Is it too late to start again? To be hopeful that a hopeless future can still be saved? Can something beautiful bloom from the carcass of a rotting world?
These are some of the melodramatic, but nevertheless timely, questions that hang over the emotionally numb cast of Beast of Reincarnation, a grand new action RPG from Game Freak, the developers of Pokémon Red and Blue (and every mainline Pokémon game since). Set in a post-apocalyptic vision of Japan that’s seemingly beyond repair, a young woman named Emma and her wolf companion Koo set out on a quest to rid a poisoned world of its corrupted monsters. It’s a cold mission that requires slaying thrashing beasts without a trace of remorse, but a necessity for new life to sprout again. There is no rebirth without drastic change.
And Beast of Reincarnation is full of drastic change for Game Freak, a developer that has spent much of its career working on its breadwinning Pokémon RPGs. After a decade of technical decay that has threatened to corrode its once-sterling reputation, the flashy project offers a chance for the studio to find rejuvenation in modern spectacle. Beast of Reincarnation does kick with its breathtaking action, powered by rich RPG systems you’d expect from the studio that once revolutionized the genre, but its identity is buried under unrefined ideas borrowed from some of the decade’s best games. In trying to create something that projects prestige, Game Freak is too quick to repress its emotions at a moment that begs for vulnerability.
Beast of Reincarnation follows Emma and Koo on a cross-country trip to a capital city that houses the story’s titular beast. They’re joined by a ghostly child named Violet, as well as Brad, the driver of the mobile mech RV that ferries the duo between nearly a dozen semi-open locations. Each one contains a Nushi, a monster covered in thick roots and poison, that needs to be slain. Doing so fights back the blight in the area, clearing the route to the capital and weakening the Beast of Reincarnation, the presumed cause of the apocalypse. Game Freak lays the lore on thick, dialing up the way it writes cataclysmic legendary Pokémon backstories and presenting it in more dramatic strokes.
The story holds a lot of cards close to its chest until it’s ready to pull back the curtain in long exposition dumps. Until then, Beast of Reincarnation is challenging to connect with. That’s largely due to its emotionless voice cast, who play their characters as flatly as possible. It’s a deliberate directorial choice that’s not without narrative reason, but it doesn’t change the fact that the bulk of the 22-hour adventure is doled out in soulless drolls. (I wanted to change the voice acting to Japanese, but there is no way to adjust the ant-sized subtitles currently.)
More frustrating is that it cuts into Emma and Koo’s relationship, a low-hanging emotional hook that Beast of Reincarnation struggles to cast. There’s little warmth between the two, as Emma speaks exclusively in monotone mumbles. Koo’s mechanical animations don’t do much to fill in the gaps either; it feels as though I’m supposed to inherently connect to the image of a woman and her loyal dog, letting inevitable fan art convince me that there’s a bond where I see nothing. Beast of Reincarnation never earns its heart, and that makes for a one-note journey that’s always some shade of morose.
It’s the first place where Beast of Reincarnation feels like a game that’s trying a little hard to be taken seriously. Everything about it feels designed to imitate an award-winning game. You can hear it in its moody soundtrack that sounds like it was ripped from Nier: Automata. You can see it in UI that seemingly takes notes from Dark Souls, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and more. You can especially feel it in an ill-conceived “Cinematic” mode, which plays all cutscenes at 24 frames per second, mirroring frame rates seen in film. It looks awful, a faux-movie aesthetic that struggles to find Game Freak’s own version of Ghost of Tsushima’s Kurosawa Mode, a black and white screen filter that mimicked the look and feel of a film by director Akira Kurosawa. It’s an amalgamation of scraps from other games, baiting players to utter the word “cinema” at least once during their playthrough.
It’s a shame that it feels like Game Freak is trying so hard to earn respect with Beast of Reincarnation, because there’s plenty to organically applaud here. Outside of the overwrought cutscenes, Beast of Reincarnation sports some strong systems, as underdeveloped and underexplained as some of them are. That starts with some perfectly enjoyable exploration. As a Sealer with a connection to nature, Emma has the power to lift high into the air on a vine, create a grass bridge to traverse long gaps, and grapple onto objects. Those powers allow her to scour every open area top to bottom in search of crafting resources, lore logs, cooking ingredients, and more. They also allow her to get a jump on unaware enemies by sailing over their head to land a stealth assassination rather than sneaking up behind them.
All of these powers are available right from the start. That makes for some fun early game experimentation, but it left me wishing that Emma’s powers were doled out to me throughout the story. Like the acting, exploration is fairly one-note in Beast of Reincarnation. The areas look and feel similar throughout most of the game. They’re filled with industrial decay, overrun by nature, and populated by robotic golems and stray monsters that attack in familiar patterns. The spaces get more narrow and linear as the game progresses, as if you can feel the budget tightening in real time. That also comes through in its inconsistent performance; I played Beast of Reincarnation on a PS5 Pro and experienced regular frame rate stutters.
Beast of Reincarnation more so finds its footing as an action game. At first, it looks like your typical Soulslike, and has been described as such in previews. Whack enemies with your sword, parry telegraphed attacks from hard-hitting bosses, repeat. In actuality, it’s much faster-paced than it seems; it just doesn’t do a great job of explaining the dance. The optimal move is to build up Emma’s Entanglement meter, which allows her to perform special moves by capping off a combo with a button press. It can also be spent to slow down time, giving her space to press the attack, punch out the right combo, or safely heal. (The heal button can be a suicide button otherwise, considering how often you need to parry attacks.) Once it clicked — and it took a long time to get there — I found that I could melt enemies in flashy fashion like I was playing something by PlatinumGames.
Careful blocking is still paramount, though. The added twist is that Koo’s special attacks, accessed via a time-slowing menu pulled straight from Final Fantasy 7 Remake, are powered by a currency earned through landing successful parries. You need to block to use those useful powers that can inflict status effects on enemies. Thankfully, the parry windows are incredibly generous, though many bosses attack in the same predictable rhythms that can leave many fights feeling the same. (The fact that almost every boss is a two-phase encounter where the second part is barely different doesn’t help ease the feeling of repetition either.) It’s the only area where Beast of Reincarnation successfully lays out the bond between Emma and Koo, even if Koo can be left feeling like a combat tool more than an animal. It’s as if watching Emma survive an onslaught of attacks gives Koo the motivation he needs to work harder to protect his friend. That’s play doubling as much-needed character work.
That strong foundation is complemented by shockingly deep RPG customization. Both Emma and Koo have enormous skill trees. I barely filled most of it during my playthrough, pushing me to specialize in a few areas. I ended up putting a lot of resources into Emma’s bow-and-arrow and quick-firing crossbow, augmenting both so that their shots ricocheted around enemies. I spent my resources upgrading both weapons and their ammo, too, allowing me to keep some distance between bosses and melt their health bars from afar. I also focused on abilities that would let Emma refill her health through finishers on stunned enemies, and gave her a sword with a vampirism perk. That level of control helps to deepen the combat, pushing you to see how fast you can take out enemies by adding the right skill to your arsenal.
It all builds to a decent, but flattened vision of what an award-winning prestige game is supposed to look like in 2026.
It’s in all of these systems that Game Freak finds fertile ground to plant new seeds in, but Beast of Reincarnation’s lack of focus leaves too many unplucked weeds. There’s a superfluous bond system that unlocks dull character conversations. There’s farming and cooking within your mobile den, neither of which are explained well enough that you’ll feel compelled to return to your base until you have to. There are progression hooks that can reach their end halfway through the game, leaving you with less incentive to explore later on.
The hodgepodge nature of Beast of Reincarnation, with its flurry of borrowed references and half-sketched systems, will make more sense when you dig into the credits. Game Freak worked with a laundry list of studios to develop the project, including Blast Edge Games (Hyke: Northern Lights) and Liona Interactive (Elite Beat Agents). The shared responsibilities go beyond your typical support studio dynamic, with key creative roles across departments split between multiple teams. That’s apparent in a final result that feels torn between visions that never fully align.
It’s an unusually complicated operation for a game that feels desperate to fit in rather than stand out from the pack. Beast of Reincarnation isn’t an act of creative rebirth so much as it is one of conformity. Game Freak and its partners do their best to mimic respected games to create a “Now That’s What I Call Action RPGs!” compilation. It all builds to a decent but flattened vision of what an award-winning prestige game is supposed to look like in 2026, a reinvention rooted in a present that’s destined to become a rusted past soon enough.
It’s the same distance that I get from Emma’s detached persona. I so often wanted to reach into the screen and shake her back to life. Get angry, shed a tear, anything! There must be someone inside of her empty mind who actually wants to bask in that brighter tomorrow, not just hit the parries needed to reach it. I can see that fire when she unloads on her enemies with an impassioned flurry of strikes that sprout roots and flowers from the ground beneath her feet. There’s life in that dance, and there’s life in Beast of Reincarnation too, buried somewhere beneath workmanlike efficiency and carefully regulated emotions. After decades spent growing up with its games, I’m still waiting to see Game Freak cry.
Beast of Reincarnation will be released Aug. 4 on PS5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PS5 Pro using a prerelease download code provided by Fictions. You can find additional information about gamexplore’s ethics policy here.
