Beast of Reincarnation Review

You probably know Game Freak as the studio behind Pokémon, and that reputation is exactly what makes Beast of Reincarnation such a strange thing to wrap your head around at first. This is the same company that's been steering that franchise for decades, and yet here they are handing you a katana, a giant mutated dog, and a ruined version of Japan two thousand years in the future.

The project actually goes back further than you'd expect; it started life in 2020 under director Kota Furushima as part of Game Freak's internal "Gear Project," a kind of sandbox program that lets staff experiment with ideas outside of Pokémon during downtime.

From a passion project buried in downtime to a full console debut years in the making. 

It first poked its head out in 2023 under the working title Project Bloom, back when Take-Two's Private Division was attached, before publishing eventually shifted over to Fictions. All you had to go on back then was a single piece of concept art showing a lone woman standing in an overgrown forest, which, looking back, tells you almost everything about the tone Game Freak was going for.

The studio kept its own core team fairly small and leaned hard on outside partners like Blast Edge Games and Lakshya Digital to handle the environmental art and the Unreal Engine 5 animation work, while Game Freak itself stayed focused on direction, world-building, and the story.

When it was properly unveiled at the 2025 XBOX Showcase, it finally had its final name, and the reveal also marked something bigger. It was the first time Game Freak stepped onto non-Nintendo consoles. The game landed on PS5, XBOX Series X/S, and PC when it launched on August 4, 2026. Knowing all of that going in, you sit down with a certain set of expectations.

Maybe this is a fascinating creative detour. Maybe it's a studio badly out of its depth. The truth ends up sitting somewhere more interesting than either of those extremes. The setting drops you into the year 4026, in a Japan that's been almost completely swallowed by something called the Blight, a corrupting force that has twisted plants, animals, and people into aggressive plant-monster hybrids known as Malefacts.

Emma is the one sent to fight the Blight's monsters, and the people and creatures who travel with her shape her journey just as much. 

You play as Emma, an eighteen-year-old who's spent her whole life treated as an outcast because she has a strange biological connection to the Blight, one that lets her channel roots and vines through her own body instead of just being consumed by them.

That connection is exactly why the surviving human settlements decided to use her as a weapon in the first place, sending her out to hunt down the Blight's regional bosses, called the Nushi, while never really letting her forget that she's viewed as tainted.

At her side is Koo, a massive, similarly infected dog who becomes less of a pet and more of a genuine partner as Beast of Reincarnation goes on. You're also traveling with Brad, a gruff older man who pilots the Walker, basically your mobile base camp.

Kagura, a young girl who cooks for the group and tags along on her own terms after Emma rescues her. There's also Violet, a strange presence tied to a scroll that only Emma seems to be able to see, and she hangs around the edges of the story, hinting at something bigger without fully showing her hand until much later.

Emma's real battle is learning to feel emotion, a strong idea that the story's uneven pacing doesn't fully deliver on. 

The core of the plot is really about Emma slowly learning what it means to feel something, since she's been raised with almost no understanding of basic human emotion, and watching her try to make sense of simple things Kagura and Brad take for granted ends up being one of the more quietly effective threads running through Beast of Reincarnation.

The problem is that this idea is stronger in concept than in execution a lot of the time. The pacing leans heavily on a repeating loop: you explore a zone, deal with some minor character beats along the way, then get hit with a cluster of story-heavy cutscenes once you clear the area.

That means big story beats tend to bunch up at the end of chapters. The same thing happens again near the very end of the whole campaign. So you can go long stretches without much forward momentum on the plot itself. Flashbacks fill in a lot of Emma's backstory.

They cover how she first met Koo, Brad, and Kagura. Some of these sections strip your abilities right back down to basics, though. That happens even after you've spent hours building up your kit. It can feel like a step backward in the moment.

The story stumbles in delivery but not in mystery, and that same momentum carries into the combat itself. 

Dialogue delivery is also its own thing to get used to; Emma's flat, almost robotic way of speaking is intentional given who she is, but it does make some of the game's bigger emotional swings land softer than they probably should, especially with static camera work during a lot of the conversations.

Even with those rough patches, the underlying mystery of what actually happened to this version of Japan, who the Nushi really are, and what the Beast of Reincarnation itself actually represents is compelling enough to keep pulling you forward, and the answers you get by the end mostly feel earned.

Once you're actually moving through the world, Beast of Reincarnation settles into a rhythm that's part Soulslike and part more traditional action RPG. You've got Emma's basic sword attacks mapped to one button, with a second button handling her special Nushi skills, which change depending on where you are in a given combo string.

Landing hits and parries build up meter. You can spend that meter in a couple of different ways. Unleash a stronger Nushi ability, or slow time down to line up a heavier flurry of attacks when an enemy is exposed. Alongside all of that, every successful parry also feeds into a separate resource. That resource lets you call in Koo mid-fight.

Koo adds tactical depth to combat, and Emma's own traversal tools turn out to be just as inventive. 

Choosing his move pauses the action just enough to give you a breather to plan your next few seconds. Koo isn't something you control the rest of the time directly. He fights on his own instincts, hunting and reacting to enemies around you. The abilities you assign him range from status effects to straight elemental damage.

Building him up alongside Emma becomes a genuinely satisfying part of your overall loadout. Movement is where Beast of Reincarnation might surprise you most, since Emma's braid can extend into roots that let her rise up off the ground when you hold the jump button, essentially giving her a personal grappling hook.

From almost any ledge, you can send a vine out to bridge a gap or create an extra platform beneath her, which opens up a lot of freedom in how you approach both exploration and combat encounters; you can go over enemy groups entirely, drop in from above for a sneak attack, or just use the height to reposition when a fight turns against you.

Combat itself is built around parrying above everything else, much like the games it's clearly borrowing a page from, and the timing windows genuinely reward you for learning enemy patterns rather than button-mashing your way through.

With parrying at the core, dodging and ranged tools round things out, though enemy variety ends up being the weak point. 

Landing a clean parry against a bigger threat has a real weight to it, and stringing several together in a row against a boss is one of the best feelings Beast of Reincarnation has to offer. Dodging exists too, though early on it's more of a short sidestep than a true evasive roll, and you'll want to lean on parries until you unlock a proper dodge roll further into the skill tree.

Ranged options round things out nicely. Bows and crossbows let you apply status effects from a distance. They give you a way to level the playing field if straight-up parrying isn't clicking for you yet. On the positive side, this whole system does a good job of feeling approachable without becoming a pushover. The difficulty curve is honestly a little uneven in a good way.

A handful of early bosses go down without much of a fight. Meanwhile, some unassuming regular enemies later on will absolutely catch you off guard with sharper combos than you expected. What holds the combat back a bit is variety, or the lack of it.

You'll notice fairly early that you're seeing the same handful of enemy types again and again, and that extends to some of the Nushi bosses too, who occasionally show up more than once with only minor tweaks to their moveset. It's a shortcoming that becomes harder to ignore the longer you spend with the game.

Even with repeated fights, progression stays interesting, with new abilities, upgrades, and systems constantly reshaping how you play. 

It doesn't ruin the fights themselves, since they still feel good to actually play, but it does mean the back half of Beast of Reincarnation leans more on muscle memory than fresh challenge. Progression comes from a mix of sources rather than a straightforward experience bar.

Defeating a Nushi hands you a chunk of new abilities tied directly to that boss, which then slot into your skill tree, so your build is constantly evolving based on which fights you've already survived. On top of that, you're collecting Amber out in the world, which acts as the main currency for upgrading weapons, alongside spirit stones that grant passive bonuses to Emma or modify Koo's abilities.

There's also a small management layer back at the Walker. Kagura can cook meals using ingredients you find or grow. Those meals give you stat boosts before heading back out. It's a lot of systems layered on top of each other. Some of them add genuine texture to how you approach fights.

Others, like a hunger mechanic that mostly just exists to be topped off, feel more like busywork than meaningful choices. The upside is that by the time you're deep into Beast of Reincarnation, you've got such a wide toolkit. Between Emma's arts, Koo's abilities, and your ranged options, later fights become noticeably more manageable.

Beyond builds and upgrades, the game's visual atmosphere is where its overgrown, post-apocalyptic Japan really comes alive. 

This actually flips the usual difficulty curve. The opening hours end up being some of the toughest simply because you haven't unlocked everything yet. Visually, Beast of Reincarnation is doing a lot of heavy lifting through atmosphere. The idea of nature completely swallowing the remains of Japanese cities and countryside is rendered with a good amount of care.

There's a real sense of scale to the giant, overgrown creatures you're fighting against. Game Freak's decades of creature-design experience clearly show through in how the plant life fuses with the underlying skeletal shapes. It makes every encounter feel like you're facing something that used to be alive long before the Blight got to it.

Different regions do try to differentiate themselves, moving from quiet countryside and rice paddies into massive underground valleys and more mechanical, industrial spaces later on, and a few standout sections, like one built around navigating the inside of a rotating cube structure, genuinely stand out from the rest.

That said, a lot of the middle stretch of the game does blur together, since so much of it is built around variations of the same overgrown-ruins aesthetic, and once the novelty wears off you'll start noticing how similar a lot of the environments actually look from one another.

Technical performance is largely reliable, and Beast of Reincarnation's sound design carries that same atmospheric quality throughout. 

Performance-wise, things are mostly solid; the PS5 holds a steady frame rate in performance mode outside of a few dips when water, lighting, and enemy counts spike late in the game, and PC handles higher resolutions well too, though foliage pop-in and some texture softness at a distance are worth knowing about going in.

Where the visuals stumble a bit is in character animation during cutscenes, since facial expressions are limited and some of the emotional beats don't land as hard as the writing wants them to, partly because Emma and much of the cast are intentionally kept fairly stoic to begin with.

Sound design is one of the clearer high points across the whole experience. The soundtrack leans into haunting vocals over soft, ambient instrumentation, giving Beast of Reincarnation a mood that fits its quiet apocalypse setting really well, especially during exploration.

It's not the deepest soundtrack in terms of raw track count. You will start to notice certain pieces looping more than you'd like over a long session. But what's there is genuinely well composed. Voice work is a similar story. The Japanese performances carry a lot more of the emotional nuance the writing is going for.

For all its ambition, Beast of Reincarnation's biggest strength and its biggest weakness both come down to repetition. 

It's worth knowing that Beast of Reincarnation defaults to Japanese audio out of the box, which feels like a deliberate choice on Game Freak's part. The English dub isn't bad by any means and has some strong moments, particularly from Brad's actor, but the more subdued, introspective dialogue style just seems to translate more naturally in its original language.

Beast of Reincarnation is a genuinely ambitious step for a studio best known for something completely different, and for the most part it backs that ambition up. The combat is confident, the traversal is some of the more creative movement you'll find in this kind of game, and the atmosphere carries you through even the slower stretches.

Where it stumbles is mostly around repetition, reused enemies, reused bosses, and a story structure that leans a little too heavily on the same rhythm chapter after chapter, along with some presentation choices that keep the more emotional scenes from hitting quite as hard as they could.

None of that undoes the good work Beast of Reincarnation puts in elsewhere, though, and if you're the type of player who enjoys parry-focused action with a companion system that actually feels meaningful, there's a lot here worth spending twenty-five to thirty hours on, with New Game Plus waiting for you once the credits roll.