I went into Beast of Reincarnation with real hope. Game Freak stepping outside Pokémon to deliver a one-person, one-dog action RPG in a post-apocalyptic Japan, promising Nier: Automata vibes mixed with Stellar Blade combat, sounded like a potential breakout. What arrived on August 4 is instead a janky, underbaked mess that feels like the studio’s technical and design shortcomings followed them right out of the Pokémon series.
Technical Nightmares
The optimization is horrible. Frame rates tank, loading stutters, and the whole thing runs like it never saw a proper polish pass. Glitches and bugs are everywhere: clipping through geometry, broken AI, random freezes. The Unreal Engine 5 graphics look smudgy and blurry more often than sharp, with muddy textures and soft edges that undermine any claim to next-gen fidelity.
The soundtrack is basically one lofi track on infinite loop. It is serviceable background noise, but hearing the same muted beats for hours turns the atmosphere into background elevator music rather than anything memorable or emotional.
Combat and Design Flaws
Enemy variety is abysmal. There are essentially three enemy types across the entire game. Once you learn their patterns, every encounter becomes a repetitive slog. Weapons feel nearly identical, differentiated only by tiny passive effects that trigger on a successful parry. Equipment never changes how your character looks. There is exactly one execution animation in the whole game. Jumping and looting share the same button, leading to constant accidental inputs. Half the mechanics receive no real tutorial, so you are left guessing at systems that should have been clearly explained.
Crouching is far too easy to trigger and locks you out of actions for a full second. Nearly every move comes with heavy animation locks, making combat feel stiff and unresponsive instead of fluid.
Exploration and Customization
Exploration is a joke. Ninety-nine percent of what you find is useless resources used to cook food that grants microscopic stat boosts, like 0.0001 percent increases that barely register. Customization is almost nonexistent beyond tweaking your companion’s abilities and switching arrow types on your bows.
Story Pacing
The story pacing is terrible. Moments drag, revelations feel poorly timed, and the narrative never builds the momentum the premise suggests.
The Few Positives
There are faint positives. The core gameplay loop and art direction are not completely horrible. The game clearly aims for a Nier: Automata or Stellar Blade style world and combat, but it executes both worse. The controls feel even stiffer than Stellar Blade’s already deliberate feel. The music is okay if you can tolerate hearing the same track on repeat.
Final Verdict
That is the best I can say. Beast of Reincarnation is a frustrating, unfinished experience that squanders its potential at every turn. After years of Pokémon releases that launched in rough shape, it seems the lack of refinement and ambition carried over. This might be my worst game of the year. High hopes met a low ceiling, and the result is a mess that should never have shipped in this state.
Comments