ok first of all, to the haters saying, "where the fuck has your blog been tilde", and "i thought you were going to slay systemd" i have two words to say to you: i've been busy dodging slop since FreeBSD and debian both decided to side with the fascist mammon machine and embrace llm code generation and my little "here's how to switch to openrc on debian" article i had planned seems quaint and naïve in retrospect. also if you haven't noticed this blog is free so fuck you, how many blog posts have you made in the last three months? (please do not answer this question it's rhetorical babe just let me have this)
anyway i played a video game, and as is my wont i then played another one. this game was my most anticipated release of the year i think. not because i'm a big fan of the studio, or that it was part of a beloved series or that i was blown away by the trailers or the hype. no it's because it's a brand new game - not a sequel or prequel or remake - made by gamefreak (the pokémon people), not exclusive to nintendo platforms, not catered towards children and not a turn-based monster-collecting/monster-raising rpg. in fact it's been described as a souls-like and yes there is a distracting amount of blood flying around and you do have to manage a stamina bar and learn enemy attack patterns.
to be clear this is not the first time gamefreak has made non-pokémon games, but the platformers "drill dozer" (2005, gba) and "harmoknight" (2012, 3ds) maintain the kiddy aesthetics. even the edgily titled "tembo the badass elephant" (2015 - xbo, ps4, win), despite having a mild swearword in the title and being available on the slur-powered console for western devils (eat shit xbox fans, how about you "free palestine" next time you picket-hopping rats), is another cartoony platformer that most christian fundamentalist parents can probably get their pastor to approve. as is the nintendo creed.
put plainly, i was fascinated by the idea that a studio like gamefreak had been allowed to make something so off-brand. something available on the sony playstation 5. something that was dressed up as a somewhat cinematic drama, with realistic human character models and katanas and shit. the game is called "beast of reincarnation" btw, and it came out in august. i didn't buy it straight away because i have been fucking broke this year, but also because i was intrigued to see if it would bomb extremely hard and become a meme. as the months passed i never once heard anyone mention it. i asked friends "hey have you heard of this game" and every single time it seemed that i was the only person in my (admittedly limited) media circles that was even aware of this thing's existence. and that just kinda blew my mind, a studio that has been tethered to the pokémon brand for over 25 years, like sisyphus using the strength HM on his boulder, has been given such an unprecedented amount of creative freedom and been allowed to make a serious game for "adults". and i haven't heard a single peep about it.
in the months before purchasing "beast of reincarnation" i kept an eye on the patchnotes post-release. i had a feeling that maybe i could glean an idea of the quality of the game from what the developers saw fit to patch. and there were a lot of patches. not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, it's very common to see day-1 patches. but the patches did not stop, there were seemingly weekly patches dropping for 3 months post release. i got the feeling this game might have Some Problems.
anyway i bought it and the opening was quite impressive. there was a fairly generic in-media-res tutorial sequence at the start, leading into some quite gorgeous establishing cutscenes. i tuned all the settings to prioritise frame rate over resolution/particle effects/ray-tracing, and it's cool that they give you the choice over whether to maintain the engine settings in cutscenes. since "final fantasy vii" (1997, psx) (and obviously earlier lets be real but it is the archetypal example, c'mon) gamers have bristled over the disconnect between presentation fidelity in gameplay compared to cutscenes. some of my least favourite moments in the ffvii remake series thusfar have been the (admittedly scarce) jumps to non-engine cutscenes. so it's real nice that they let you choose to maintain the same fidelity throughout the game. i play plenty of retro games, i seriously do not give a single shit about pixel counts or how many triangles are being rendered at a given time. smooth gameplay and consistent presentation are what make a game feel immersive.
so it's a goddamn shame that despite the thoughtful configuration options the game drops frames like bombs in an israeli ceasefire; frequently and without justification. it was hardly a problem with too many enemies or overly spectacular environmental effects. it would happen in boring little corridors, turning a corner in a dungeon, no combat, no npcs, and suddenly i'm dropped down to like 20fps or so. my ps5 was fucking chugging, and this is on basically the worst graphical quality. i suspect the problem has nothing to do with graphics, and more to do with poor storage optimisation. the big promise of the current gaming generation was the abolition of loading screens. ssd's are fast and before sam alt man and the boys started running their grift they were also reasonably cheap. problem solved! except actually not, contemporary games are huge and you can't load everything into memory, so instead of a loading screen you often get pace-killing ladder-climbing sequences, or that thing where you have to gingerly squeeze through a tight gap in the enivronment. it's a loading screen in all but name, a period where you can't really play the game like you normally would, where you can't look at anything interesting or dynamic, while the software dumps all the assets you won't need for the next area and loads the ones you will. well "beast of reincarnation" is built different, fuck that shit, there's no pride in sugarcoating the need to load assests, we'll make the sacrifice to the framerate gods.
for a time i suspected this was due to the novel traversal mechanics the game employs. you see our protagonist emma has got herself some disney princess powers. she can grow vines and shit from her hair at will, providing a way to creatively bridge gaps between various parts of the map. she can also use her hair vines to boost herself into the air like a brief jetpack effect. so i thought that perhaps because the devs can't predict how you might approach any given location it doesn't make sense to use the laddersqueeze technique to fake your loadscreens. i was initially impressed with this approach to traversal, it's really fun and a cool as hell idea.
i may have mentioned before, but due to bullying and homophobia in my somewhat rural childhood i quit gaming in the early 2000's in favour of doing drugs and learning to play the guitar. it took until my transition about 10 years ago for me to afford myself the permission to get back into my beloved hobby, and i went back to 90's gaming for the most part. the ps5 i bought in 2022 was the first console i got in the 21st century and the first open world game i ever played was "death stranding" (2019, ps4). so that's kind of where my benchmark is set for open world exploration. in "death stranding" there's any number of ways to get towards the stupid little beacon on the HUD. straight as the crow flies is sometimes the silliest and hardest way, but it's definitely fun making norman reedus stumble and faceplant and ruin all his uber eats deliveries and upset the baby out of pure stubbornness. fuck i love kojima. a fucking shame he moved to xbox studios because now i have to boycott his upcoming games (eat shit kojima-sensei, how about you "free palestine" next time you picket-hopping rat). ANYWAY. i took my "death stranding" traversal sensibilities into "beast of reincarnation" and tried to just head straight for that stupid little beacon on the HUD. and very quickly the cracks appeared, in a very literal sense.
it's a post-apocalyptic japan setting, so there's loads of collapsed buildings with all the windows blown out, and it seems like you can kinda squeeze through a lot of the time. and the hairvine-jetpack mechanic means that when you do inevitably get stuck in the geometry you'll try and boost your way out and clip through the ceiling and find yourself in unreal engine limbo, firmly out of bounds, staring towards vistas of grey-white void trying not to accept the cold and inevitable kill plane awaiting your next misstep.
this game has JANK
and not just when you're trying to test its boundaries. even just following the obvious path is fraught. because you can boost and bridge your way between ledges and platforms and such you can easily skip areas. and this is by design, the team is clearly proud of their fun little mechanics and with good reason. you're actively encouraged to find creative ways to traverse the world. but then you're punished, because dialogue triggers are placed on certain coordinates, rather than by say, proximity to a stupid little beacon on the HUD. this means that you can recieve a puzzling piece of dialogue that feels suspiciously like the punchline to a joke, before falling down to a platform you skipped and recieving the setup to said joke. this kills me, because as we'll get into soon, this cast is in dire need of a charm infusion, and one of the few moments of mirth and personality getting fumbled like this is such a detriment to the experience.
so you get the picture very quickly that there is a correct and intended path to follow and deviating from it can see you missing out on moments to connect with the cast on one end, or outright break the game on the other. so just always do the obvious thing and don't get too curious. brutal. but also, why the fuck does the game chug so hard on loading new areas then?? make emma squeeze past a boulder ffs, the sequence is mandatory, this shit is linear as hell!!
the jank doesn't stop there though, there's plenty of times where an enemy would rush me, get caught on some rubble or something, and just get stuck in a walking animation while i would just repeatedly swing my sword at it with no retaliation. the worst part was the doggo companion, our inugami best boy koo. he's very big and fluffy and beautiful, and pretty useful in battle. one mechanic he has is that before enemies have spotted you koo can be sent in to get a sneak attack off. considering just how hostile every enemy is towards emma there is a certain amount of ludonarrative dissonance seeing this giant mutant dog god approach them freely, and have the enemies only retaliate after he actually starts biting their throats or whatever. but that's neither here nor there, it's videogame logic, i've suspension-of-disbelief'd my way out of hairier propositions than this. no the real sad thing is that every. single. time. i sent koo out to do his cowie-punch king hit routine he'd get caught on some kind of geometry, get stuck in a running animation loop until he hit a timeout, respawned closer to his target, and hopefully made the rest of the way towards the bad guy without getting caught on anything else. listed in the credits is a whole team dedicated to programming koo, and i do not want to shit on their work, they're obviously under-resourced and over-worked. but seriously, if every single time you use this mechanic you end up having to respawn the dog, then just have the mechanic be that he spawns in the desired place. because this boy cannot pathfind for shit. clearly they wanted to be able to send him out like a hunting dog, but they didn't pull that off and the result is serious jank.
emma herself isn't immune to this either. combat is very parry-oriented, blocking enemy attacks is how you fill up the stamina/skill gauge and it's absolutely mandatory. there's not much chance you'll win any of the boss fights without parrying. and parrying a hit gives you a little pushback. so far so standard. the thing is the boss arenas are not always well designed, and one in particular had the boss repeatedly push me out of bounds mid-combo. at least once or twice in each attempt i'd be pushed into a weird falling animation and have to wait for the engine to respawn both me and the boss back into the middle of the tiny arena. another time i was fighting a big bird up in some tall forest platforms and i got knocked back by a failed parry, caught inside a bunch of tree branches, clipped into the geometry, couldn't see the character model but i assume emma was in the falling pose, with the radio npc dialogue helpfully saying, "watch how the enemy attacks, learn how they move" as the bird clipped through the bottom of the platform, into the branches i was stuck in and combo'd me to death. fucking infuriating, and not in the "git gud" sense.
combat is actually quite good, very enjoyable system, and as someone who fucking sucks at action games i was able to beat the game on normal difficulty without much fuss so i'd say it's probably on the easy end of hack and slash. there's plenty of room to build emma and koo to suit your playstyle. i went for a strength build on emma, giving her a sword with hp-drain passives becuase i know i'm going to get hit a lot, and giving koo all the magic to wear down enemy stagger gauges. you get a crossbow and a traditional bow and arrow also, and plenty of elemental/status-based ammunition. so ranged attacks are definitely an option, but i generally went in with melee against non-avian enemies. there's a generous scope to respec your characters as well, so no need to fret a lot about wasting your attribute/skill points. very enjoyable hack and slash. but!
the real shame is the boss fights. as with a lot in this game, they make a good first impression. the designs are cool as hell and the patterns are a fun challenge to adapt to. at first. see about a third of the way they start reusing bosses. and the npc's in the radio are like "holy shit, look at these colours, it's a variant!!" which may be unthinkable in the world of the game, but for us gamers we just call that a palette swap. i was wondering why, after the first act of the game, i got the choice to "take the quick route to the capital". the story makes a big deal about the importance of emma defeating and absorbing the powers of each of the "nushi" (bosses) wreaking havok across the 41st century japanese rainforest wasteland. and fighting bosses is the best part of this kind of thing, why would i want to skip a whole big chunk of the game? well apparently this was a "feature" added in a post-release patch. people didn't want to play the repeat bossfights in the midgame, and the developers said "okay, i guess it's called MIDgame for a reason, here's a skip button". astonishing. how many hours of workers' lives when into these three chapters, for them to just end up, not even on the cutting room floor. that would have mystique. the game straight up admits, "this section is a bit of a slog, and the plot doesn't suffer a lot for skipping it, it's up to you darls". of course i took the long route, and there are some very pretty new environments, but it was honestly depressing to see that they'd run out of time/budget to actually design the centrepieces of these chapters.
beyond that, even when we do get a new boss model the behaviours and patterns are just kind of remixed from previous bosses. including the final boss. narratively it makes sense that the final boss can do everything the other bosses can do, but it also didn't introduce much of anything new. paired with how samey the rest of the bosses were it didn't give a sense of, "oh shit, now it's using a pattern from the second boss, i remember that". it's just more of the same. a serious anticlimax imo.
the story itself is interesting enough, if a bit convoluted, but i was intrigued by the setting and the world and was hungry to know more about how things ended up this way and what secrets were being kept from us. no real complaints there, passing grade. but how that story is told is easily the weakest aspect of "beast of reincarnation". emma herself is an autistic-coded amnesiac, actively described as lacking emotion, accused by some of not even possessing humanity. i don't have any real criticisms of that as a trope, it can work because we don't have any real attachment to this world yet either. and we can grow those bonds alongside emma. but in this structure emma needs other characters worth becoming attached to. koo is easy, he's a big floofer, we fight alongside eachother, take showers together (lmao), you can give him pats and treats and his nonverbal nature suits emma's emotional detachment in terms of him becoming the main bond we build. easy to love. gamefreak are good at making loveable beasts. the rest of the cast though? baffling. there's an internet ghost violet who only emma can see, who is posed as emma's guide and guardian, reminds emma to thank people, sees through people telling lies etc. she's supposed to be someone with emotional intelligence and social competence, but her voice lines are so incredibly fucking flat. does not sell the part. and not just her, the little girl, kagura, who lives in the legally-distinct star wars at-st with us. she's a little traumarelli, a neglectarino, but also she provides a lot of care and concern for emma, and does her bit to teach her the basic social niceties: say "ittekimasu" when you're heading out, "tadaima" when you get home etc. so basically exactly the same as violet, except she exists in the material realm and is a bit more vulnerable due to having a physical body and ptsd and being a child. so of course she has an even flatter affect than violet. so three of the main cast are mildly spoken autistic-coded women with no personality traits to speak of. when your protagonist is positioned as someone who needs to learn to build emotional bonds, friendships, humanity, you need someone to actually contrast them against. violet and kagura are not it.
which leaves us with brad, a mysterious man with a silly hat, he's kind of like wilson, the neighbour from home improvement, in that you never get to see his face. he pilots the legally-distinct star wars at-st and stands up maybe twice in the game. the rest of the time he sits at the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel, for days at a time. while emma and koo are out exploring and saving the world, brad sits and seethes in the driver's seat, engine dead, hands at ten and two, glaring at the windshield, like a passive-aggresive dad absolutely ruining the family camping trip with an unspoken and inscrutable man-tantrum. and he's a bit grumpy, sure, but the utterly absurd way he comes across is surely unintentional. and guess what, his delivery, while perhaps the best among the main cast, is boring as hell. and this is not the result of cheap casting, they got akio ōtsuki to play brad. the japanese solid snake. ekibo/dimple from mob psycho 100. souther from hokuto no ken. this man can deliver amazing and varied performances. leaves me thinking that gamefreak has no idea what they're doing in terms of voice direction, nor the difference between a silent script and one that needs to be read out. in a pokémon game you can let the words on the screen do a lot of heavy lifting, because you have the imagination of a reader, often the imagination of a child, to rely on to bring the words to life. but voice acting smothers that room for interpretation, it sounds how it sounds, you can't escape the material quiality of the performance. if the script is shallow, or the performance dull you are stuck with that.
a lack of awareness about how the characters come across is present in other ways. one thing that consistently cracked me up was after speaking to any non-hostile npc emma would immediately unsheath her sword, an extremely aggresive action which to me screams "i am going to fucking kill you". hilarious. i would simply only have emma unsheath her sword when enemies are present, but then they'd have to make a bunch of new assets of her running with her sword sheathed and who has time for that?
other times it was bizarre dialogue. the game has a cooking mechanic, kagura cooks for you every night, but in the early game ingredients are scarce. eventually you develop a hydroponic farm in the legally-distinct star wars at-st but you need seedlings to get that started, and even if you do find a bunch of ingredients you still need to find the recipe in order to have kagura cook for you, and even then time needs to pass in order for kagura to learn the recipe, just having the recipe is not enough. also you can only eat a meal once a day, when you return to the legally-distinct star wars at-st. you have rations when you're out in the field and if you play well you can finish an entire chapter without having to turn in for the night. also yeah, returning to the legally-distinct star wars at-st means you can't go outside for the rest of the day. you have to get a full night's sleep every time you come home.
all this to say that by the end of the first chapter i had slept twice. the first night we had plain onigiri, because the only ingredient we could use was rice. the second night we had sleep for dinner because we didn't even have rice to cook with. at the start of the second chapter kagura corners me and starts quizzing me about what my favourite meal she has made for me is. and how the fuck do you want me to answer this honey? was the time i went to bed hungry better than the time you fed me plain rice? i guess you packed the rice into a nice shape, so my answer to my favourite meal was "plain onigiri" of course. lmfao. a second later koo barks, and emma gently says "koo", and brad angrily chastises emma, saying the bond between her and koo is the most important thing for our mission, and we need to learn to get along. like wtf brad? she just responded to the floof, with his name, sounded playful to me, why do you feel the need to lecture the woman about animal husbandry you grumpy old fuck. and THEN, we set out for the first time in the second chapter, i'm still learning how the game works and take a hit or two in my first encounter and brad starts telling me to "get back to the legally-distinct star wars at-st now emma, you're hurt, you need to rest". 80% hp bar, all of my potions, all of my rations, no status effects and this freak is saying "come straight back and have a full night's sleep and let those two robots you just beat respawn RIGHT NOW YOUNG LADY". fucking bizarre.
then there's the inexplicable hostility of all the human npcs in the world. emma is immune to the Big Problem in the world, which kills normal people just by breathing it in and has created all the monsters. and she is one of very few people who are capable of killing the monsters and keeping humanity safe. even the robots get infected, but emma doesn't. but everyone fucking hates her, and i still have no idea why. they say she's tainted and filthy, but uh, why do you think that? she does have magical powers from her ability to absorb monster energy but that's precisely the thing keeping you alive fuckers. for whatever reason emma and people like her are shunned by everyone and they try to explain it but i still don't understand beyond, "they're just jealous babe, they wish they could breathe air and have cool hair magic like you". she should be a hero in her society, she should have incredible clout, but everyone treats her like shit and takes her for granted and i have no fucking idea why.
anyway i said at the top of the post that i played another game, and that game was "pokémon x" (2013, 3ds). sixth gen pokémon is widely regarded as when the series really kinda checked out, went on autopilot. these games are for kids but even at that it was a real sleepwalk of a game, never even came close to losing a single battle, and i restricted myself to normal and fairy type mons to try and add any challenge whatsoever. who cares, these games are for babies and they just churn them out at this stage. the thing that struck me was that "beast of reincarnation" characters are kind of on the same level as sixth gen pokémon characters, except with the colour and cartoonish nature of pokémon they're at least energetic or camp or something. i don't think gamefreak have ever had to write for an audience with any kind of media literacy before, and it shows, their characters are empty and bland and when you can't lean on childrens' aesthetics the void where these characters' souls should be is yawning and cavernous.
"pokémon x" does have some good music, in fact the classic hits returning from previous games felt outright boring in comparison. and that's another tick in the column for "beast of reincarnation", its music is Good. nothing groundbreaking, nothing that ever really stuck in my head, but i do remember thinking more than once, "this track is really tasty". i'd go so far as to call it "classy". unfortunately much like the bosses there's simply not enough of it and its reuse becomes a detriment. though to nowhere near the extent of the bosses. lmao.
this has been a kinda relentlessly negative writeup, but at the end of the day i'd say this is very much a 7/10 kinda game. not that numeric scores are worth a damn, but more that this is kind of the archetypal "mediocre mid-2020's soulslike". mediocrity has never had a moment like right now. bland "content", spooted out from the ceiling like tubby-custard except without the exciting pink hue, such dross is king in 2026 and this game is such an emblem for that. which actually guts me because it had so much potential, and i'd love to see this studio break free from the formula set out in the 90's and do something interesting.
ultimately everything i've noted above is a symptom of poor management. the numerous QA failures tell me that the money men weren't willing to resource enough staff or hours to get this thing tested adequately before release. there's a lot of ambitious ideas, like the hairvine-traversal mechanics, which suggest that the idea was for a reasonably non-linear adventure. but linearity is cheaper and easier, so we get both, and all the bizarre consequences of that are just shrugged off. the voice acting and script issues may be the result of gamefreak genuinely not realising that they don't have experience making story-driven games with relatable characters. but with the calibre of the cast i'm inclined to think that management thought they could fake their way through without spending a lot on experienced and talented writers and voice directors.
i'm no industry insider, i have no idea what goes into making a game like this, or what kind of studio gamefreak is like at the end of the day. but my read is that without the budgets and/or oversight of nintendo this game was hollowed out and released as what i can only imagine is a husk of what the talented people who created "beast of reincarnation" dreamed it could be. the saddest thing i read about this came from the game's director kota furushima; "i'm truly sorry that parts of this game haven't provided a sufficiently enjoyable experience".
and in the words of steven seagal "well i'm sorry to hear that" (apologies to napoleon blownapart). i truly hope the workers at gamefreak get another opportunity like this again. because somewhere under all the corners cut and ideas unrealised there is a good game. and these people deserve to make something new, something they want to make, not just another family friendly sequel in a 30 year old franchise with nintendo breathing down their necks. and if they do i'll definitely try it out again. but this shit is never going to change until game workers claw back some control from the investors and executives who currently call the shots. i'm not saying a gamefreak union would have fixed "beast of reincarnation", but it is the first step towards creating a working class culture in games and tech more generally. workers' co-operatives are a nice idea, and certainly a gamefreak workers' co-op would have created a better game with the same people. but what would be far cooler is for the workers who created this industry, and all industry for that matter, to organise as a class and reclaim the products of their labour.
i wanna see that monarchist slimeball princess peach with her neck in the saddle of a guillotine and i'm not kidding.