Beast of Reincarnation Review: A Rocky Launch and an Unusually Candid Apology
Game Freak has spent nearly three decades known for exactly one thing, and it isn't this. Beast of Reincarnation, released August 4, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store — with day-one availability on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, according to Wikipedia and VideoGamer — is the studio's first major action RPG that has nothing to do with Pokémon. It's a real swing, built on Unreal Engine 5 with published support from Fictions and a small army of co-development studios: Blast Edge Games, Liona Interactive, Safehouse, C&R Creative Studios, Lakshya Digital, and Technicolor Games.
The result is a game that critics mostly liked without loving, players received with more skepticism, and whose director then did something you don't see often in this industry — he stood up and apologized for it, by name, with specifics.
A six-year road to release
Beast of Reincarnation didn't come from nowhere, even if it felt that way to a lot of people when it was finally unveiled. Development reportedly began back in 2020 under an internal Game Freak initiative called the "Gear Project," conceived specifically to build new intellectual property beyond the Pokémon franchise the studio is otherwise inseparable from. It first surfaced publicly in May 2023 under the codename "Project Bloom," announced as part of a partnership with Private Division. The final title and actual gameplay weren't shown until the Xbox Games Showcase 2025, more than two years after that initial reveal.
That's a long, quiet gestation period for a game this ambitious, and it tracks with how cautiously Game Freak has approached stepping outside its comfort zone. Pokémon is the studio's identity and its financial engine; putting real resources behind something entirely separate from it, for six years, before showing meaningful footage, suggests a level of internal deliberation that a lot of new-IP projects don't get.
The pitch: a post-apocalyptic Japan overrun by parasitic plants
The setting is where Beast of Reincarnation tries hardest to distinguish itself. According to RPG Site's review, the game is set in a post-apocalyptic Japan in the year 4026, consumed by a parasitic-plant infestation known as the Blight. Players control Emma, a "Sealer" — someone capable of absorbing the Blight into herself and turning it back into a weapon. That ability puts her on a collision course with the Nushi, elite corrupted creatures twisted by the infestation, and eventually with the titular Beast of Reincarnation itself.
It's a premise that leans into body-horror ecological dread rather than the usual apocalypse iconography, and the studio's choice to root it specifically in Japan rather than a generic ruined-city backdrop gives it a slightly different visual identity than most entries in the genre.
Combat: a wolf, a parry, and a lot of Sekiro comparisons
The mechanical heart of Beast of Reincarnation is Emma's bond with Koo, a wolf-like companion classified in-game as a "Malefact." Parrying is the primary defensive tool, and successful parries restore Koo's FP — Florescence Points — which in turn unlock a set of offensive abilities called Bloom Arts. It's a tight feedback loop: defend well, and you're rewarded with your companion's strongest tools rather than just avoiding damage.
Reviewers have consistently reached for the same two comparisons when describing how this plays: NieR: Automata for the human-machine-companion emotional throughline, and Sekiro for the timing discipline the parry system demands. That's a flattering pair of reference points on paper, though it also sets an unusually high bar — both of those games are considered genre high points, and living up to either comparison invites scrutiny that a lot of new IP wouldn't otherwise face.
Director Kota Furushima, who also served as producer, designer, and writer on the project, has been explicit that accessibility was part of the design intent from the start. "We're trying to make it so that even people who aren't good at action games can enjoy it," he's said — a notable goal for a combat system built around parry timing, which is traditionally one of the least forgiving mechanics in action design. Whether that goal was actually achieved is one of the more contested points in the game's reception, discussed below.
The rest of the cast and the road itself
Emma isn't traveling alone. Kagura, a younger companion picked up along the journey, and Brad, described in coverage as a grizzled pilot, round out the game's core traveling party. The group's mobile base of operations is the Cleanse Walker, a vehicle that doubles as both transportation and a home base between story beats — a structural choice that's become common in post-apocalyptic RPGs but still does real work here in giving the cast somewhere to breathe between fights.
The soundtrack is arguably one of the more stacked elements of the whole package. Composing duties were split among Kow Otani, Cris Velasco, Mikiya Hayashi, Yasuaki Iwata, and Go Ichinose — five credited composers, including names with real pedigree in action and RPG scoring, which suggests Fictions and Game Freak treated the audio side of this project as a priority rather than an afterthought.
How it actually scored
The numbers paint a consistent picture of a game that landed in the "good, not great" tier rather than either a disaster or a breakout hit. On Metacritic, Beast of Reincarnation sits at 71 on PC, 73 on PS5, and 75 on Xbox Series X/S. OpenCritic's recommendation rate lands around 55%, which is squarely mixed territory — enough critics liked it to avoid a pile-on, but not enough for a consensus recommendation.
RPG Site's own review scored the game 8 out of 10, putting it well above the aggregate average, and it's worth reading that gap on its own terms rather than assuming the aggregate is simply "right." The outlet praised the narrative and the parry-driven combat loop specifically, while flagging genuine structural problems: repetitive boss fights, a middle act that sags noticeably compared to the opening and closing hours, and animation work that comes across as stiff relative to the rest of the production. Kotaku's review, meanwhile, ran under the headline "RPG With Good Ideas But Too Much Repetition" — a framing that lines up with the broader critical consensus even without getting into the full text of that review.
Player sentiment on Steam has tracked somewhat cooler than critic scores, sitting around 62% positive out of roughly 1,239 reviews as of mid-August, earning a "Mixed" rating tag on the platform. That figure comes from aggregated search coverage rather than a direct check of Steam's own review page, so treat the exact percentage as directionally accurate rather than gospel — but the general shape, a player base more divided than critics were, is consistent across multiple outlets.
What people actually liked and didn't
Strip away the specific numbers and a clear pattern emerges across the coverage. On the positive side: the parry-based combat is fluid and satisfying when it clicks, the art direction carries real atmosphere, the human-animal bond between Emma and Koo gives the story an emotional anchor that a lot of post-apocalyptic RPGs skip past, and — notably — the game shipped in a technically stable state, without the major performance problems that have dogged some recent Pokémon releases under the same parent studio. For a studio stepping into unfamiliar genre territory, technical stability not being a headline complaint is itself worth calling out.
On the negative side, the complaints cluster around structure and polish rather than the core concept: inconsistent level design that doesn't maintain the quality of the game's best areas throughout, repetitive boss encounters that lean on similar patterns too often, a bloated middle section that several reviewers single out as the point where momentum stalls, animation that reads as stiff in cutscenes and combat alike, and what more than one outlet has described as "bizarre" indoor lighting that undercuts otherwise strong art direction in interior spaces specifically.
The apology
What makes Beast of Reincarnation's story genuinely unusual isn't the mixed reception itself — plenty of ambitious new IP lands in this exact critical range. It's what happened next. Around August 13-15, 2026, director Kota Furushima issued a public apology, reported by PC Gamer, Insider Gaming, and GamingBolt. "I'm truly sorry that parts of the game haven't provided a sufficiently enjoyable experience," Furushima said, acknowledging that elements of the game "need polishing."
That's a striking thing for a director to say this directly, this soon after launch, about a game that wasn't a critical or commercial disaster. Public apologies from directors tend to follow either catastrophic launches or major controversies; Beast of Reincarnation had neither. What it had was a set of specific, named shortcomings — pacing, animation stiffness, repetitive encounters — that Furushima chose to own rather than let ride out through patch notes alone.
What's actually being fixed
A first patch had already shipped by August 9, ahead of the apology itself, suggesting the studio was responding to feedback before Furushima's statement rather than the statement prompting the work. Furushima has said further updates are planned specifically targeting the story pacing complaints that dogged the middle act, frame-generation support for better performance scaling, and cutscene-skip options — a quality-of-life feature whose absence at launch is a fairly common miss for narrative-heavy action RPGs, but one that's easy to fix relative to something like level design or animation quality.
Furushima also used the moment to highlight what the studio saw as validated: positive player response to the co-op combat and to the game's post-apocalyptic atmosphere, both of which line up with what critics singled out favorably as well.
Where this leaves Game Freak's first swing outside Pokémon
Beast of Reincarnation isn't a flop, and it isn't a triumph either — it's a game that landed roughly where its Metacritic numbers say it landed, with a vocal minority of critics (RPG Site among them) finding significantly more to love than the aggregate suggests. What sets this launch apart from the dozens of other "mixed reception, mid-70s Metacritic" stories that happen every year is Furushima's response to it: specific, public, and attached to a concrete list of promised fixes rather than vague reassurance.
For Game Freak, a studio whose identity is otherwise completely bound to one franchise, the real test isn't whether Beast of Reincarnation scored a 9 or a 7. It's whether the studio follows through on the patch roadmap Furushima laid out, and whether that follow-through is enough to turn a mixed launch into a game people look back on more kindly a year from now — the way plenty of action RPGs before it have managed.
A first patch already shipped August 9, with Game Freak promising further updates targeting story pacing, frame-generation support, and cutscene-skip options.