The Final Fantasy Versus XIII spiritual successor lacks any soul
The reveal of Reynatis had me hooked from day 1. With a script penned by Final Fantasy VII writer Kazushige Nojima, a soundtrack scored by Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts composer Yoko Shimomura, and a design that heavily referenced the long-abandoned Final Fantasy Versus XIII, I was fully behind this new project.
The staff and atmosphere were no coincidence – the developers explicitly stated that Versus XIII and The World Ends With You you were direct influences on the world they wanted to create. Indeed, this even received the blessing of the creator of both of those projects, as Tetsuya Nomura gave his blessing and endorsed an official, canonical crossover event between TWEWY in-game in Reynatis.
Cut to the present and I am, very regrettably, disappointed. The Final Fantasy Versus XIII spiritual successor lacks any soul.
All Cops Are Wizards, and Therein Lies the Rub
Reynatis is where “fantasy meets reality”, says developer FuRyu. The game is set in a modern day Shibuya, Tokyo, where some people have started to manifest magical powers, and are known as Wizards. People fear magic in this world, and Wizards are outlawed, so they must conceal their identities in public, lest people report a Wizard sighting as deviant behaviour on the city watch app. While some Wizards try to live free as members of the Guild, others join law enforcement as Shibuya’s anti-Wizard taskforce, the M.E.A., to hunt down and ‘rehabilitate’ stray Wizards on the street. The story echoes the plight of Marvel’s X-Men and the Brotherhood – both groups of the same stigmatised minority working from opposite ends of the law for the betterment of their own kind.
To explore each side, the game features dual protagonists in Marin, a young Wizard hoping to become more powerful so as to be ‘free’, and Sari, the cop. As well as their own personal struggles, we are introduced to the concept of Rubrum, or ‘Rub’, which is essentially a magic drug that can slowly turn people into addicts and, finally, monsters.
There is not much development of the main characters beyond these central premises. Each character is accompanied by several party members, each of whom have a tenuous link to their respective protagonist. Although there is dialogue between party members, it is fairly uninspiring, and largely occurs as optional text messages in an app accessed from your menu, buried in a confusing non-chronological list of messages. The protagonists only meet around halfway into the game, eventually working together for the remainder of the game.
While the story and setting are Reynatis’s strongest points, it leaves a lot to be desired.There is simply not enough of an exploration of the complex themes introduced here beyond the superficial implications you would assume from such a setting. I would even go so far as to say the issue of drug addiction is tackled rather poorly, as the only option to deal with people addicted to Rub is essentially to smite them before they turn into literal monsters, if they haven’t already. There is at least an attempt to cut off the supply of drugs from the city to stop others falling foul. I found myself fairly uninterested in any particular characters, with my main motivation to finish being the hope that something interesting happens in the wider world towards the end.
A Small Measure
Yoko Shimomura delivers a couple of typically brilliant pieces here. Think of the orchestra, classical piano and choir combo of Final Fantasy XV’s best moments, and you’ll be in the same headspace she was when she composed some of these themes. I say ‘a couple’ of pieces because there is very little music in this game – in fact, the digital soundtrack only has 6 tracks, and I can’t think of any pieces in-game that aren’t on the soundtrack. Half of those are fairly basic background music for wandering the city. I can’t help but feel a little shortchanged after being promised a Yoko Shimomura score.
Paints A Not-Very-Vivid Picture
Many have commented on the PS2-era visuals and, while I feel strongly that not every game needs to have AAA hyper-realistic visuals, Reynatis does feel a bit rough around the edges in places, with particularly lazy and generic lip-flap and nothing to interact with. Combat animations seem slick, smooth, and appropriately flashy, and overall character & art design is fairly good. It also seems like great care has gone in to recreating Shibuya quite faithfully.
The level design, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Exploring Shibuya is limited to picking up inconsequential amounts of money and jumping between 2-3 sidequests per chapter, all of which involve killing either a monster or drug addict. Your mission and exploration rewards are cash, which can be exchanged for health potions and the tiniest of temporary stat buffs in battle – but you can find plenty around the world. I have well over 99 health potions at any one time and have yet to purchase anything at all. As you complete more sidequests and rid the city of those pesky drug addicts, you will reduce the level of ‘Malice’ in the city and be able to access some new abilities by examining ‘Wizart’ – street art made to improve the skills of Wizards who examine it, so there is at least a crumb of incentive to explore the city and complete sidequests.
When you are not trekking from one street to the next for some dissatisfying sidequests, you may find yourself in the ‘Another’ dimension. The dimension is literally called ‘Another’, which consists of a corridor of forest paths with the occasional pocket on the map to fight the same four enemy designs until you reach the end of the path to fight one of the same four recurrent boss monsters (more on that later). The forest paths are planned, poorly-textured, flat, empty, and repetitive – and for some reason they also disable the function to look at the whole map in the menu, so you don’t have a sense of how much longer you’re stuck there. Anyone hoping to find a silver lining in the game’s visuals will be left wanting.
Fight Your Way to the Flop
The themes of “Suppression” and “Liberation” of magic users are woven into the combat in an initially interesting way, and it’s not too hard to see the outline of a coherent attempt to have the story impact the gameplay. In Suppression Mode, you cannot attack, and move more slowly, but you can evade attacks and absorb magic – with enough magic stored, you can enter Liberation Mode, where you remove your hood, unsheathe your weapon and go to town on the baddies. Entering Liberation Mode with a full magic gauge triggers Burst Mode, which freezes enemies for a short while, similar to ‘Witch Time’ in Bayonetta.
Your magic gauge will deplete over time, and runs out faster the more you use attacks, so you are forced to switch between offensive and defensive play, as well as tagging in your party member to keep up momentum. It’s an interesting and fairly unique mechanic at first, and with a little more time to cook, it may have been considered an evolution, or at least iteration, of Final Fantasy’s ATB system.
In theory, this all sounds very good, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing. Narratively there is not much point in ‘suppressing’ in the middle of a battle with a giant monster intent on killing you, so being forced into Suppression Mode can take momentum out of the fight. When you are actually fighting, you are limited to mashing the attack button, or using one of two equippable magic abilities at a time. You can increase the power and effect of these abilities in the character screens, and acquire new abilities as the story progresses, but my experience is that the abilities do just as much, if not less damage in the same period of time that mashing the attack button would achieve, with the additional frustration of simply depleting the magic gauge more quickly than standard attacks.
The camera and enemy targeting does often misbehave, especially in some of the narrow corridors, so be prepared to be mashing buttons and not even being rewarded with the flashy attack animations on many occasions because your character is off the bottom of the screen somewhere, or overshoots the enemy’s position and is attacking midair a few feet away from the enemy.
All of that combines to mean the combat loop is very button mashy with no real skill, depth, or variety, until you are forced into Suppression or another character again. If you run out of magic, you can stand still and be given a generous amount of time to trigger your evasion and magic absorption to restart the loop.
To stick salt in the wound, there is a distinct lack of enemy variety, and you’ll find yourself fighting the same handful of designs around every corner. All drug addicts and thugs and cops look the same as the next group, and while there are a few monsters with not-uninteresting designs, you’ll only see a small range. The particular sting in the tail is that some end-of-level bosses are extremely repetitive. I have already fought the Titan on at least 5 separate occasions as a boss, then again a few times in pairs as an apparently normal battle. Recurrent bosses are fine if there is a reason to keep fighting them again, but this was just unapologetically lazy and uninspired.
Summary
I’ve never been a great cook. Sometimes I follow a recipe to the letter, get the best quality ingredients, and slave away over the cooker, only to taste a plain dinner after all the effort. Just like my home-cooking, I am not quite sure what went wrong with Reynatis. Despite the quality ingredients and preparation, FuRyu have managed to produce something incredibly bland. Not bad – just bland. If there were ever to be a sequel, I’d be willing to give it another chance, but I’d probably prefer whet my appetite elsewhere. The reality of this fantasy is that it is thoroughly disappointing.
Written By: David Walker
Favourite Game – Final Fantasy X || Favourite Film – Batman & Robin || Book – The Thursday Murder Club
About: I’m a gay man in his thirties with an undying love for Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, so you’ll *definitely* want to check out what I have to say in between me gushing over my two cats, dog, and Lady Gaga.
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