The Beast of Reincarnation reviews went live on Tuesday, and they do not agree on much. Scores run from 9.5 out of 10 down to three stars out of five. Game Freak’s biggest swing outside Pokemon has landed on Metacritic at 73 on PlayStation 5 and 72 on PC, which is the numerical shape of a genuine argument rather than a quiet flop.
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Where the Beast of Reincarnation reviews split
Read the two ends together and something unexpected turns up. The critics are not really fighting about the combat at all.
Vice went to 9.5 and said the combat “isn’t just innovative, it’s incredibly fun”, calling the mix of real time and turn based action “a perfect blend”. GamesRadar gave it 9 and praised “firm but fair combat” with wide scope for building a character your way.
Now look at the low end. VGC and Eurogamer both landed on three stars out of five, which aggregators convert to 60. Yet VGC’s own headline calls it “endearing characters and combat wrapped in a disappointingly dull journey”, and its summary line reads “an uninspired adventure, but one with great action and combat”. Eurogamer’s headline says Game Freak “riffs on Sekiro and Monster Hunter with mixed results”.
So the marks down are for the journey, the story and the borrowed ideas. Even the reviewers who scored it lowest single out the fighting as the part that works. On that, critics are closer to agreement than the spread of numbers suggests.
Steam reviews are split harder than Metacritic
Players are a different matter, and this is where the argument about combat actually lives.
On Steam the game sits at Mixed, with roughly 52 percent of more than 700 English language reviews positive at the time of writing. That is about as evenly divided as a rating can get, and well below where the critics landed.
The wording is what matters. One positive review calls it a blend of Sekiro, NieR Automata and Princess Mononoke, praising combat that “feels slick”. Meanwhile a negative one says the game “looks far more ambitious than it actually plays”. Another goes further, complaining that “guarding and parrying are very inconsistent”.
Slick against inconsistent, aimed at the same buttons. Critics broadly agreed the fighting was the strong part, while the people playing it at home cannot decide whether the parry window is demanding or simply unreliable.
The director saw the Beast of Reincarnation reviews coming
Now for the part that has gone mostly unmentioned this week, even though it was said out loud beforehand.
Game director Kota Furushima says his first reaction to the art style was “this doesn’t really fit our vibe does it?”, adding that “this isn’t a photorealistic graphics kind of studio”. He stuck with it anyway. While building the prototype, he decided “photorealism would be the best fit for what I’m trying to express here”. Those comments come from a DenFamiNicoGamer interview translated by GamesRadar.
That is a studio saying in advance that this one would feel unlike its other work. A split reception is close to the expected result of that decision, not a surprise on top of it. Before launch the game had already drawn attention for its unusual dog companion commands, another idea with no Pokemon precedent behind it.
There is a practical upside for anyone still undecided. The game arrived on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on day one, so subscribers can settle the parry question themselves without gambling 59.99 dollars on which camp they fall into. GamesRadar collected the full spread of scores as they landed.
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