Beast of Reincarnation Review: The Game Freak Without Pokémon That Fails to Make a Mark

Game Freak is the company that has always brought us into the (video game) world of Pokémon, but perhaps some developers were tired of catching little monsters, and together with a creative team and many others (external parties to whom much of the work was outsourced), we ended up with the title of this review in our hands. While we'll discuss the story in the next chapter, in this part, I confess, I found myself a bit bewildered right from the start of the game. The title could be classified as an action-RPG, relegating almost everything to the first word of the genre and the second to the part of power-ups and leveling. Unfortunately, in my experience with it, I confess that it struggled to reconcile many of the choices.

While the gameplay mechanics and the way you act with the controller in hand—including combos—are fun, the repetitiveness of the action and the few variations in situations I encountered made my journey rather flat. The animations are particularly well-crafted, and some ideas were "stolen" from many action games of the genre, but it was done to streamline the formula into a solution that perhaps wanted to embrace the masses, with a very low difficulty, but which in practice turns out to be very unstimulating, which is the opposite of what should be asked of players. It's not an open world, I imagine some of you wondered; the maps, however, are almost entirely explorable (one per chapter), but they have little to offer beyond the main road—and this is coming from someone who found almost everything there was to discover in every nook and cranny—with situations where even the directional indications are not always clear or with the risk of "getting stuck" in the scenarios, which also tend to be somewhat similar, despite being all completely different.

The story transports us to Japan in the year 4026, a distant future where civilization is now reduced to a few scattered fragments. The world has been devastated by a mysterious corruption known as the Blight, a plague that has altered ecosystems, animals, and even human beings. The ruins of ancient cities coexist with gigantic forests and wild landscapes that seem to have reclaimed what belonged to technology and modern society.
The aloof protagonist is Emma, a young woman who carries the mark of this contamination within her. Considered an outcast by society, she lives in a state of constant conflict between what she is and what others see in her.

By her side is Koo, a dog who becomes much more than a simple travel companion. The bond that unites the two seems to represent the emotional core of the entire experience and accompanies the player along a path characterized by dangers, discoveries, and questions about the fate of the world. Without dwelling too much, the key point is not just the narrated part itself, but the way the protagonist, seemingly devoid of emotions, approaches beings who are particularly full of them. This is why her journey is not just an attempt to defeat the beast of reincarnation, but a deep and well-written emotional journey, despite many overused oriental fantasy clichés.

I confess that the biggest problem I found is the game's complete anonymity. You'll hardly remember it once completed, almost impossible to think of replaying it at the end of the journey, and above all, it lacks a striking personality that would make it stand out from the ever-increasing flood of action games coming from the East. If I told you it's a bad game, I'd be lying, as I rightly wanted to emphasize the goodness of the plot; it's difficult to digest many of the developers' choices regarding stylistic approaches to combat, which is also somewhat the focus for which greater care would have been reasonable to expect.

 

The version we received is a concentrate of balancing errors. While the game on normal difficulty can be played with your eyes closed, bosses included, and even with these behemoths, I encountered the worst things. Let's start with the camera, which often made it objectively improbable to follow the scene and what was happening on screen—despite the fact that we have to dodge or parry and understand how the bosses move to act accordingly—but as unfortunately happens with productions (often less renowned), the balancing is terrible. You might find monsters that you defeat with two hits at the highest difficulty levels and some that don't fall even on story difficulty (although in general, the difficulty, as I said, is set towards the lower end).

So, while the artistic direction isn't particularly inspired, unlike the narrative one, despite the balancing flaws and not being the action game of a lifetime on the gameplay front, it's absolutely not to be discarded. There are things to do, there's entertainment, but perhaps it's a bit far from the qualitative goals that would have been reasonable to expect from this title.