izigame.me

Reynatis is an action RPG leaning on the RPG side, so optimizing equipment and stats is more important than reflexes. It still is a fun action game but very easy as such; if you stock on consumable items to recover HP or counter bad stats you can take plenty of hits without dying. It has a just guard mechanic to revover MP faster which is decidedly RPG like in its execution and unintuitive for action game fans, which spawned much controversy. Basically you wait and react to a fullscreen prompt rather than the attack animation.
It has a lot of unique ideas, like suppressed (defensive) and liberated (offensive) states, stress levels (which boost offense but lower defense and might force you into liberated state), public attention which draws the cops. These gameplay mechanics reflect themes of the narrative, which seems like a belated rendition of the canceled Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Much lower budget but also unfiltered by company politics. If FFXV was suppressed, Reynatis is liberated.
The game is set in real world Shibuya at night, which is rendered in a beautiful color palette. It's not open world but segmented, which helps with escaping from bystanders taking photos of you on their smartphones and uploading it to social media after a battle. There are also portals to typical fantasy game like environments which have limited map access. A nice feature is that after a battle an arrow indicates where you were headed pre battle to avoid getting disoriented.
You will spend a lot of time walking around Shibuya and another great idea is the Wizarts, graffitis you can spot on the walls to acquire eqippable skills and stat boosters. These as well as items which are only visible in liberated state make the environments very interactive, requiring you to look around, even when you are following quest markers.
Character animation is lacking (no budget for motion capturing) and the characters and world are a bit low poly, but reasonably big and busy. Art design does offset these limitations and the BGM is top notch. FuRyu follows their usual strategy to hire big names, featuring scenario writer Kazushige Nojima, composer Yoko Shimomura and image art designer Yusuke Naora. Despite the low budget the game is reasonably polished with some exceptions, which boil down to minor annoyances:
Sometimes you will accidentally escape a battle because your attacks move you over the batte area's border. Using fast travel can (very rarely) break story progression, in which case you need to return to where you last saw a quest marker. Subquests can be done at any time, even if characters involved shouldn't be able to participate at that time. In the latter half the difficulty bottoms out and makes the bosses push overs, which is cool in how much of a power rush it is though.
After the incredibly low ratings the game got I was kind of worried for its quality. But if you don't expect an action game and aren't compulsive over graphics/open world the game is actually quite amazing and among my favs this year despite strong competition. It even compares favorably to FF7 Rebirth, the high budget Nojima game of 2024.
Rebirth has an amazing open world and great character writing, greatly adding depth and new mystery to a known narrative. But it being the middle part of a larger story and so much optional stuff to do, the pacing is not well suited to the kind of narrative earlier FF was known for. And I really don't know how the Remake series hits for people who didn't play the original.
Reynatis is self contained and thanks to its smaller world, the story moves at fast pace and gripped me in ways an open world, which is more enjoyable as a game but distracting from its narrative's direction, simply cannot. I want both of these types of games. Linear games with more limited interactivity/agency, which is used to close the gap between player and game character rather than trying to create an illusion of freedom, still have their place. True freedom in games will only ever exist outside the narrative.
Reynatis concludes one part of its story but also ends on a cliff hanger. The free DLC episodes (3 out of 9 released at time of writing) take the story further and shake up expectations also game play wise. Reynatis is an amazing experiment not possible on AAA budgets, and so far the payoffs have been worth it. It remains to be seen how successful its last experiment will turn out: the post game episodic releases bridging into a sequel (?) or concluding the other side of the events unfolding.