'Beast Of Reincarnation' Review: Game Freak Spent Seven Years On This, And It All Comes Down To One Wolf

After playing through the whole of 'Beast Of Reincarnation,' the only character worth remembering, the only one you can actually touch, is a magical grey wolf named Koo. There's something deeply ironic about that. Developer Game Freak built an entire two-decade-plus Pokémon empire on getting players to catch, raise, and emotionally bond with creatures, and now, in their first non-Pokémon console release in seven years, the one trick they can still pull off is "here's a wolf you can pet."

In a review published August 14, NME's Ali Shutler calls the action RPG "the most forgettable game of 2026." The story is set two thousand years in the future, where a mysterious infection called The Blight has ravaged Japan, turning once-gentle forest creatures into bloodthirsty monsters, all caused by the "beast" in the game's title. The protagonist, Emma, a stoic and hardened warrior, is infected with The Blight herself, losing her memory but gaining vine-like hair she can wield as a weapon or use to swing around like Spider-Man. She also has to absorb power from mutated bosses called "Nushi" to stop the infection from spreading further.

The backstory itself isn't short on material: humanity made a choice to escape emotion, and it caused souls to slowly rot from within. That's already complicated enough, but the game piles on "memories within memories," wrapping a sci-fi plot whose direction you can already guess in packaging far more convoluted than the substance underneath. Emma doesn't fight alone. Her frail adoptive sister Kagura and stern mentor Brad wait on standby in a walking vehicle called the Cleanse Walker, which looks lifted straight out of Star Wars, while a ghost named Violet occasionally pops up to cheer things on. But the review describes this entire cast as flat and emotionless, and the 35-hour main story is bloated with so many cutscenes it drags on and on.

Combat mostly takes place in overgrown forests and abandoned villages, and enemies are the same handful of forest creatures cycling through, even boss fights are just oversized versions of those same monsters, and you have to fight them twice. There's a skill tree that lets players tweak their combat style, but beyond a few finishing moves and stat bumps to weapon damage and health, Emma's fighting never really evolves. Worse still, all 13 stages share the exact same soundtrack, looping from start to finish. The review is blunt about it: by hour 10 it's already tedious, and by hour 30 it's numbing.

As for Koo the wolf, it can unleash various attacks against blocking monsters much like a Pokémon would, but most of the time it just does its own thing, barely registering a presence. What actually made it into the "pros" column was simply being able to pet it. The review even lists "Koo is cute" twice as a selling point.

Shutler can see the ambition here: an attempt to blend the strengths of The Legend of Zelda, The Last of Us, Monster Hunter, and Stellar Blade. What comes out the other end, though, feels clumsy and short on originality. He names other 2026 titles that do it better, point blank. Want a story about technology and human connection? Memories In Orbit does it better. Want cooperative team combat? Pragmata does it better. Want satisfying monster-clearing? Resident Evil: Requiem is up to the task. Want to lose yourself in a fantasy world that keeps reinventing its own gameplay? Crimson Desert is the pick. But if what you're after is a game you'll forget the moment you finish it, Beast Of Reincarnation gets the job done.

'Beast Of Reincarnation' is now available on PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.