Having recently showcased the gameplay for Beast of Reincarnation, developer GameFreak inadvertently ended up inviting comparisons with the Soulslike genre. In an interview with Japanese publication Famitsu, however, game director Kota Furushima has confirmed that there are quite a few differences between the kind of combat you would expect from a FromSoftware release, and what you’ll see in Beast of Reincarnation.
Among these is the fact that Beast of Reincarnation will offer difficulty options. With the stated goal of it being welcoming even to players that might be unfamiliar with action games, Game Freak’s upcoming title will allow lower difficulty playthroughs. The skill tree will also allow its own ways to mitigate some of the game’s trickier parts.
“We’re trying to make it so that even people who aren’t good at action games can enjoy it,” said Furushima (via machine translation). “You can also choose the difficulty level, so if you’re unsure, I think it’s best to lower the difficulty level. Personally, I’d be happy if people could enjoy the game by taking an approach that actually lowers the difficulty level, by devising the skill tree system and Koo’s support.”
This doesn’t mean that Beast of Reincarnation will be a piece of cake, however, and Furushima wants to encourage players to experiment with different fighting styles and combat abilities. This will be helped by the fact that both protagonist Emma and her wolf-like companion Koo will each have three different skill trees, offering choices that range from melee combat to more stealth options, and even long-range abilities.
“I think there will be times when you get defeated, and I want players to enjoy trial and error, trying different fighting styles next time, or changing Kuu’s skills,” he explained. “However, I don’t intend for players to never be able to clear the game on their first try, or to have to retry dozens or hundreds of times, so I hope that players will pick it up without being too scared.”
Previously, Furushima had also revealed that the team at Game Freak working on Beast of Reincarnation is a small one, with partner companies contributing to its development. Counting everyone working on the game, however, he noted that the team size is “quite large”.
“The team is quite large, as you can imagine, but I will note that it’s not all folks internally here at Game Freak,” he said. “We managed to seek out a lot of partner companies to work with us, companies, studios that are able to realize the vision of this game in the way that we wanted to make it, so we’re lucky to have a lot of people working on it externally as well.”
He also described how the concept of Beast of Reincarnation came to life thanks to an internal competition at Game Freak encouraging employees to come up with new IP.
“I wanted to try something completely different and new, unlike other stuff we’ve made. And it just so happened that internally, here at Game Freak, we have a program we call the Gear Project, which is sort of an internal contest run by our president, Satoshi Tajiri, to make original IP within the company. So, I entered my design doc into that contest, and I was able to get permission to start working on a project,” he revealed
Beast of Reincarnation is being developed for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release this Summer.
