Every slain Nushi adds another pretty flower to Emmaโs ponytail; it’s an ironically lovely marker for such a grim deed. These corrupted animals are covered in all sorts of wooden horns and festering wounds, yet they’re also draped in luscious greens leaves and vivid pink flowers. This marriage of beauty and wickedness not only defines a lot of Beast of Reincarnationโs visual style, but also its overall quality. Almost every positive the game has is at least partially tainted, leading to a conflicting experience that pulls in players almost as much as it pushes them away.
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Its combat excellently demonstrates this dichotomy. Emma, its conical hat-wearing protagonist, is a proficient swordswoman who specializes in parries, uses her plant-based powers to give her an edge, and works in tandem with her canine companion, Koo. Deflecting blows comes with a satisfying and spark-heavy clang, and the game is punishing enough on the default setting to discourage mindless mashing and careless defense. It borrows lightly from Soulslike games in this way, but thankfully doesn’t also steal irksome traits like bad checkpoints and needing to go on corpse runs.
Rating: 2.5/5
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Swordplay, even with its undercooked systems and amount of superfluous attacks, can sometimes been thrilling | …But it completely loses itself through poor pacing, dry characters, and too much sci-fi mumbo jumbo |
| The story is initially promisingโฆ | The overly long campaign drains story of its impact and makes combat monotonous |
| Its music, while decent, repeats far too often |
Combat is a bit flashier than the Soulslike norm and is more toward the Nioh side of the spectrum where speed is more of a driving factor than methodically blocking and slowly hacking away. This pacing is refreshing and opens the door for aerial juggles, massive plant-based specials that flood the screen, and assists from Koo that can help weaken enemies. Even though the puzzling lack of input buffering for healing and its โrage modeโ is frustrating โ unlike just about every other game, holding the block button during a heal won’t lead to blocking once the healing animation is done โ its general responsiveness and extravagant animations mean hacking away at rogue robots and infected creatures is, on a base level, satisfying.
Beast of Reincarnation‘s Swordplay Has Too Much Variety in Some Areas and Not Enough in Others
FictionsDigging beneath that base level, though, reveals issues. Kooโs assists stop time and have players hit a quick-time event, but itโs the same simple spinning wheel prompt for almost literally every attack and therefore adds little nuance to his contributions. Mechanical and fleshy foes alike have a limited amount of attacks, and the parry timing is relatively forgiving once the tiny initial delay is accounted for. Spongy elites, particularly early on, make this even more clear since taking them out is often a battle of attrition and hitting the same parries over and over until one side falls. Parry timing between enemies is also strangely consistent with little variation; donโt expect any delayed strikes or ones that deviate far from the predictable and established rhythm. Death can come after only a couple swipes, so duels arenโt necessarily easy, but the lack of variety means there is less to master, making victory noticeably less sweet.
Bosses (or Nushi, as the game calls them) also fall victim to these same problems and only serve to further highlight them. Their limited arsenals are not hard to counter or memorize in either of their phases. A few of them repeat over the course of the game, too, and one in particular is bizarrely recycled almost a dozen times. Some of those encounters are abbreviated, but itโs still remarkable how often players have to fight the same vine-covered terror again and again.
Like many great bosses, these climactic battles also give Emma a new ability, yet itโs almost impossible to differentiate between them all. Thereโs so little variation between this flower-rich dive bomb and that flower-rich dive bomb, and they only serve to clog up the already-busy skill tree with unnecessary fluff. The kicker here is that a decent portion of these are too slow to be pulled off consistently even with the silly speed boosts buried in the overly dense skill tree.
Beast of Reincarnation Is Just Too Long
FictionsItโs not just the combat that bends under the weight of repetition. World design pulls a little from the Horizon series with its lush new world forged in the ruins of the old one. However, the levels quickly devolve into shallow arenas dominated by invisible walls and plagued by a lack of any notable activities. Hunting down the same shrines, elite variants, and seeds are all shallow time-wasters pulled from the dusty tomes of the open-world genre’s past. Itโs a universe with a long history, yet very little of that is exercised in its bland hubs that betray the liveliness theyโve facilitated after the human race collapsed. Its vistas and commitment to injecting natural elegance into the grotesque can sometimes mean these stages look solid, but its jerky or glitchy lighting can often undermine its occasional visual splendor.
Getting around these disappointing hubs is also rather dull. Too much of the game takes place in empty rooms or large fields filled with nothing. And for all the violent powers Emma picks up, she doesnโt gain any meaningful traversal-related ones. She can ascend vertically through a root that extends from her right ankle or shoot out vines that extend horizontally off the end of a ledge, and both are interesting ideas early on, but they arenโt built upon at all. As such, moving from objective to objective becomes monotonous because the game never gives players the tools to move freely or lets them fully exercise the two they already have. The repetitiveness of its flora-powered movement is only matched by the repetitiveness of its soundtrack that loops the same couple songs to a comical, Deadly Premonition-esque degree. Itโs a soothing list of tracks that fits the natural wonder of this fallen civilization, but its dearth of music and inability to let the silence breathe becomes grating.
Many of Beast of Reincarnationโs flaws are downstream of its elongated campaign that pushes most of the gameโs systems to their limits. A shorter runtime would mean fewer boss repeats, a more focused skill tree, less time for regular fights to grow as stale as they do, and a soundtrack that isnโt as capable of driving players to the brink. It wouldnโt magically grant enemies new patterns, make Kooโs assists more exciting, or lead to a more thoughtfully designed world, but they also wouldnโt grow as repetitive if this 25-hour campaign had been trimmed down to a more acceptable 10 hours. A bigger beast is not necessarily a better one.
Beast of Reincarnation‘s Story Doesn’t Provide Enough Satisfying Answers
FictionsUnsurprisingly, Beast of Reincarnationโs narrative also isnโt safe from the all-encompassing bloat. Emma and the world around her are shrouded in mystery, and the game uses its many questions to keep players on the hook. Why does Emma not have any memories? Why does she talk to a hologram of a child no one else can see? Who gave her the mission to track down the titular Beast of Reincarnation? Who exactly is Koo?
Potential sustains the story early on when the answers to these questions still hold promise and are supplemented by small, amusing morsels of lore. Humans dealing with the apocalypse by sealing their souls in robots called golems and then going mad and oppressing blight-infected Sealers like Emma is a rich concept that can be thoroughly explored. Itโs a hard sci-fi angle that can easily be used to inspect prejudices and the follies of humankind through a different lens, which is often a strength of the genre.
But Beast of Reincarnation, for the most part, isnโt capable enough to deftly handle all the questions it raises. Many of the revelations are difficult to keep track of because of how ridiculous they get and how quickly the game moves on from them. It has a knack for teasing out small questions only to drop dense lore monologues that drag on for multiple minutes at a time. Doling out answers is a key part of mystery-filled stories like this and is yet another aspect of Beast of Reincarnation that buckles under its length. It seems as though the gameโs hour count dictated how much story developer Game Freak thought it needed and, thus, is why it feels narratively overstuffed.
Beast of Reincarnation‘s Characters Are Underdeveloped
Emma and Kooโs relationship isnโt strong enough to pick up the slack, either. Emotion has been stripped out of humans for various lore-related reasons, meaning Emma is purposely wooden and set up to have an obvious arc where she slowly opens up and regains her humanity. And even though this is part of her journey, that bit of backstory doesnโt justify how bland she is throughout the game.
Sheโs a skilled and determined warrior, but hearing her rarely sway from her monotone delivery is irritating, especially since the writing is not strong enough to make up for her lack of range. And when paired with an admittedly cute dog who naturally has a limited emotional range, itโs difficult to get too invested in their bond that is central to the experience. As such, emotional moments donโt resonate and conversations are often melodramatic to a fault, only exhibiting some humor โ albeit, unintentionally โ when the same โsadโ piano track starts playing for the 149th time.ย
Itโs a well-composed track, but its inability to improve the experience points out Beast of Reincarnationโs most pronounced problem: The better parts of this game all come with some sort of caveat. Its decent music loops to an absurd level. The intriguing universe it sets up is mostly squandered by its lifeless levels and a story that offers nonsensical answers to too many of its questions. Melee swordplay is flashy and sometimes thrilling, yet is diminished by the limited enemy design and distended skill tree. An inflated campaign length sits at the root of its failures since some streamlining would go a long way in easing its more glaring shortcomings.
In a game stuffed with plants that are equal parts beautiful and deadly, itโs fitting how every rose in Beast of Reincarnation has its thorn. Said rose petals still have their charm some of time, but their qualities would be much more apparent after a fair bit of pruning.
A PS5 copy of Beast of Reincarnation was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
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