Beast of Reincarnation

Beast of Reincarnation launched August 4, 2026, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC from Game Freak and publisher Fictions: a one-person, one-dog action RPG sold as the studio’s big proof it can ship prestige outside Pokémon. I played it on Steam with a Steam Controller 2026. After finishing it, this barely scrapes a positive. Steam has no in-between rating, so hear it plain: smack in the middle. A decent game wearing a fantasy-Japan skin over a Stellar Blade fight loop, and Stellar Blade remains the better night by a wide margin.

Year 4026, blighted Japan. Emma the Sealer and her dog Koo push through corrupted beasts and machines toward a capital and a title monster. Real-time sword work mixes with companion commands. Rest sites feed upgrades. Semi-open zones, plant traversal, a mobile den between chapters. Game Freak wanted a statement piece after years of Pokémon discourse about who owns the mediocrity. This release answers that question the worst way for the studio’s defenders.

It looks good. Weird texture glitches and some blur show up, nothing exceptional, nothing ugly. The world is interesting to walk: buildings, nature, blighted ruins worth staring at. Music is pretty good and obviously chasing the Stellar Blade vibe, especially camp tracks and overworld ambience. You will notice it almost immediately. Battle music lands. Overall a decent soundtrack, even if the early overworld leans on one lo-fi loop that sounds pretty for twenty minutes and then sits on the mix like a held chord.

Combat takes a long time to ramp. Once skills unlock, it gets very good. Enemy weaknesses to exploit, combos and tools in a Devil May Cry lane, Koo abilities stacked with Emma’s for openings. Melee and ranged upgrades, cooking, build toys. Late-game combat is the reason this review does not fall off a cliff. Game Freak basically took the Pokémon elemental system and hung it on swords instead of monsters: lightning, fire, poison, multi-type blades with pros and cons. You can see the inspiration.

My gut still said “another one?” at the first rest site. Upgrade skills. Parry, dodge, push, die, jog back. Same Souls-adjacent homework the genre has worn as a default costume for years. Competence starts reading as inventory. Runbacks through sparse roads make the déjà vu louder. Other games in this costume stuff the corridor with toys. Here the structure shows before the personality earns the commute.

The fight cadence will feel familiar if you spent time with Shift Up’s debut: commit, parry, dodge, punish, rinse. Emma has flourishes; Koo adds a layer. Muscle memory sits in the same chair. Stellar Blade hooked from the open. This leaves that grip on the table. Craft problems make the echo worse. Slash animations and takedowns misalign so often you notice the puppet strings. Movement is extremely stiff: caught on terrain, glitching after landings, ice-skate glide that overshoots the weight a cover-and-blade fantasy needs. Stellar Blade was stiff. Nowhere near this. Day-one camera was one of the worst I have seen for this pace, locked super zoomed-in; a later patch helped. Not perfect. Glad they addressed it. Random shallow creeks will dump you into the Atlantic and reset you. Yeah. I do not get it.

Koo is the marketing face, and the partnership should be Game Freak’s home field. Calling dog techniques from a selection menu reads like the studio refused to leave the monster-command habit behind. Stylish once you learn parries into Koo spends. Stylish and inevitable are different compliments. When the dog opens a move list, you hear the old factory floor through the wall.

Enemy variety is the real poison. You fight the same foes the entire game. Famous copy-and-paste. Same moves on repeat. Different melee skins, same mechanics. Memorize them early, and the roster becomes a joke. Bosses are worse. Stellar Blade, Souls games, and even recent Mortal Shell 2 give you epic kits. Here most bosses run one or two moves total. Nushi fights pad by having them run off, so you fight them again with nothing new. One Nushi did the same tail swipe for the entire fight. Only the tail swipe. Over and over until it died. Bigger versions of regular mobs. Uninspired. Story character bosses are better and still stuck on two or three moves until death. Pathetic design for this genre. First contact with a Nushi can feel like an event. The second date is homework.

The story has interesting premises and world-building across thirteen chapters. It takes forever to get anywhere. I was not interested until chapter nine. Then it starts to matter and faceplants on the ending’s reasoning for why any of this is happening. Soft pull in the seat the whole way, then a shrug.

I hoped this would prove Game Freak’s hands were fine and the publisher was the soft layer. After campfires, glide steps, and that tail swipe, the case falls apart. Mediocre execution has Game Freak’s fingerprints too. Playable and special remain different jobs. This clocks in for the first paycheck and barely clears Steam’s “yes.”

Standard $60, Deluxe $70, day-one Game Pass on Xbox. Late combat and builds keep it above a hard no. The Stellar Blade echo, empty roster, and soft hook leave an extremely mid experience: wait for a mega sale, or Game Pass if the sub is active. Sixty dollars asks for a hook this campaign leaves unsold. Came for Koo and flashy bosses? Crumbs, then the same swipe again. Came for Shift Up debut energy from the Pokémon studio? Temper that hard.