REYNATIS - Switch Review

What do you get when you cross Final Fantasy writer Kazushige Nojima, Super Mario RPG composer Yoko Shimamura and action RPGs? You get Kingdom Hearts, duh. Also, to a lesser extent, you get REYNATIS.

Shibuya is overrun with outlawed magicians and a drug epidemic turning people into monsters. Take control of Sari Nishijima, a prodigious witch officer who aims to restore peace to the city streets and Marin Kirizumi, an oppressed wizard looking to become the strongest wizard to ever live.

The Good

Having two playable characters with opposing goals is an easy way to make players connect with the protagonists. With Marin being a power-hungry wizard living on the streets and Sari being an officer of the law trying her hardest to fight the threat of illegal wizardry, it really does grip you as a player and make you interested in how the plot is going to progress and waiting in anticipation for the inevitable clash between the two.

REYNATIS’ combat is split into two phases: the Liberation phase and the Suppression phase. The Liberation phase is when you go on the offensive, deal damage and combo your enemies into oblivion; this costs you your magic and when that runs out, you switch to the Suppression phase where you can’t attack but your magic slowly regenerates, but you can build it up quicker by dodging enemy attacks at the right time. This combat flow makes you really feel like an overpowered anime character, styling on a group of random dudes only to stop and goad the last survivor into attacking you, dodging their pathetic attempt, then finally cutting them down. If you love hyper-confident, edgy characters like Devil May Cry’s Vergil or pretty much any anime villain ever, you will love this combat system.

TL;DR

• Two playable characters with opposing goals
• Interesting combat

The Bad

REYNATIS has a serious issue with its difficulty curve. Most average enemy encounters are over in less than, no hyperbole, 3 seconds; boss fights tend to be long and annoying encounters with damage sponges but the second you get into a fight with the opposing protagonist, the game stops messing around and will blindside you with a fight way above what you’re used to. My first time fighting Sari and her fellow officers hard blocked my progress for weeks, no joke. Partly because none of the first prior properly prepared me for the difficulty curve and partly due to my next point.

REYNATIS performs atrociously on the Switch. The game has a lot of slowdown and at best, you are going to get 20fps during combat, making it hard to combo enemies properly and dodging their attacks incredibly inconsistent. In an action RPG like this, that is just straight up unacceptable.

When you are playing as Marin, the game introduces a mechanic akin to Grand Theft Auto’s wanted mechanic. Whenever you draw attention to yourself, you will quickly gain the attention of the magic police and they will hunt you down. You can hide in various parts of Shibuya to throw them off your trail but as far as my experiences have been, this is an absolute lie. Yes, your wanted level stops climbing while hiding, but it doesn’t seem to lower. I hid in a safe zone for around 10 minutes once to test this and it didn’t decrease at all. The thing is, whenever you do get caught, you will immediately be thrown into a fight you can’t win but once you die, you get the option to continue on as if nothing happened, so really, what is the whole point to this mechanic?

Something that a lot of anime and Japanese games tend to do is make up a lot of terminology for various things as a form of world-building. REYNATIS does this to an absurd degree. When someone has a near-death experience, they become a Wizard or a Witch. People who gain powers like this are called Replicas, while those who were born with magic are called Legacies and they work with The Guild. Rubrum is a drug that turns people into The Damned, which are monsters but they’re different from naturally occurring monsters called M. Some Damned can become immune to Rubrum and they are referred to as Fools and SHUT UP! All this terminology is annoying and very confusing.

On paper, REYNATIS’ plot sounds interesting; modern Shibuya is filled with magic; one kid wants to be the strongest Wizard but the police are trying to stop him. The thing is, REYNATIS’ plot is filled to the brim with mundane plot points stitched together with heavily played-out tropes to keep the story moving, leading to a lack of emotional engagement. A good example is very early on while playing as Sari, one of the officers in your squad mentions that one of his friends from school could have a lead on a case they're working on. He mentions in passing that he’s been having a hard time and hopes to have a beer with him soon to cheer him up. It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is going and once you get there, take him out. After he turned into a monster, your squad member’s response may as well have been “welp, that sucks. So what now?”

I originally wasn’t going to mention this but I thought I had to after learning that Yoko Shimamura was the composer for REYNATIS. When I boot up a game for the first time for a review, I will take out my best set of headphones and pay close attention to the music, sound design, voice acting, etc. After my first play session, I’ll decide whether or not to continue playing like that or just listen to a podcast or something during future sessions. REYNATIS was one such case where I stopped caring about the game’s audio. Speaking as someone who has had Kingdom Hearts’ soundtracks living in their head rent-free for over 20 years, you can imagine my disappointment learning that Yoko Shimamura worked on this soundtrack.

TL;DR

• Insane difficulty spikes
• Abysmal performance
• Wanted system is more of an annoyance than a deterrent
• Obsessive use of named terminology leading to narrative confusion
• Mundane and trope-heavy plot with no emotional impact
• Uninteresting soundtrack

Final Score: 3/10

Japanese action RPGs are a dime a dozen and I can say from experience that most of them are pretty average. REYNATIS is no exception. At best, REYNATIS is an okay game with a boring story but at worst, it is an excruciating experience. I’m sure my experience would’ve been smoother if I played REYNATIS on anything other than the Switch but we review Switch games here, so my hands are tied. 

As an aside, I’m also a little annoyed that this game just took the same plot I wrote for my first Dungeons & Dragons campaign and made something so bland with it.

Thank you for checking out our REYNATIS Switch review, thank you to NIS America for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

• Andrew Caluzzi (Inca Studios / Camped Out)
• Bel Cubitt
• Bobby Jack
• Jack Caven
• NintenVania Podcast
• RedHero