The moment perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with Beast of Reincarnation. Looking up at a high ledge, every RPG instinct screams that something valuable awaits at the top. The ascent requires genuine skill—leaping to a lower platform, using the protagonist’s unique hair-bridge ability to cross a gap, making a daring leap of faith, and employing a hookshot to climb ever higher. After several clever uses of the game’s genuinely interesting platforming mechanics, the summit is finally reached. But there’s nothing there. No item, no enemy. Just emptiness. This frustrating experience wasn’t isolated—it became a recurring theme throughout the entire adventure, symbolizing a game that consistently promises more than it delivers.
Key Takeaways
- Parry mechanics feel responsive and fair but become the only viable strategy, rendering skill trees, buffs, and equipment largely pointless.
- Bosses repeat up to six times throughout the 25-hour campaign, creating severe monotony despite polished animations.
- Exploration rewards are inconsistent—elaborate platforming sections often lead to empty ledges or useless items.
- Visuals hold up well against recent releases, but the soundtrack lacks variety, looping the same melancholic tone for hours.
- Narrative structure obscures an interesting premise through constant flashbacks and exposition dumped during boss fights.
Beast of Reincarnation arrives with an impressive pedigree of influences and ambitious design goals. On paper, it combines beautiful musical compositions, stunning environmental art, parry-heavy combat mechanics, and strategic turn-based elements that reward player engagement. The narrative premise evokes comparisons to philosophical action games like NieR: Automata while channeling the visual poetry of Studio Ghibli’s legendary director Hayao Miyazaki. For fans of thoughtful action RPGs, this combination sounds like a dream come true. Unfortunately, like those deceptive platforming challenges that fail to reward careful exploration, Beast of Reincarnation ultimately becomes a collection of empty promises and derivative ideas that never quite live up to its considerable potential.
A Parry-Centric Combat System That Grows Stale
Among all the game’s promising aspects, the combat system initially shows the most potential. The slick combat overview trailer accurately represents the mechanical foundation—this is fundamentally a game where players must parry or die. Almost every attack can and should be deflected, creating a rhythmic dance of defense and counterattack. Each successful parry builds a stagger gauge, enabling instant kills on regular enemies or creating vulnerability windows against bosses. The parry timing feels fair, even if slightly earlier than veterans of similar games might expect. Consistency is the key, and the system delivers on that front. Players familiar with FromSoftware’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Neowiz’s Lies of P will find themselves on familiar ground.
The companion system adds another layer through Koo, a canine partner whose abilities are powered by “Florescence Points” accumulated through parrying. When the FP gauge fills, time slows dramatically, allowing players to select special moves for their loyal companion. This mechanic appears fresh and innovative on the surface, promising strategic depth and meaningful choices. However, the execution proves disappointingly shallow. The most effective strategy quickly becomes apparent: alternating between just two abilities to rapidly inflict status effects. Any deviation from this optimal approach simply doesn’t perform as well, eliminating the tactical variety the system seemed designed to provide.
The combat experience suffers further from a shocking lack of enemy variety and excessive boss repetition. Each boss encounter repeats a minimum of three times throughout the adventure, with some appearing as many as six times. This design choice creates monotony that no amount of mechanical polish can overcome. The difficulty curve compounds these problems, becoming progressively easier as players master the parry system rather than presenting escalating challenges. While additional systems exist—including food buffs, experience levels, and a skill tree—none significantly impact gameplay because parrying overwhelms every other consideration.
Gorgeous Environments With Nothing Inside
| Element | Beast of Reincarnation | Comparable Titles |
|---|---|---|
| Core combat | Parry-focused, stagger gauge | Sekiro, Lies of P |
| Companion system | Canine abilities via Florescence Points | Limited tactical depth in practice |
| Enemy variety | Low; bosses repeat 3-6 times | Typically higher in peers |
| Exploration payoff | Often empty or inconsequential | Usually rewarding in genre standards |
| Runtime | ~25 hours minimum | Varies widely |
The emphasis on parrying extends its influence into exploration design, often to the game’s detriment. Beast of Reincarnation features approximately a dozen distinct zones, several of which achieve genuine visual beauty. Each area contains collectible items, challenging Elite enemies, and occasional engaging platforming sequences. However, most zones suffer from excessive linearity, and all of them recycle the same limited enemy types. The fundamental problem persists: items feel inconsequential because parrying mechanics render most equipment and consumables unnecessary. Invisible walls appear in nonsensical locations, breaking immersion and frustrating players who expect consistent world logic. What should feel like rewarding exploration instead becomes repetitive busywork.
The musical accompaniment represents one of the game’s most disappointing missed opportunities. Initial impressions suggested the soundtrack might originate from MONACA, the acclaimed studio responsible for the NieR series and Stellar Blade. The soft choral arrangements and ethereal atmosphere certainly evoke their distinctive style. However, reality proves far less impressive—the soundtrack lacks variety, with nearly every track conveying the same melancholic mood. While that aesthetic certainly has its appeal, a game demanding a minimum 25-hour investment desperately needs musical diversity to maintain engagement.
Visual presentation fares somewhat better, delivering crisp graphics that compare favorably to recent releases from major developers. The zones present crumbling architectural ruins set against environments ranging from expansive green valleys to mysterious mountain caves. Battle animations and kill sequences demonstrate genuine craftsmanship, while character models and boss designs maintain impressive detail throughout. Technical performance remains stable, maintaining consistent frame rates crucial for timing-dependent combat. Nothing here revolutionizes visual standards, but the graphics competently serve their purpose without becoming a distraction.
Story Potential Buried Under Clumsy Execution
Beast of Reincarnation’s story nearly transcends the game’s overall mediocrity, presenting an engaging plot foundation that unfortunately suffers from awkward, ineffective presentation. The narrative begins in medias res, dropping players into a brief tutorial before flashing back to reveal the world’s catastrophic history. Civilization collapsed a millennium ago after humanity attempted to eliminate emotions, unleashing the “Blight” that corrupts souls. The titular Beast of Reincarnation threatens the world every century, and Emma, our protagonist, serves as a “Purifier”—an emotionless warrior uniquely capable of absorbing the Blight and surviving. She is chosen to pursue the recently returned Beast, setting the main quest in motion.
The lore proves confusing and strangely withheld, partially due to the fragmented timeline of flashbacks and flash-forwards. This represents a classic failure of narrative design, where structural choices actively obscure potentially compelling storytelling. Even the climactic revelations—delivered through heavy exposition during active combat sequences, a frustrating sin the game commits repeatedly—fail to distinguish the story from its obvious inspirations. The derivative nature becomes so pronounced that comparisons to plagiarism don’t seem entirely unfair.
The writers clearly aspire to craft a contemplative character study, focusing on Emma’s gradual emotional awakening as she develops genuine feelings and perhaps a soul. However, this arc takes far too long to develop momentum. Player boredom sets in long before emotional investment becomes possible, leading to complete disengagement from character fates and narrative resolutions. Relatively flat voice performances in both English and Japanese dubs compound these problems, failing to inject life into scenes that desperately need it. The game demands significant time investment before offering any emotional payoff, and most players will have checked out long before reaching potentially meaningful moments.
Despite all these criticisms, Beast of Reincarnation isn’t without merit. The fundamental gameplay loop, while repetitive, provides enough satisfaction to carry players through the experience. The ideas underlying every system show genuine creativity, even when execution falls short. This isn’t a bad game—it’s a mediocre one built on foundations that deserved better realization. Like that empty ledge, the journey might provide moments of enjoyment, but the destination offers no meaningful reward. Beast of Reincarnation ultimately represents a collection of wasted potential, a game that could have been special but settles for being merely adequate.
Where Beast of Reincarnation Stumbles
The core issue is not a lack of ideas but a failure to connect them. Parrying feels good—until players realize it trivializes every other system. Companion abilities, consumables, and leveling exist on paper yet contribute almost nothing when perfect deflection solves every encounter. That imbalance shrinks the skill ceiling and flattens the difficulty curve instead of raising it.
Repetition compounds the problem. Recycling bosses up to six times and populating a dozen zones with the same handful of enemy types turns a 25-hour runtime into padding. Exploration suffers a similar fate: platforming mechanics are inventive, but the payoff—empty ledges, redundant loot—teaches players not to bother.
Presentation choices undercut an otherwise intriguing narrative. Fragmented timelines can work, but here they obscure more than they reveal, and dumping exposition mid-combat is a cardinal sin for story-driven games. The soundtrack, initially evocative of MONACA’s work on NieR, offers too little variety to sustain dozens of hours.
For players hungry for another Sekiro-style rhythm-action experience, Beast of Reincarnation delivers a competent foundation—but little beyond it. Those expecting rewarding exploration or narrative depth should temper expectations until patches or sequels address the hollow spaces.
Common Questions
Is Beast of Reincarnation similar to Sekiro or Lies of P?
Yes, the parry-centric combat and stagger-gauge system draw clear inspiration from both games. Veterans will adapt quickly, though the challenge diminishes rather than escalates as mastery improves.
How long does Beast of Reincarnation take to finish?
Expect a minimum of around 25 hours. However, repeated boss encounters and limited enemy variety can make the runtime feel padded.
Does the companion dog add meaningful strategy?
In theory, Koo’s abilities should offer tactical options. In practice, alternating two specific moves to stack status effects outperforms every other approach, limiting real decision-making.
Expert Opinion: Beast of Reincarnation exemplifies a troubling trend in modern action RPGs where developers prioritize aesthetic inspiration over mechanical depth and meaningful content. The game’s commercial performance will likely determine whether the studio receives opportunity to refine these promising concepts in a sequel. For players seeking similar experiences, established titles like NieR: Automata or Sekiro remain superior choices, though Beast of Reincarnation may satisfy those who have exhausted the genre’s premier offerings and desire something new, even if flawed.