Beast of Reincarnation review

Beast of Reincarnation is a sci-fi action RPG whose parry-happy woman protagonist is on a mission to save an apocalypse-blighted humanity. On paper it sounds like Stellar Blade, and in practice, it feels a bit like Stellar Blade. It's open but linear, and ruthlessly focused on speed and dexterity. And yet, while Beast of Reincarnation may draw from the same pool of inspiration—think Sekiro, Final Fantasy, Nier—the net result is cosmically at odds with Shift Up's outing.

Emma is a young woman stricken by the Blight. It's the very same phenomenon that has transformed 41st century Japan into a wasteland of verdant ruins. She entirely lacks emotion thanks to her malady, nor can she remember her life before the illness. To make matters worse, she's an outcast among survivors by dint of her condition. But in exchange she has inherited some gnarly Blight powers, namely the ability to generate aggressive, tentacle-like flora.

The Blight is an infection spread by the titular beast of reincarnation, whose wrath is renewed every hundred years. Though an outcast, Emma and her similarly Blight-infected dog companion Koo are tasked with taking the fight to this mysterious deity-like beast. So off they go, chaperoned by a small crew in a giant military biped which serves as home base.

The flagrantly unoriginal premise seems to promise a bombastic, relentlessly loud spectacle. But entirely to its credit, Beast of Reincarnation is an unusually quiet and patient thing. If Stellar Blade is psytrance with the bass jacked right up, Beast of Reincarnation is psytrance with the percussion removed entirely. I mean, it's essentially a precision-oriented action game, and it can often be very tense, but the whole project is suffused with an elegiac doom. This is a richly atmospheric, melancholy videogame. It took me by surprise.

Parry On

But let's assess it as an action game first. Emma is a dab hand with a sword, but an even dabber hand at parrying with it. Like Stellar Blade, Beast of Reincarnation is a parry dance and there's just no getting around it, though if you feel vindicated by the sudden popularity of the "parryslop" pejorative, there are ways to loosen things up.

One way is with projectiles. Emma has a bow and a crossbow, and if you invest in them via Beast of Reincarnation's typically convoluted skill trees, you can make them monstrously powerful. Both can be equipped with three elemental varieties, and ammunition is automatically replenished at bonfires campsites. If I aim my bows mid-air the world slows to a crawl but Emma doesn't, an effect which depletes the "entanglement gauge" I can also manually trigger to slow down time on foot, or to use my special attacks.

But the most effective way to fill a depleted entanglement gauge is to pull off perfect parries or dodges with an ever-increasing array of swords, none of which feel different but carry certain passive benefits. Parrying and dodging is also the most effective way to make sure canine Koo's powers stay viable in combat. While the mutt will happily fight without my input, I can trigger their special attacks via a turn-based combat style menu. Smooth application of these specials will also marginally heal Emma.

I think this will be wildly variable between players, but since Emma and Koo share a pool of skill points I ended up investing far more heavily in the former than the latter. I found myself almost forgetting to use the dog's special attacks (I was too busy raining down explosive bolts from the sky) though they were always marginally useful: especially for that slither of health, because most enemies will kill you in two or three hits.

(Not that I'm ragging on the dog: Koo's a lovely hunk of fluff.)

Beast of Reincarnation's skill trees do offer the possibility of contrasting playthroughs. Rather than focus on projectiles I can upgrade Emma's hair, which is one of the game's neatest tricks. Emma can use her sylvan expandable ponytail to gain a huge elevation boost or create bridges to otherwise inaccessible platforms. Better still, she can use her locks to eff her enemies' shit up in ways ranging practical through to "for no better reason than it looks cool".

Green Out

I liked the combat, for the most part. If you're a parry tragic but enjoyed the slightly more forgiving windows of Stellar Blade versus Sekiro, that's basically where Beast of Reincarnation sits on the spectrum. There's a gratifying freneticism to more prickly encounters that really highlights the emotional decompression afforded by the dog’s light turn-based trappings.

But while the fighting feels good in the hands the encounter design is often extraordinarily dull. Beast of Reincarnation takes place across a series of discreet maps of varying openness, and it often feels like enemies are just plonked thoughtlessly onto the map. There are usually too few of them at once to really ratchet the tension, especially if I stealthily eliminate some in advance. It usually took the presence of at least one hulking heavy to give the scraps any zest, but then, there's very little at stake when I die: campsites serve as checkpoints where I can save, craft and level up, but they are almost comically abundant, and anyway, no items are lost upon death.

Where combat sings is during major encounters with bosses or mini-bosses. What otherwise simmers boils over into something spectacularly spicy. It's an overused analogy, but when all of Emma's abilities interlock—her bows, her magical hair, her swordplay—Beast of Reincarnation feels truly balletic. It’s just a shame it only ever reaches that point during big cinematic scraps.

The game's prizing of fluidity is somewhat undermined by the overly rugged art style, whose lush and tangled regrowth is full of geometry that may or may not be solid. It can put a real dampener on exploration. The graphics can be egregiously busy too, often resembling a general green mucky murkiness that makes it hard to take in the true scale of the world. This extremely green overgrown wasteland remains an extremely green overgrown wasteland for the vast majority of the game, and while it can sometimes be gorgeous it wends rather too closely to the tech-jungle look of Avatar or Horizon Zero Dawn, which is starting to feel overplayed.

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It also runs pretty poorly on my gaming laptop, with frequent dips below 60fps with settings on medium and FSR 3 toggled on. My PC is just below the recommended specs, but even on low it occasionally trebled. (A performance patch rolled out just an hour before this review went live, but I haven't had the chance to test it.)

Of course it's not perfect, but I admire Beast of Reincarnation. The fact that it comes from Pokémon studio Game Freak is both bizarre and, in other ways, makes perfect sense. This is a prestige double-A outing, which is basically what all Pokémon games are if you remove that timeworn brand.

But what even is double-A? Is it just "mid-range budget"? Or is it a vibe? Because if it's just the latter, Beast of Reincarnation is decidedly not that. The characterisation and voice acting—I played in Japanese, but English dubs are available from the main menu—is among the best I've seen in a big action game for years. Emma's robotic impassivity could have been performed as blandly stoic, or doll-like and naive, but instead registers as oddly, hauntingly absent.

And like I said, there's a maturity and patience to the presentation that feels more filmic than even the Hollywood-aping fare that Sony doles out (or used to). Game Freak loves its long, slow, lingering shots. It loves a strangely resonant silence. No one quips. There are no quirky asides or overbearing teaching moments. Characters speak elliptically, or else with an unguarded sincerity just a touch removed from JRPG mawkishness. It is severely committed to its bereft, enveloping ambience, and feels like it was made by a team blissfully unaware of Star Wars or the MCU.

Do not be misled: Beast of Reincarnation is tonally further away from the hypersexualised Stellar Blade than, I dunno, Pac-Man, despite feeling like an answer to its popularity. I knew the Pokémon studio's first blockbuster action RPG would be imperfect, but I also didn't expect it to be so fun and distinctive.