Beast of Reincarnation Review

Game Freak started this in 2020 under an internal programme meant to produce something other than Pokémon, and the result is the studio's most serious attempt at a mainstream action role playing game. Emma is eighteen, carries blight powers that let her grow and ride plants through the ruins of Japan, and travels with a stray dog called Koo who is the best character in the game by a wide margin.

The combat is the achievement. Parry led, fast, readable, with enough build variety that two players can finish the same boss in entirely different ways, and it drew comparisons to Sekiro and Black Myth: Wukong that it mostly earns. Several reviewers named its boss fights among their favourites of the year.

What surrounds it does not hold. The cast is flat and the dialogue flatter, the environment design is repetitive where it should be a Ghibli influenced ruin worth walking through, bosses are reused, and the polish is uneven from one area to the next. Scores split hard along that line: a handful of glowing reviews about the fighting, a majority sitting in the low seventies about everything else, and barely half of critics recommending it. A combat system this good deserved a better game around it.