JRPGs are a genre where I feel the middle ground might as well be the bottom. As much as I love them, you either find games that are exceptional and stick with you forever or ones that simply don’t. The reason that people keep circling back to Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are that they have elements and characters that stick with you throughout eternity. But, when a game doesn’t leave a lasting impression, positive or negative, it just fades from memory. I know, for a fact, that I played all of Legend of Legaia, and I can tell you NOTHING. Players need a reason to cherish a JRPG for it to attain immortality. Which is why REYNATIS, in spite of having no mortal flaws, simply does not land well in the public eye.

In a world of magic and illusions, people across Japan have near-death experiences and reawaken to being Replicas – those who have nearly died and come back imbued with magical powers. Some, like Sari, use their magic to maintain order and bring justice to the world as part of the Magic Task Force (MTF). Others, like Moa, are part of OWL, which operates outside the law but still seeks to balance the lives of wizards and regular people. However, the Guild, a group that believes in wizard supremacy, seeks to embolden magical folk and actively create more through a drug called rubrum, which, in high doses, can corrupt humans into becoming magical monsters called The Damned. The three entities co-exist in constant struggle, until the ambitions of a rogue wizard named Marin uncovers a greater threat that forces magicians to make a choice: cooperation, or annihilation.

Me, on the toilet, at 2 AM, after my third Del Taco visit of the day.

REYNATIS is a slow opening flower of a game, asking players to bear with it as you gradually get a drip feed of mechanics, lore and character exposition. For example, when you first begin exploring the world of Sari, you’ll encounter an indicator in the lobby of the police force that says you’ll be able to utilize it when you reach chapter 14. That feels like a lifetime away, but you quickly move through the first ten chapters at an almost breakneck pace, getting told about the main players in the game, the real antagonist who will unite the factions, how to play, why you should care about the obnoxious texting feature within the game, and many other things. The stream of information isn’t overwhelming, but it is constant to the point where it seems to draw focus away from the “action” part of this action JRPG.

You can view REYNATIS through a triple lens: the combat, the additional features and the story itself. Inarguably, and I will fight players on this, the weakest aspect is the story. Yes, there’s something to be said for putting magic in a modern day scenario and having it rub against the real world through a veil that the magicians can actively choose to reveal or cloak from humanity. It’s an interesting concept, and I think it evoked a lot of The Magicians for me in terms of ideology. It was further enhanced by the drugs that can “make” wizards, and the way that every character had their own coming-of-death story that lead to the awakening of their powers. It’s not a bad presentation, per say, and it makes sense when showcasing in game elements, like graffiti tags – called “wizart” – being a way to share spells/teach characters new abilities.

However, once you start trying to make it cohesive, it feels like a song I’ve heard many times. Main female character is trying to uphold justice and do the right thing. Male character is reckless and wants to be the strongest whatever. The two are in opposition at the beginning but then learn to work alongside each other. Some more powerful force is at play that threatens everything, and I’m trying not to spoil the story for those who are looking forward to playing. But, in spite of a bizarre plot twist that made me need to scratch my head about how the entirety of the game works, it just felt…flat. 

Stop trying to justify it, Marin, you know as well as I do that this is going nowhere.

Also, REYNATIS has committed the honestly overbearing trope of setting everything in and around Shibuya. I get it, it’s a busy ward full of people and shops and the best secondhand anime store I ever visited, but there’s more to Japan. Hell, there’s more to Tokyo. But the number of games, movies and manga that are set around the Shibuya crosswalk are just exhausting. Wow, so many people walk here! It’s reached the saturation level of setting a movie in Times Square, and I got sick of that trope around Vanilla Sky. This game could have easily been put in Takadanobaba or even Ueno and been just as interesting, instead of me, once again, seeing a 109 adjacent building as a landmarker.

Lastly on my plot rage issues is the way that characters will just talk as you’re running to your objectives. While this isn’t nearly as offensive as some, you need to either understand spoken Japanese perfectly or constantly be reading as you’re running to get all the nuances from the members of your party as you head to your objectives. Keep in mind, REYNATIS has tons of exposition dumps as bumpers for chapters where characters will talk, at length, about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and what they had for breakfast on the morning of April 13, 2023, but they then have even more to say when you’re out and about. Like Kingdom Hearts, if you need to fully understand everything about the lore and the world, you also need a copilot furiously scribbling notes as you try to, well, play the game.

It’s fine, Dogo, just know that everything is an analogy to a very specific part of Japanese history.

The combat of REYNATIS, far and away, is the best part of the adventure. The concept of magic revolves around Suppression and Liberation, which is toggled through the shoulder buttons. Being able to Suppress so you can dodge attacks and essentially fill your magical meter through QTE responses is fun and makes you feel powerful in execution. You quickly get into the groove to continually dodge the incoming attacks until your meter is full, and then Liberate to create a time stop moment where you can unload on the enemy in a big way. It never gets old, and I love the Bayonetta adjacent moments of dumping attack after attack on a single target, just in a significantly less sexy way.

The combat only gets more fun as you add other wizards to your party, as you can tag them in during combos to get a Marvel Vs. Capcom level of fly-in damage from others, but with the added bonus of then switching to THEIR magical meters so you can keep the game going. See, if the magic meter fully depletes, you automatically revert to Suppressed and cannot keep swinging away. But if you’re smart about timing (and also aware of attacks from other enemies) you can keep the damage flowing for a significant amount of time, with plenty of variety in damage as you incorporate different wizart abilities that are gleaned throughout your adventure.

Having said that, REYNATIS teaches you the core idea of combat victory – QTE dodging followed by button mashing – and that’s really all you need for the duration. Sure, you need to account for variables like multiple enemies or unblockable attacks, but those are footnotes that get adjusted as they come. Making sure you account for projectile attacks is important, and knowing when to Suppress for safety becomes second nature. For the most part, though, once you get good at mastering the timing wheel for dodging, you’ll always be pulling in four or five star results per encounter, giving you an EXP boost that…should mean something, but I don’t think it ever did.

But damn, when the game looked good, it looked GOOD.

This is where REYNATIS sort of falls apart for me, which is the core “RPG” tenants of the whole thing. There’s plenty to see and do. as long as you’re patient and also don’t want to see or do too much. That is, the world looks vast but is actually pretty limited. You have decent sized maps, but there’s tons of side roads and buildings that you can never enter, or just enter long enough to buy food you rarely use. Save spots are plentiful, and they recover all your HP, so I almost never found the need to purchase any additional items. There’s drops in the main world and also the Another realm (more on that in a second) that more than supplemented my need to have extra healing goods on my person. So a lot of the sales were just choices that I felt I didn’t need.

Then there’s all these other systems in place. When you’re with non police wizards, there’s a chance that Liberating yourself in front of normies will get you into a no-win battle with the elite MTFs. You have to watch your Malice level that acts like a GTA wanted level, and you can erase it by ducking into a safe spot. This is in counter to the Stress meter that Sari’s troupe has where you get more agitated as civilians share information with you, and the Stress can make your attacks stronger but also make it hard to control being Suppressed. Neither of these levels seemed worth engaging with because a majority of the combat didn’t call for the attack bonus. Instead, it was so much easier to just not engage with anyone and maintain the status quo.

This directly ties to REYNATIS’ wonky side quest availability. I felt like, again, this vast world was so limited, and the number of side quests you can pick up, particularly in the beginning, were scant and sparse. I get trying to move the plot forward by not allowing too much deviation, but players have gotten used to having tons of errands to accomplish on their way to the “plot,” and we had an information dump near the beginning about their importance. So why wasn’t I able to do more than a couple of side quests prior to approximately chapter 11, and, even then, it was just a modest number? If you don’t let players explore enough at the beginning, they’re less likely to just pick it up towards the end.

And the instant messaging system! Why do I constantly have notifications on my screen to let me know there’s an inconsequential exchange happening between characters on my phone that I definitely need to read? I don’t CARE why Dogo prefers physical attacks over magic, or the reasoning that Moa uses to craft cutesy nicknames. It’s something that just constantly hangs in the periphery of your vision, begging you to see text exchanges between characters who literally might not reappear for several chapters. The fact that I keep seeing MTF hard cases dropping cat emojis in a text chain while I’m trying to solve murders is baffling, and the whole thing felt inorganic and worthless in the grand scope of the game.

Seriously, I hate all of you and this is why I keep notifications off with LINE.

On a technical side, I do appreciate the performance, for the most part, of REYNATIS on the Switch. While I knew there would be some sacrifices for the port, I was only surprised when it came to some of the dubbing throughout the game. Mouth movement is an imprecise science when trying to scale a 4K game down to the small screen of the Switch Lite, but that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned completely. It was an odd enough occurrence that I began to wonder if there was something about wizards communicating psychically that I had forgotten. Combat was smooth, the world unfurled nicely, but just that small extra bit of animation was missing and made it weird. It was only further amplified by the fact the dev team did not forget to make sure female characters’ chests were constantly swaying, heaving or otherwise moving.

The beautiful soundtrack and excellent voice work of REYNATIS helped to propel the game along, giving me plenty of reason to remain invested, aurally. The visuals were…okay. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that a great deal of detail went into capturing the nooks and crannies of Shibuya on an almost infinitesimal scale, and that’s ruddy brilliant. Yet, when you move into Another – the magical pocket world where a majority of the important plot plays out – you’re left in a very generic “fantasy” world of medium strangeness and, again, restrictive pathways.

I think it would have been better to simply use the Liberate system to layer Another on top of the already existing Shibuya landscape and just give it an inverted color scheme or something. It would be less work and less disappointing for players to need to keep hopping into the set for Ladyhawke every time wizards needed to do something magical.

Yes…I got prophylactics for…lifting curses. Said the 20 year old college dropout hanging out with two older sister types.

There’s more content coming: NIS America and FURYU have confirmed REYNATIS will get some DLC content, additional chapters rolling out and a continuation of a story that left me feeling a little uncomfortable with some parallels to Japan’s own odd history with the West. But the enjoyable combat isn’t enough to make me keep returning to deal with the frivolous mechanics, exhausting dialogue and repetitive, limiting maps. It’s far and away not a terrible game, but it’s just simply not that good. The wonder and excitement gave way to repetition and tedium, and I had to fight to make myself play a bit more in anticipation of this review. JRPG enthusiasts should add it to their wishlists, but I can’t see this fast food game leaving more of a mark other than “Huh, that was something.”

REYNATIS is available now on PS4, PS5, PC and Switch.

Reviewed on Switch.

A copy of REYNATIS was provided by the publisher.