Keep your tomatoes holstered for a moment, please, and hear me out.
Beast of Reincarnation, the new not-Pokémon action RPG game from Pokémon studio Game Freak, has been marketed as a “one-person, one-dog” game. You play as Emma (person) while she and Koo (dog) venture around a post-apocalyptic future Japan in search of giant, ugly monsters to parry and stab. Koo helps you in combat, and in exploration as well. And that’s where my issue with him arises.
Koo just won’t stop sucking out all the fun of exploring. Bad dog.
While Beast of Reincarnation isn’t quite an open-world game, it does feature some large maps that are rife with off-the-beaten paths to explore and hidden items to find. Well, except they would be hidden… if Koo wasn’t pointing out literally everything the game has to offer.
I can’t take two steps in a new direction without Koo pointing something out in the form of a distracting on-screen pop-up message. Koo found a book! Koo found a valuable item! Koo found a shrine! OK, well, good for you, Koo. May I discover something for once? The game spotlighting everything that may be of interest makes the experience of running around its map feel hollow. Just head from marker to marker that Koo points out. No marker in a building? Then there ain’t gonna be anything in it, bub.
There are no genuine surprises when scouring Beast of Reincarnation’s locations — just Koo barking at you. The maps get rather stale after a while too, as there’s no real variety between areas; most of the decayed, hollowed-out buildings and grassy fields look identical to one another. At times, Beast of Reincarnation even actively discourages exploration, with some of the most egregious invisible walls I’ve encountered in a game this side of Black Myth: Wukong.
At a certain point, I have to wonder why Game Freak even scattered “hidden” (heavy air quotes here) items around Beast of Reincarnation if the game, via Koo, was just going to immediately signpost them. It’s not too dissimilar to playing the new God of War games and having Atreus blurt out a puzzle solution before you’ve even had a chance to solve the puzzle for yourself. Let me get stuck first, boi.
Koo’s annoying barks aren’t just about spotting items around the world. He’ll also “arf arf” when enemies are near. Every. Single. Time. What sounds helpful quickly becomes quite frustrating. Koo, I know there are enemies around. That’s why I’m sneaking around in tall grass to stab them in the back! Thankfully, enemies don’t seem to hear him, so Koo’s presence doesn’t send oblivious enemies on alert. If he did alert them, we’d be in trouble as he has a penchant for running right in front of their faces while I slyly move into backstabbing position.
What adds to the annoyance is Emma always finds the need to comment whenever Koo “discovers” an enemy. She’ll tell him that there are enemies here, as if that wasn’t the whole reason he was just barking. It gets more and more annoying the more time you spend in a given region, since enemy placement doesn’t change. While not strictly a Soulslike, Beast of Reincarnation can still offer tough challenges on its default difficulty setting. If you keep respawning at the same campsite to re-challenge an Elite Enemy, Koo will let you know there are enemies about, even though you run past the same group of robots every damn time.
So, yeah, the Beast of Reincarnation dog kinda sucks, and it pains me to write this as someone who wants more dog games around and even snuck a picture of his canine friend into a game review. It’s not all Koo’s fault — this fluffy furred friend is just representative of questionable design choices. He’s less an actual character and more just gameplay mechanics disguised as a big ol’ white dog who won’t shut up.
But if you disagree about Koo’s suckiness, I’ll take those tomatoes now.