Gaming is at it’s best when it’s a little janky. As much as I appreciate the advances in tech that a lot of triple-A games have broken ground on, there’s an undeniable charm to a game that’s just a little busted yet full of heart. Double-A JRPGs made on a shoestring budget are some of the strongest soldiers of janky gaming, and for all their flaws they’re still absolute gems to experience. Reynatis will be a love it or hate it game for many, as it falls confidently into that category.
Despite wearing it’s Kingdom Hearts and The World Ends With You inspirations proudly on it’s sleeve, this FuRyu developed modern mage adventure never reaches the same heights as those Tetsuya Nomura classics – but watching it shoot for the stars and seeing where it comes so close is still a hell of a time.
In Reynatis, magic and wizards are real – but only a select few are born with those abilities, and in the modern heavily-sanctioned Tokyo streets you can only use those gifts legally if you’re a member of the police force. Sari Nishijima is a high-ranking member of that magic-enabled police task force. and one of our protagonists. She spends long nights on the streets of Shibuya hunting down rogue wizards and potential magic users who are addicted to the street drug rubrum. Our other main character is Marin Kirizumi, an angsty magic-user who sets out to Shibuya with the incredibly vague and anime-as-hell goal of becoming the strongest magic user ever.
Reynatis tells a really dense story, but I wouldn’t say the overarching beats or twists are all that great. The opening chapters of the game are especially stiff – you’re introduced to two additional party members for each protagonist, and while the police co-workers who join Nishijima are well introduced, the quirky mage girls that end up tagging along with Kirizumi really don’t have any meaningful or well-done reason for doing so.
Despite the flawed story structure, I loved the smaller character moments throughout the game. In an angsty city and a story full of sacrifice and suffering, our characters find a lot of time to exchange silly banter with each other and bond really naturally. You even get to see text message exchanges between them all on your phone, although those texts are annoyingly organised in a giant list of individual conversations and not like actual per-contact text chains.
Combat in Reynatis almost has the opposite problem – at first, the small moments suffer, and each battle encounter felt like a bit of a chore. The game has a unique system where each of your three party members can change between two modes at any time – Suppressed state and Liberated state.
You’ll need to be in Liberated state in order to attack your enemies with basic attacks or special attacks, but being in those mode slowly drains your MP (and special attacks drain it even faster). When you’re in Suppressed state, you can’t attack at all but time will stop as enemy projectiles are about to hit you, letting you dodge them as much as you want. When a melee attack connects, you’re shown a circle rune on the screen. Hold the dodge button down enough to fill that circle, and you’ll dodge the attack plus recover a massive amount of MP.
It’s an incredibly weird system at first – you’ve got to essentially let the attacks hit you to trigger the dodge, which goes against muscle memory from every other game with a parry system. You’ve got some minor options to mix up your combat abilities, too – as you explore Shibuya and complete side quests, you’ll find graffiti across the city that you can acquire and convert into usable combat abilities.
You can tell they really wanted to emulate the feeling of ability pins from The World Ends With You with the way these graffiti pieces are rendered and the collectible nature of them. Since every character can equip any ability art, you’ve got the opportunity to mix and match in a surprisingly open-ended way that helped massage the combat loop into a more satisfying place once I got way deeper into the game.
The most impressive part of Reynatis to me is the attention to detail in recreating Shibuya as your main explorable environment. Streets are full of iconic, real-life shops and landmarks from the vibrant Japanese city ward, and it’s the kind of game world I could pause and take a stroll through in-between missions just to soak in all the atmosphere. It’s just a shame that same attention to detail isn’t present for other environments in the game.
When story missions or challenges take you into the fog-gated world of Another, you’re basically tossed into copy-pasted forest and desert dungeons that lack any sense of style or substance. Even the music in these regions is a bit of a snore, which is heartbreaking when you consider how important music is to the games that seemed to so heavily inspire Reynatis.
