Reynatis

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I recently got back from my first trip to Tokyo, and boy, are my arms tired. Wait, that’s not how that joke goes, is it? Well, regardless, it was a fantastic experience that I’d recommend to anyone. That’s a sharp contrast from an experience I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, which is playing Nastume Atari and FuRyu’s new action-RPG Reynatis, an urban fantasy adventure that tries its best to draw you into a magical cityscape but instead just leaves you mashing buttons and chugging BOSS coffee.

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Shibuya just ain’t what it used to be. Nearly two decades after the rise of magic, people capable of wielding arcane abilities – wizards – are persona non grata around the city. The Magical Enforcement Administration, or MEA, keeps magic under control with an iron fist. We follow a pair of protagonists as they navigate the strange landscape of a magic-infused Shibuya: Sari, an MEA officer, hopes to keep the peace and prove herself to her superiors, while the rogue wizard Marin is on a magical quest for power.

That setup sounds pretty cool, right? Cool your jets, since Reynatis doesn’t have the time or energy that it needs to really make it shine. It’s clear that Marin was intended to be the main character, as his side of the story gets significantly more runtime than Sari’s. This would be fine if it didn’t lead to Sari acting like a complete psychopath. She’s played up to be a good cop who wants to do things by the book, yet within a couple hours we find her accosting Marin on the street and starting crap with him for literally no reason, openly admitting that she’s breaking the law by doing so. Rather than scathing social commentary, it feels like we missed a few scenes somewhere.

Hip urban street wizards engaging in covert magic wars might sound like a great setup for some exciting combat, but…well, uh, this ain’t it, chief. Reynatis is an action-RPG in the Kingdom Hearts vein, particularly leaning toward the later iterations of that legendary series in the sense that there’s a lot of button-mashing and not so much strategy involved in victory. This can work if you’re willing to turn your brain off and look at the pretty pictures, but Reynatis doesn’t have the graphical chops to pull it off. Just check out those screenshots, imagine we’ve toned them down a console generation or three, and you’ve got the idea.

You’ll fight with up to three characters in a party, with each having their own fighting style and variety of magic, and you’re able to switch between them on a fairly rapid cooldown. You can beat baddies up with a single normal attack chain per character or use “Wizart” abilities, which only sound like magical flatulence and are in fact special moves you obtain throughout the game. Both of these consume MP, and you’re able to suppress your character’s magic power to regenerate your juice at a trickle. It’s a nod to Reynatis’ core concept of wizards having to hide their powers in public for fear of being persecuted.

The real plan, though, is to slurp up a ton of MP at once by suppressing your magic and then precisely dodging enemy attacks. This almost certainly doesn’t work the way you’re thinking it might, as precision dodges in Reynatis actually amount to suppressing, then deliberately allowing yourself to be hit. While suppressed, this causes an automatic bullet time slowdown, and at any point during this you can just hold the ol’ dodge button to take no damage and regain MP.

There’s not a whole lot of actual precision involved, which turns Reynatis’ combat into a dance of spamming attacks to run out of MP, auto-dodging to get it all back, and repeating until you win. It’s far, far too easy to be engaging, and unfortunately you do a lot of fighting in this game. Little nods to character customization and growth don’t do much to make this feel any better since the basics don’t change throughout the game.

Okay, so the combat’s a wash. What about when you aren’t fighting? Well, there’s exploration and sidequests, such as they are. NPCs around the world offer simple delivery, fetch or kill quests for meager rewards if you’d like to prolong your experience, but don’t expect much more worldbuilding or anything. Reynatis’ bizarrely short runtime, around 20 hours or so, means you might as well do them and get your money’s worth. Let’s not even talk about the bizarre Stress system that’s meant to represent characters’ mental health freakouts over the situation for wizards in Shibuya but in fact mostly serves as a way to push tasty Suntory beverages and punish players for talking to too many NPCs.

The World Ends with You, a classic JRPG with a similar setup to Reynatis, handled basically every aspect of this concept way, way better. The characters were more interesting, it had an urban style that permeated the entire experience and, well, the combat didn’t suck. It also looked a lot better. Reynatis’ developers clearly think it was a solid game, as there’s a minor collaboration between the two in Reynatis. That just makes the latter seem worse in comparison, as it doesn’t really settle on an aesthetic and ends up feeling like an early PS3 tech demo most of the time. At least it runs pretty well.

The promotional art for Reynatis might lead potential players into thinking they’re getting something special, but unfortunately FuRyu’s urban fantasy action-RPG just can’t deliver. This is a classic example of a game that’s too confused about what it wants to do to successfully do anything. A little more time and budget probably would have gone a long way here, but as it stands, Reynatis is hard to recommend. Maybe just save up to visit Shibuya for real instead.