Back to Shibuya
Developer FuRyu has been making games for a long time and as they tend to make RPGs, I’ve played more than a handful of their games over the years. However, for the vast majority of the titles that I’ve played from them, they fell short of being great due to either a lack of polish or some very strange design choices that hampered the experience in not so insignificant ways. It was disappointing as often they would have a very unique premise, but the execution simply hasn’t been there.
As such, I’ve taken a break from playing new FuRyu releases for the last few years, skipping titles like Monark, Caligula Effect, Trinity Trigger and more. When I saw the trailer for Reynatis, I liked the fast-paced looking combat and interesting world premise so decided to give them another shot, hoping for the best.
Story of Reynatis revolves around two protagonists.
MSRP: $59.99
Price I’d pay: $19.99
Platforms: PC, PS4/5, NSW
Voice Over: JPN Only
Steam Deck: “Playable” status but plays very well outside of the very small font.
Played: 12~ hours
In a world where magic exists, wizards are both feared and despised for their power. Two ideals clash when Sari, a lawful wizard meets Marin, a wizard outside the law that wants to become the strongest in the world.
As far as the premise goes, magic being real in modern Tokyo and how society adapts to that reality is a very interesting idea. Unfortunately, while there’s an attempt to marry story with gameplay as when Marin is discovered to be a wizard, he has to run away and hide in order to avoid being chased by the law. It’s made moot by the fact that I could just quick travel to another area to lose the heat immediately. Worse yet, it wasn’t really up to me in regards to when I exposed myself as a wizard since bumping into enemies on the map (ala Yakuza style) forced me to take arms as a wizard at which point, the civilians around the area would immediately start reporting me. It’s doubly unfortunate since I could only find hidden items when in wizard form and have faster movement speed which felt essential since I was walking around everywhere.
The characters were not presented in the best light as there wasn’t much time spent developing each character’s personalities and motivations for why they were there in the first place. Even though there were a few interesting developments in the story, it never quite hit a place where I felt invested, and I was just going through the paces to the next story objective while feeling bored.
What am I looking at? What year is it?
Even though I’m not someone that puts too much stock on how a game looks, Reynatis struck me as an especially ugly game. The juxtaposition of the gorgeous character illustrations and FMVs to the in-game models of the characters and the dull environments came across as decidedly low budget with a misguided art design.
Not everything is doom and gloom as the highlight of Reynatis is definitely the combat.
The combat is fast paced and while simple, took some time to master.
While engaging foes, a wizard must balance between Suppression and Liberation modes. While in Suppression mode, I was unable to attack but recovered my mana natively. I could speed up the rate I was recovering mana by dodging attacks which was made easy since unlike most other dodge systems, I didn’t need to do so proactively. Allowing an attack to “hit” me, triggered a QTE that if I completed perfectly, would max out my mana instantly, slowing down the action and allowing for me to go directly into Liberation mode to attack.
In Liberation mode, I was able to execute fast attacks that had me jumping from enemy-to-enemy unleashing quick attacks and launch active skills which took mana to use but allowed me to extend my combos. Using up all my mana meant I would be forced back into Suppression mode, not being able to attack so I had to manage my mana wisely.
While not being able to attack seemed like a big disadvantage, once I unlocked more characters I could swap to on the fly, it became much less of a factor. Also, since how defensively powerful Suppression mode was, I found myself willingly going into that mode even with mana to spare just to be able to dodge some powerful attacks. Swapping characters, going back and forth between the modes and juggling different active skills so I could keep my combo count high to deal the maximum amount of damage ended up being pretty fun.
However, I found most enemies died entirely too quickly for me to truly flex what the combat was capable of which was a bit of a shame.
There were a few neat boss battles that required a little more thought.
In terms of the PC port, this is yet another terribly barebones attempt as it doesn’t even have basic settings like FPS limit and font size. If nothing else, the game is not very demanding and worked on the Steamdeck without any major issues (outside the small font) and I didn’t suffer any major crashes or bugs during my play time.
How very realistic.
With an interesting premise and a solid combat engine, Reynatis has the foundations of a good game. However, the myriad of questionable game design choices, ugly visuals and an uninteresting story makes for a hard sell for anyone but the most enthusiastic action RPG fan.
Fun Tidbit: I was surprised to learn that the legendary Yoko Shimomura, composer of titles like Kingdom Hearts, Parasite Eve and Xenoblade Chronicles lent her talents for this game as I didn’t find the OST all that notable. Perhaps it was an issue of direction.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
