The Beast of Reincarnation Easy Mode is meant to help players who want the story without getting stuck on difficult fights, but there may be one problem: Story Mode can make the combat so forgiving that players looking for something in the middle are left without a great option.
Game Freak gives players three difficulty settings: Story, Normal and Hard.
Story Mode reduces enemy damage and gives players more time to land parries. Normal expects you to learn enemy attacks and make proper use of Emma and Koo, while Hard is aimed at players who want much tighter timing and harsher punishment for mistakes.
On paper, that sounds like enough choice.
In practice, the jump between Story and Normal can feel much bigger than expected.
Story Mode Can Take Too Much Pressure Away
Beast of Reincarnation relies heavily on parrying.
Landing a parry does more than protect Emma. It also helps build the resources needed to use Koo’s powerful Blooming Arts, so learning the timing is an important part of how the combat works.
Story Mode makes that process much easier.
That is useful for players who mainly want to follow Emma and Koo’s journey, but it can also remove much of the tension from fights. Players who find Normal slightly too demanding may therefore discover that dropping to Story goes further than they wanted.
The good news is that difficulty can be changed during a playthrough, and there is no extra reward tied to staying on a harder setting.
So there is little reason to struggle just because you picked Normal at the beginning.
Still, a fourth setting between Story and Normal could have made the choice easier for players who want some resistance without turning every fight into a test of parry timing.
There Is Another Way to Make Normal Mode Easier
Interestingly, players may already have a better middle ground hidden inside the combat system.
Emma’s ranged weapons can become extremely strong if you invest heavily in them.
Upgrading the crossbow and longbow, along with skills that improve tracking, ammo and projectile damage, can let Emma attack enemies from a safer distance instead of relying on perfect close-range parries all the time.
It does not completely remove the need to dodge or parry, especially during bosses, but it can make Normal Mode much more manageable.
That might actually be the better option for players stuck between the two difficulties.
Instead of switching to Story Mode and making every part of combat easier, you can build Emma around ranged attacks and lower the pressure through the game’s own progression system.
That also fits what Game Freak originally said about Beast of Reincarnation. The studio did not want difficulty to depend only on fast reactions. Builds, Spirit Stones, weapons and Koo’s abilities are all supposed to give players different ways to deal with difficult encounters.
So Beast of Reincarnation does have ways to make the game easier.
The strange part is that one of the best middle-ground difficulty options may not be in the settings menu at all.
For more on the game, see this Beast of Reincarnation guide and PC Gamer review.
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