Reynatis is a really interesting game. Its ambitions lie to the heavens, hoping to recapture a very specific game that never was. It positions itself at a crossroads between Kingdom Hearts, The World Ends With You, and Final Fantasy Versus XIII, the game that would one day morph into Final Fantasy XV. Featuring music by Yoko Shimomura, writing by Kazushige Nojima, and blessing by Tetsuya Nomura. Expectations were high from many, but I knew what to expect here. Reynatis is a budget title, reminiscent of the PlayStation Vita era of game design. But I honestly love that.
The game plays out in the main hub world of Shibuya, broken into chapters where you switch between the dual protagonists Marin and Sari. Marin is a rogue wizard in a society rampant with drugs and crime (both of them related to magic) and Sari works for the wizard police force M.E.A. The story overall deals with them learning more about their place in their corrupt society and the oppression brought down by the police. It’s a solid premise.
The combat is one of the biggest draws of this game, attempting to emulate the style from the Versus XIII trailers to moderate success. There are two thematically appropriate modes you’ll be switching too often named Liberated and Suppressed. Liberated is how you do damage, letting you slash away wildly. The catch is that this will burn meter, so you can’t keep it up without needing a recharge. Suppressed is your default state, where your wizards cover their faces to hide from getting caught using magic.
In combat, this serves as a defensive/evasive stance, where you dodge enemies and can then regain meter to go back in. When it works at its best you’re switching to Suppressed frames before an enemy attack lands to time a dodge perfectly, immediately going back in and weaving in and out of them. There’s a flow you get into when the game works like this, and it truly feels like it rewards risky play. When it doesn’t work however you feel awkward in standing around waiting to be hit to go back on the offense as fast as possible. I enjoy Reynatis’ combat overall, but I think it’ll take a lot of getting used to and won’t work for people who want their action games to be more mechanical. Style is the substance here.
This dichotomy adds another layer to exploring the world, where using magic in public will have everyone post about you to alert the M.E.A. to come get you. If you don’t hide in one of the several hiding spots in each map or leave the map altogether you’ll summon an advanced M.E.A. task force to fight you. I like what this system does for putting us in Marin’s perspective, but I don’t think it’s developed enough to make much of a difference.
In each chapter, you’ll have a main mission, some side missions, the occasional dungeon, and various enemies you can find along the way. If you beeline to the main mission in every chapter the game will probably be much shorter, as most of the meat is in doing the side missions. Doing everything on offer can make chapters last anywhere between 40 minutes and an hour, and will involve gaining resources to improve your characters in combat. Side quests also lower a Malice meter, which will allow you to unlock Wizart’s hidden throughout the city to equip as abilities or give you money/exp. This is pretty solid on paper, but I think it can grow a bit tedious long term.
Reynatis doesn’t have many environments and will recycle them often. Side quests have this the worst, often making me feel like we were spinning our wheels in terms of gameplay progression. You’ll find yourself redoing dungeons, going back and forth between the same areas, and refighting the same monsters. The stories in these quests are charming and the rewards are good, but if you attempt to do every quest per chapter you might burn out quickly.
As you explore the world you can stumble upon topics of discussion your party can text about in an SMS group chat. Here you can choose the dialogue of someone in the cast, and these conversations are a great way to learn more of the true personalities of all the main characters. I’ve always felt that people are a bit more of themselves when messaging one another, and I’m glad something as little as this was accurately represented. Unfortunately, your messages are not sorted by the order in which you find them, so scrolling through them to find a new one when it unlocks gets old fast.
However, despite my gripes, I think the gameplay loop is ultimately engaging. You get into a rhythm with this game that’s hard to break out of, the motions become satisfying. It doesn’t ask much of you, and it tries to really utilize its small scope as efficiently as it can get. If the game hooks you early, I have a feeling that the tedium won’t matter too much.
I’d say the biggest point of contention for many will be the visual presentation. Most of the people eyeballing this are undoubtedly going to be Square Enix fans, and that studio has a sense of prestige in its visual presentation that will probably set expectations a certain way. I’m coming at this from a fan of Furyu-published games, and their budgets are always on the low side. I have a tolerance for games like this, but many do not. Characters have awkward animations in cutscenes as well, and that’s when they aren’t just standing still when they say their dialogue.
On the other side of the coin is the soundtrack, which is about as good as you’d expect from Yoko Shimomura. When in complement to the awkward visuals it almost feels out of place, given her pedigree. However, I’m glad she took on a project from such a young dev team. It makes everything click into place and sells the experience as authentic in a way, even if I do think this probably won’t rank that high among her body of work. I don’t think this would work without her involvement.
Despite thinking the character models themselves don’t look that good, the environment design is a standout. We’ve received an extremely stylized recreation of Shibuya in NEO: The World Ends With You, but I don’t think we’ve seen many games that capture the city in a somewhat realistic fashion. It’s rather moody and well-lit, with plenty of buildings to look at from the outside. You can’t really go into many interiors of places, but I think overall the main map is pretty decent to look at and explore. I wish there were more places to go to however to keep visual variety fresh, but I can appreciate what is on offer here.
To get platform-specific, Reynatis isn’t great on Nintendo Switch. It was clearly designed around being able to run on it, but it doesn’t do so that well. The frame rate target is 30 frames-per-second (fps), and despite it achieving that in battle it’s everywhere else where it struggles. When exploring Shibuya it hardly comes close to 30 fps unless you’re in as small of an area as possible. It gets especially bad on the large Shibuya Crossing zone of the map, where all of the buildings, cars, and NPCs make the game especially choppy. If a battle takes place here (and several do) you can expect the frame rate to go to about 15-20 fps by my rough estimate. Battles overall still feel rather fast and stylish, but the inconsistent framerate hurts a lot of this game’s overall appeal.
A decent trade-off for performance that will probably have the game age well once the Switch successor comes out is that the resolution is often rather crisp and looks good on my OLED screen. In busier areas, the resolution can take a sharp dip, but most of the time the models look very clean. Textures take a hit as you’d probably expect from a Switch port of a game on other consoles, being really low resolution and sticking out with the sharp characters and landscapes.
About a week before launch however a rather sizable patch came out to address a lot of the issues with the game. One of these was the performance, but it didn’t fix it to be entirely stable. Shibuya Crossing was around 10fps the first few weeks I was playing this, and when loading into the map it’d drop even lower for about the first 5 to 10 seconds. It is a bit better now, but just know you won’t get a solid 30 FPS experience.
This also affects simple things like cutscenes and menus. If a cutscene is being kicked off in a new location from the last one, you can expect the text to be stalled for a few seconds as it tries to load everything. The menus are clunky but serviceable, even if a low framerate keeps them a bit unwieldy. The only time menuing really got on my nerves is at the game’s main shop, where you’ll have to sell item drops from enemies to expand your Wizart ability slots. Every item type must be sold individually, and you cannot do it quickly. You can’t choose to just sell all your items, and you can’t mash through it because the default selection on the confirmation box is “No”. Since expanding your ability slots specifically requires selling items (not just turning them in, oddly enough), and the menus here feel like they’re running at half the speed of the game, I found it to be a frustrating system made worse by the weak hardware.
But overall this is a simply OK place to play this game. You should probably play it elsewhere if you can, but if you’re playing this game mostly for the story premise and only have a Switch you’ll be fine. The story itself is interesting, and the cast is overall charming, but the budget does hold it back far more than I’d like. The pacing of the story is pretty slow to start, and it felt like for the first 10 or so hours of my playthrough not too much was really happening. It picks up later of course, but when you’re running around the same maps doing similar things just to see cutscenes with little story progression for the first big chunk of the game? It isn’t the best feeling and led me to struggle to get invested in the first third of the game. Once the entire cast gets together though things become a lot more entertaining, and I think the game’s themes are able to shine better. Like with the rest of Reynatis, to enjoy this part of the game you have to be willing to meet it at its own level. I’m a fan of Nojima’s writing as is, and I think at the very least it’s fun to see him get a bit more freedom than he’d typically have on bigger corporate projects from Square.
I miss the era of games Reynatis feels plucked fresh out of. The PlayStation Vita was my gaming awakening that defined my taste, and was a swan song of a particular era of Japanese portable games that were able to be experimental and weird on a low budget. The ambitions of the team far outshine the budget they were given, but there’s definitely something to like here. The combat is flashy and fun if not a bit simple, yet still outshines most other action games of this scope. The six playable characters are plenty customizable, and once you get into it there’s plenty of fun to be had. I respect Furyu continuing to fund creatives of all sizes with enough money to make their weird and cool games, and Reynatis is among their better titles. For those who are coming at this from an exclusively Square Enix fan perspective, however, I don’t know if you’ll be able to see past the blemishes. Maybe don’t play it on Nintendo Switch, though.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by NIS America