Wizardry Without Wonder – Reynatis Review

I’m a big proponent of idealism being one of the most important things that go into a work. When it comes down to it, I’d prefer to play a game that shoots for the stars and misses, rather than a game that tries to arbitrarily hit all the expected notes. In many cases this leads me to championing rough-around-the-edges games such as Drakengard 3, because at the very least it’s evident at every turn the creators had some ideas. 

Recently, I’ve gotten into the catalog of FuRyu, a lower-budget Japanese publisher more famous for their figure production than for their games. While it’s understandable they’ve flown under the radar, it’s also a bit of a shame. In the past year alone they’ve released Trinity Trigger, a passable send-up of the top-down Mana games of old, and Crymachina, a game about robot lesbians that I was extremely effusive about late last year. They’ve also been behind games like The Caligula Effect 2, which I’ve never quite gotten into, but appreciate from afar for its usage of music and its interrogation of social issues beyond the well-trodden standard. FuRyu publishes games that, at the very least, leave me impressed by their novelty or character concepts. On the other hand, with every game they publish being made by an entirely different outsourced developer, they consistently feel disjointed, rushed, and incomplete. 

Earlier this year, FuRyu announced Reynatis, a love letter to the long canceled Final Fantasy Versus XIII. After how much I enjoyed Crymachina, I was pretty excited! I’ve always been a fan of Tetsuya Nomura’s works, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that games like Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends With You are the cornerstones that established exactly what I love about video games and art at large. The idea of some similarly-inclined creators taking a crack at one of the most pined-after “what ifs” of gaming was incredibly enticing. Many of the pre-release discussions and interviews gave off a similarly positive impression, specifically finding out that Kingdom Hearts series composer Yoko Shimomura was on board, and that they had managed to somehow get an official collaboration with NEO The World Ends With You.

I wouldn’t say I was expecting the best gaming experience ever conceived, or even anything close to the imagined highs of a real Versus XIII successor, but I was still expecting something that I would come out the other side of with admiration and respect for developers trying something new. Unfortunately, I instead finished Reynatis with an overwhelming disappointment in what should have been an experience elevated by a development team’s interest in the works that shaped them. Reynatis is a game lacking in depth, character, and, worst of all, any sense of cohesion.

Reynatis takes place in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, in a pastiche of 2024 where a small subset of the population have become magic-wielding wizards after near-death experiences. You play the early parts of the game through the viewpoints of two different characters: Sari Nishijima, an agent for a wizard enforcement agency that controls and deals with the various types of crises that arise in a world where people can just do all sorts of random magic; and Marin Kirizumi, a rogue wizard sneaking around the city trying to become “the strongest”.

One of the magical issues in this alternate Shibuya is the distribution of Rubrum (shortened to Rub without a hint of irony), a magical drug engineered from the blood of wizards that gives the standard effects of a recreational drug, with an on-the-nose added effect of gradually turning users into mindless monsters known as “the Damned”. Rubrum is distributed to the masses by an evil group known as the Guild; old-money wizards who got rich off of World War II and live in a pocket dimension, traveling across the world through gates of fog to cause all sorts of chaos and mayhem. 

Now if you, like me, have read all this outrageous exposition and thought, “Awesome, this all sounds pretty unique and interesting!”, yeah! From the outset, it seems like Reynatis has crafted a world that, while clearly iterative of various urban fantasy works, feels fairly unique and engaging. As you make your way through the game and uncover more about the worldbuilding through concepts like “Wizarts” (graffiti that teaches you spells like a modern-day spellbook), or “Legacies” (transformation spells that allow higher-level wizards to don supervillain-style outfits or monstrous forms), it seems like they thought a lot about the various concepts and underpinnings of their magical world, with a mind towards what would be cool first and foremost. Even the core conceit of being a wizard in that world is interesting, with most wizards being called “Replicas”, implying that they’re more of a copy of the person that died, rather than that same person suddenly gaining magic powers. 

The problem is, Reynatis never connects all these disparate ideas and concepts together into a meaningful whole. Instead, it just keeps rushing to a new idea they had, a new concept, a new bit that “feels like it should happen now”. By the halfway point of the game, it comes across like the writers have given up almost completely and just started implementing story beats 1:1 to their rough story outline, rather than thinking about how to flow from one scene to the next. 

To give an example: female protagonist Sari Nishijima is the standout golden child of the magical police. Not only is she consistently on the promotion fast-track for her success in dealing with drug dealers and rogue wizards, she’s also the poster girl for the entire agency, with her style and finesse making her a popular choice for the agency’s recruitment drives, advertisements, and overall public image. When you engage with sidequests, or even just walk down the street, you are bombarded with this assertion that Sari is widely beloved by the populace, a sort of idolized magical girl defender, and representative of the power and control the magical police have within Shibuya. 

Around a quarter of the way through the story, Sari is, for one of the vaguest reasons I’ve ever seen in a game, branded a traitor, exiled from the police, and put on the most wanted list. Instantaneously, everyone hates her. Everyone in the entire town now submits police reports against her, and she has to fight off not only the standard monsterlike enemies, but also her ex-coworkers. I understand why this decision was made, obviously a classic narrative trope is to subvert and change a protagonist’s relationship to the world around them, but here’s the thing: Sari’s posters and videos and all that idle dialogue about how she’s the best are still in the game world. You cannot cross a single block without running into those recruitment drive posters for the police, or giant billboards with her face on them. The story has decided that structurally, it would be interesting to have Sari become a traitor, but nothing in the world enforces or engages with it, and within a couple of chapters it barely even matters anymore. 

This problem continues in other aspects as well. I said the developers talked up their love of Tetsuya Nomura games and you can feel it throughout. You run into characters that are functionally identical to characters like Joshua from The World Ends With You, but they lack all of the depth and setup to make them memorable. You spend an entire third of TWEWY with Joshua, having conversations and getting hints at his true nature, whereas the Reynatis equivalent maybe spends a total of 10 minutes with you across a 30 hour video game and they expect it to make you…feel anything? It’s just completely baffling to me!

One of the worst aspects of this rushed narrative structure is the way that they’ll suddenly decide to execute upon an idea that’s had zero build-up or explanation. Marin’s character concept is a rogue wizard seeking power, right? He’s trying to build up his magical energy to become the strongest wizard ever of all time. Over the course of the game, he’s forced to push past his edgy teen aloofness to help people, though he often couches it in selfish rhetoric to make it seem like he’s not doing it for the sake of others (edgy boy 101, classic technique, basic execution). Randomly throughout the game, however, characters will suddenly go “Marin…you’re so evil and fucked up…you’re really a bad person…it scares me…”. The thing is, he has not done anything even remotely questionable. In fact, one of the main characters that is constantly saying this, and making it clear he wants to make sure that Marin opens himself up to love and change, is a guy who makes slave bomb collars to control people with. 

Not only is there nothing to back up these constant moments of fear and concern (there aren’t any Marin killing sprees or anything that makes him seem worse than any of the other characters in the game), the game consistently transitions into sequences where everyone is going “oh see Marin is so nice hehe, what a dweeb”…FROM THE SAME CHARACTERS!!! Everyone’s personality is basically switching back and forth to whatever the writers thought would make sense to complement a later plot beat. There’s no consistency, no flow. Nothing builds off of what had come before, nothing leads into what’s going to happen, and what happens in any given chapter after that halfway point is basically determined by whatever vague character concept for a boss fight they want to implement.

Speaking of boss fights, gameplay wise Reynatis is pretty much exactly in-line with every other FuRyu game I’ve mentioned in the sense that it certainly has gameplay. It’s actually almost comical how similar the upgrade systems and game design is between Trinity Trigger, Crymachina, and Reynatis, and while it’s not necessarily any worse in Reynatis than it is in those other games, it does stand out as more noticeably flawed since there’s nothing else to really distract you from its mediocrity or encourage you to push through it. 

The main gimmick of Reynatis’ combat (an otherwise fairly basic third-person action RPG), is a mana bar mechanic, in which the player has to charge mana through evading and parrying attacks in order to fight back. The way this evading and parrying works, however, is that you have to stay in your non-combat form, and wait for on-screen prompts to appear that allow you to do air dashes and ripostes in a similar format to the reaction commands from the Kingdom Hearts series. I actually really liked this system in spite of its simplicity, because the idea of having to specifically observe  and react at the correct times to trigger animations instead of relying on just becoming invincible with a Dark Souls-style dodge roll was a breath of fresh air, and the fact you have to engage with this system to attack at all is a really good way of making players interact with the different elements at play. 

Unfortunately, Reynatis is over 20 hours long, and this unchanging loop quickly becomes tiring as you’re forced into battle after battle after battle. It doesn’t help matters that the combat you’re doing once you fill that mana gauge is incredibly basic as well. You can do a standard attack combo with one button press (that’s it, only one button press), or use two different spells that you can equip from a set of fifteen or so options, with some shared between characters and others being specific to their weaponry (one of your party members has guns so he can use gun spells, as an example). Not even an hour into the game, you’ve probably seen all its combat has to offer; you charge your mana up a bit by doing one of the parries or dodges (as you level up you start with more mana, making this even less necessary), and then you use one of your spells and mash the attack button until the enemies die. I don’t think any fight I experienced in the game outside of some late-game boss fights took longer than 20 seconds; even when I was doing optional challenge fights over 40 levels above me, the fights ended incredibly quickly as long as I didn’t get hit. 

If the combat is so easy and exploitable, you might think you could get away with skipping over most of it, but Reynatis forces you into fights nearly every few seconds. If you’re not doing one of the game’s story missions, or its dozens of identical sidequests, there are countless random identical NPCs roaming the streets that will just start attacking you immediately. Even worse, engaging with these fights immediately triggers a Wanted rating (yes, like in GTA), causing a meter to gradually fill up until you either find a designated spot located within some of the areas to idle in for a few seconds, or just fast travel out of that area. The Wanted system makes Reynatis far more exhausting than it already was. It means that every time you enter an area trying to do a side quest or anything else, you have to thread your way through and around the random enemy encounters on the map, or you’ll have to leave and return to try it all over again. You’d better hope that the side quest you’re doing doesn’t involve a fight either, because if it does, that means you’ll have to do the fight (without triggering any fights beforehand), then leave the area, then return to the exact same spot to talk to whatever NPC resolves the quest (because you can’t interact with them while you have an active Wanted rating). It’s tiring, it’s vapid, it’s inane. I can understand the idea of a system punishing you for utilizing “illegal magic”, but the way that it’s implemented, and the way you can just circumvent it by switching areas instantly, makes it a completely pointless drag.

It doesn’t help that most of the sidequests are incredibly dull as well, offering very little in the form of characterization, or any sort of emotional response. Whenever you start a new chapter, you’ll be prompted to open your phone and look at a list of requests ranging from “Help me find an item” to “Help me stop my boyfriend from doing evil wizard drugs”. While the latter’s concept is at least slightly original and feels like it should tie into the world at large, the reality of it is that you’re probably just going to kill someone’s demonic boyfriend and get a musing on how tragic this world is. This is pretty much the status quo for…every chapter until the end of the game. There’s no sidequest-specific NPCs with their own storylines, there’s hardly even any writing in these quests that prompts even the most idle of thoughts, it’s the most obligatory system imaginable.

At a certain point it even felt comical that after Sari’s falling out with the magical police, more than half of the sidequests become honeypots designed to trick her into helping that are all just “surprise” fights against random police grunts. If the game ever made any sort of stride towards implying this was because of Sari’s rich character trait of believing in justice and the good of the common man, maybe I would’ve felt this was at least expressing something. As is, you could skip all of the sidequests across the game (save the post-game superboss quest that includes random tidbits of lore), and have the same experience as someone who did them all.

So many of my problems with Reynatis could have easily been salvaged if there was literally any care or interest being put into the characters whatsoever. For a work inspired by the design philosophies of Tetsuya Nomura, I find it incredibly hard to believe that the party members of Reynatis are as dull as they are. If there’s one thing that’s consistent between Nomura’s works, it’s a stable of loud and diverse characters that ooze style over substance at every turn. You might not feel that Roxas from Kingdom Hearts II has that much going on from a writing standpoint, but the concepts behind his design and the relationships he has with other characters become distinctive and establish him as an incredibly cool guy you want to learn more about. Reynatis sets up many characters that could be interesting given a similar element of care, but without any sort of actual compelling communication between them, it’s hard to find reasons to care about what happens to them, or even believe that they care about each other at all.

Outside of the occasional talk-and-walk plot-apropos conversations, the only time your party members meaningfully talk to each other is through text messages you can read on their phones. These conversations are sometimes structured in a cute way (it’s fun to see RPG characters type “ffs” at one another), but for the most part they frustrated me by either being too cookie-cutter, or implying a character trait that would never be explored in the story proper. Does it matter if Sari has this character trait of being bad at romance and addicted to customizing her outfit and gun if it never comes up anywhere else? Does it matter that your other party members apparently have other jobs and friends that will never get mentioned ever again? So much of Reynatis for me was spent going “Is there even any reason to care about these characterizations and concepts that are tossed aside just as quickly as they were typed out?”

Most egregious to me is the treatment of Sari and her party as characters. The longer the game goes on, the more the focus shifts to Marin and his storyline and friends, leaving Sari and her two party members sitting in the background of most major scenes going “That’s right Marin!”. Neither of her friends get any sort of side quest chain expanding their characterization, or even the smallest amount of integration with any of the main plot beats going forward. It’s comical that in a game that wants to be so much like the works of Tetsuya Nomura, the only aspect they managed to nail completely was forgetting that a female lead exists.

A lot of my fatigue and apathy towards Reynatis goes hand in hand with the game’s performance and presentation, which is really not that great. I am willing to put up with pretty much any performance issues (I mentioned I loved Drakengard 3 earlier so you can trust me on that), and while I didn’t mind the incredibly rough frame rate that Reynatis has on the Nintendo Switch, the degraded visual quality and stiff animations make everything look bad. Outside of pre-rendered cutscenes (which actually look alright!) every character looks like a rough draft with absolutely no anti-aliasing done to their model. Spell effects clip out of existence at random- sometimes just taking forever to load in- and the jagged low resolution on everything makes the constant wizard dodges and flips you’re doing through the air absolutely nauseating. I admire a game with grand ambitions, but did Reynatis need simulated traffic, a ton of fully modeled NPCs walking around, and incredibly busy environments filled with animated billboards? Even larger budget games like the Persona series exercise restraint when it comes to these things, usually leaning towards either smaller-scale environments or animated crowd effects that imply the existence of something larger behind the immediate focus, so why all the unnecessary bells and whistles?

The load times aren’t unbearable, but when you have to constantly switch locations because of that Wanted system, you’re going to be seeing a lot of black screens during your time with Reynatis. Every single menu option has the classic Switch problem of input lag, with some status screens and party menus taking far longer than they should to open and navigate. Becoming comfortable with this rough performance was even more frustrating in the late-game, as almost every single boss fight in the last 1/3rd of the game would idle on either a slowly loading dialogue box or black screen before crashing entirely. I would sit there every time thinking “oh this is just par for the course, it’s coming back any second now” when it would have been faster just to restart the game. I imagine some of these problems are solved on other consoles, but even with my time playing the PS5 demo version of the game, the visual design was still messy and rough in a way that betrays the hyper-stylized concept art behind it.

It might seem unfair to compare a work like Reynatis, clearly a more budget title, to the more complex and expensive works made by people like Tetsuya Nomura, but the game is inviting this comparison at every single turn. I didn’t even need to get to the NEO:TWEWY crossover event portion of the game to feel like the developers were hovering over my shoulder going “Look! The World Ends With You!!! We got a writer from Kingdom Hearts! Are you hearing this Yoko Shimomura music? It’s just like those games!”, and when I did get to that crossover, I just thought about how much more I liked NEO: TWEWY. 

I feel bad for being so cruel to Reynatis, but at a certain point it really feels hard to believe that there was that much care being put into its ideas. I don’t even know how to outline every problem that I have with the game! This isn’t a case of rampant idealism- a game with creators who have eyes bigger than their stomachs-  it feels like a game where everyone involved just had to give up at some point. I wanted to care about Reynatis, but it felt almost impossible to. With how it came about and was released, it almost feels hard to believe that its creators even cared that much either.