenoblade Chronicles, you’re almost certainly going to be disappointed. It’s especially weird just how flat most of the characters are; they rarely show emotion (sometimes with in-universe reasons, not that the justification makes it more interesting to watch). The robotic animations, lifeless eyes, and long silences in between dialogue makes nearly all the scenes between Emma and her found family pretty hard to sit through most of the time. And they do that thing where they show a washed out flashback to something that literally happened less than five minutes ago, which drives me up the wall way more than it probably should.
Also, this isn’t really a specific pain point, but I feel obligated to mention just how much of the dialogue is taken up by characters talking about food and the eating of it. It’d make sense if it was woven in thematically, but it’s not and I’m not sure if the writers were just super hungry when they wrote this or what, but it’s pretty bizarre.
