Beast of Reincarnation Review – A Beautiful Struggle

Beast of Reincarnation Review

This game is gorgeous. There are tons of weird little systems to dig into, the plot is melancholy and weird, and the combat is delightfully dense. Yet somehow, Beast of Reincarnation feels like it’s missing something. Maybe an emotionless protagonist is too hard to relate to. Or maybe the story is all crumbs and no bread. Regardless, I had a great time with this game, but it always felt like I was chasing something. An experience forever around the nearest corner, never to connect with my grasping hands.

You play as Emma, a blight-stained warrior with neither free will nor emotions. The world as we know it has mostly ended. Golems with human souls are slowly going mad, and the blight has consumed much of the planet. What little remains of the human race is huddled up in isolated colonies or the distant Capital. Your job is to eradicate the monsters that produce the blight, and to strike down the titular Beast before the human race is totally wiped out. It’s a fascinating concept, but you spend a lot of playtime being hammered by esoteric tidbits and cryptic clues. Chapters are broken up by tiny vignettes that explain just slightly more than nothing at all, and no one is willing to tell you anything. It’s all either delightful or utterly infuriating, depending on your sensibilities.

Drip-Feed of Plot

Beast of Reincarnation looks and sounds absolutely lovely. The blight is actually just an explosion of nature taking everything over, so it’s all choked with trees and greenery. Flowers, vines, and roots are crammed into every region. Even the monsters are fused with nature in a beautiful, sinister fashion. Emma and the humans are dressed in this stylish blend of old-school Japanese threads and sci-fi sensibilities. Everyone looks awesome. Oh, and the music is haunting and ethereal. It’s all restrained piano tracks, distant choral arrangements, and slowly building landscapes. Real melancholy vibes that fit perfectly with the visual language being spoken at all times.

Game Freak describes this as a ‘one-person, one-dog action RPG’ and I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Koo. Koo is the best boy, hands down. He’s a gigantic fluffy white dog with a blighted tail and I loved him immediately. You can talk with him, pet him, and also he’s essential to your success in battle. Koo’s talents are accessed through a separate menu during combat. They’re what give the fights a more turn-based flavor, faint though it may be. I underestimated their value at first, to my extreme peril. Almost every boss fight was decided by judicious use of Koo and his talents. Koo also sniffs out items for you, which is great, because they would be mostly invisible otherwise. The point is, I love this big fluffy dog and he enriches your time with Beast of Reincarnation in numerous ways.

You Can Pet The Dog

Along with Koo, I misunderstood the combat in this game at first. It’s just swordplay, parries, and dodges right? Sometimes you pause to use a Koo-based attack, but that’s it, right? Anyway, I got utterly rinsed at every boss fight until I discarded this dangerous mindset. You see, the sword skills are overwhelming and easy to ignore. They come at you rapid-fire, in these brief tutorial screens that zip by with zero friction. Worse still, they’re connected to this skill tree full of nodes that I couldn’t figure out. It’s all tiny percentages and obscure terminology that didn’t seem to connect at all to the fights I was losing. It was incredibly frustrating!

Anyway, it turns out that all of that – the whole complex combat apparatus – boils down to how you mix in the square button while you’re mashing R1. You even get prompts during combat that sort of spell it out for you. Beast of Reincarnation has this absurdly simple battle system that they dress up with page after page of tiny stats, esoteric terms, and countless tutorial screens. It’s four buttons! Well, five if you include Koo’s moves. Yes, mastering the parry system is easily the hardest part. You will struggle with this most of all. But it’s all so much simpler than the game makes it seem at first. Utter madness.

Not As Complex As It Seems

But let’s be extremely for real, I absolutely switched it to easy mode after my first dozen defeats, I’m not above this kind of thing. ‘Normal mode’ is a hilarious misnomer, to be clear. That’s the setting you stick with if you want to master the parry system immediately or go down in flames. Easy mode is where you master parrying eventually, at some point during your playthrough. Hard mode is for psychopaths. The point is, you are becoming a parry pro or you are not finishing Beast of Reincarnation, full stop.

There’s an important plot reason why Emma has zero emotions whatsoever. I do not, however, understand what that reason is. Also, why is it only Emma whose emotions never developed. Is it connected to her blight contamination? None of the humans we meet aside from her have any serious trouble understanding feelings. But the golems, who I guess used to be human, are divorced from their flesh. Does that affect their emotions as well? Yes, a lot of these questions are eventually answered, but you spend a huge chunk of your playthrough stumbling through the dark. Most importantly, though there is a plot reason for Emma’s condition, it does make her hard to relate to. All of her dialogue is delivered in perfect monotone, she’s disconnected from any real motivation, and her character growth is pretty glacial. It’s tougher than I anticipated to connect with her plight.

Tell Me About These… Feelings You Have

So yeah, this is a beautiful, well-crafted game. The environments are gorgeous, the characters are stylish, and the monsters are extremely cool. Combat is intense, the soundtrack is excellent, and the premise is fascinating. Also, Koo is a total delight. But it’s very difficult to latch onto Emma in a meaningful way. A lot of the plot is reinforced by hazy, vague delivery and coy refusals to elaborate. And the combat is absolutely loaded down with window dressing and dross. I had a great time playing Beast of Reincarnation, but getting to that point was a bit of a fight. If you can manage to peel back this game’s many chitinous layers, you’ll find something lovely underneath, waiting to shine.

***A PS5 code was provided by the publisher***