Well, here we are again. It’s time for another review of a FuRyu game. In general, I’m a pretty big fan of the things they do. They create what I think of as AA experiences. They’re not going to touch the level of polish that the major studios are putting out, but they know what they’re setting out to do and they typically pull it off. Frequently, that means telling a compelling story. Their newest release is Reynatis, and it’s got quite a pedigree behind it. We’ve got a scenario written by Kazushige Nojima, the writer of Final Fantasy VII. We’ve got a soundtrack by Yoko Shimomura, one of the most prolific and beloved JRPG composers of all time. We’ve got artwork by Yusuke Naora, an art director for the Final Fantasy series. And it’s being helmed by relatively new director Takumi Isobe, whose previous credit is Trinity Trigger. So we have some longtime industry vets teaming up with a new up-and-coming director. I think that’s great! Like it or not, our favorite game designers and directors aren’t going to be making games forever, so we need to let the next generation step up and start taking charge.
Reynatis is a story of wizards in modern-day Tokyo. In this world, some people have magic from birth, while others gain their powers through a near-death experience in which they see a spooky red sea and a boatman. Those who are born with it are known as Legacies, while those who are Maybelline are known as “replicas.” Does that joke work anymore? Is that only effective on my generation? I mean, it’s not a great joke, it’s barely a joke at all, but still. I don’t think commercials exist in the same form they did when I was growing up? Trust me, a “maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline” joke would have KILLED twenty years ago.
Anyway, society at large isn’t super supportive of wizardkind. It’s not technically illegal to be a wizard in this world – after all, no one can help it if they are. No, it’s just illegal to use magic in public or for any purpose the government deems to be inappropriate. They’ve created a taskforce called the M.E.A., the Magic Enforcement Administration, that polices wizards to keep them in line. This group is pretty much exclusively made up of wizards themselves, by the way. As you can imagine, wizards don’t exactly love the way they’re treated and viewed in this world. In response to that, some powerful wizards created the Magic Guild of Japan, which is ostensibly an organization that looks out for wizards’ best interests. This puts them frequently at odds with the M.E.A., naturally. They live in a reality outside of Shibuya called Another, which you’ll find yourself visiting frequently, by the way, and serves as sort of the main “dungeon” of the game. Then you have Owl, a group of unaffiliated “stray” wizards, as they’re called, that operate outside of either system. Yes, it’s an urban fantasy JRPG, so there are a bunch of terms to learn. But if I can do it, you can do it, believe me.
We have two protagonists. First is Marin. He’s a college student, or he was, at least. He’s “on hiatus” now while he tries to “find himself,” which is teenager for “probably just doesn’t want to go to school.” He’s a replica who came into his powers due to an accident several years back, and it’s his goal to become the most powerful wizard in the world. That sounds like kind of a cheesy motivation, but there’s a reason for it. Our other protagonist is Sari. When she came into her powers, she opted to follow the path of order and joined the M.E.A. to take down the rubrum market – that’s a super powerful drug made with wizard blood that makes you feel REAL GOOD, but will eventually turn you into a monster. Roughly the first half of the game has us frequently switching between perspectives as we follow Marin’s and Sari’s stories until they eventually, inevitably, converge.
For me, the highlight of a FuRyu game is the story, so I don’t want to say too much more beyond the setup. The story being told here is one full of nuanced characters and so many shades of gray. More than 50, that’s for sure. You have an oppressive society with an oppressed people that are fighting for their rights, sometimes fighting in ways that well-intentioned members of the broader society deem inappropriate. There are bad people in fundamentally good groups, and good people in fundamentally bad groups. The government’s job is to stamp out oppression, but through its bureaucracy it props it up instead. It’s kind of heavy stuff, guys.
The presentation of the story is not quite what I want it to be, particularly in that this is a subtitle-only game, no English voicework. For me, I can’t connect with a character as strongly when they’re speaking a different language. I know a lot of people say they prefer subs because “the Japanese is better than the English,” which doesn’t make sense to me unless the person saying that is fluent in Japanese, but whatever. Like what you like. For me, it’s a barrier to a deeper connection. But it’s a testament to the storytelling that it was not a full-on deterrent to enjoying the story. Graphically, I should mention, it’s also not great. Models lack detail, there isn’t much in the way of dynamic lighting. Shibuya itself does look pretty cool, though, and it was great to get to run around and see all the stores lit up at night. So, presentation is lacking overall, though not in a way that ruined anything for me.
The characters are all entertaining in their own right, though Marin spends most of the game as a bit of a downer. He’s the sort of “I want to be the very best like no one ever was” guy who’s single-minded to a fault and not very sociable. He does have some genuine moments with his teammates though, and his general prickly attitude made those moments more impactful. The rest of your party are fairly diverse both in their personalities and their attack styles. Which brings us to the gameplay.
Each character has two states: “Suppressed,” and “Liberated.” When a character is Suppressed, they can’t attack, they can only dodge. When Liberated, they’re fully able to unload on enemies, but only until their magic power runs out, at which point they will automatically return to their Suppressed state. In my initial playthrough of the demo of Reynatis, this was a big bummer to me. I didn’t get what they were going for, and it just seemed like a weird and arbitrary barrier to me enjoying the combat. But now that I get it, I can actually say that I really, genuinely enjoyed it from start to finish.
To fully enjoy the combat in Reynatis, you need to fundamentally alter some key ideas you might have about action RPGs. From the very beginning, you’re told to “Trust the Magic.” This was my initial hurdle to overcome, and it took a bit of practice. See, when you’re Suppressed, your ability to dodge is greatly enhanced. When an enemy fires a projectile at you from a distance, you’ll be prompted to press the dodge button, which results in you doing a flashy mid-air evasive maneuver. When you’re close to an enemy and they attack you while you’re Suppressed, something different happens, and this is where you really have to trust the magic. Your instinct upon seeing an enemy wind up to attack is to dodge out of the way. In 99% of action RPGs, this is the right move. It’s the wrong move in Reynatis. You actually want to wait until it would otherwise be too late to dodge. Doing so will cause a ring to appear on screen. Hold down the dodge button until the ring fills up, and you will magically evade the attack and hit the enemy with a counter that’s capable of breaking shields and will also fill up your magic points. When your MP is full, you can initiate an attack which will switch you automatically to Liberated mode and slow down time so you can wail on your enemies a bit. You might think it would become a pain to switch back and forth between Suppressed and Liberated due to the state of your MP, that it would drag the battle pacing down. Generally, though, it really doesn’t. It’s actually pretty thrilling to pull off the dodges in suppressed mode – and anyway, if you’d rather not go through the trouble, you can always switch to another active character and let your previous character recharge over time.
Outside of the unique “trust the magic” dodging system, combat is fairly standard, but it’s also pretty flashy. You can supplement your standard attack combos with different special moves. Each character starts with a couple, and you can unlock more via Wizart as you go – more on Wizart in a second – but you can only have two active at any time. These are anything from super powerful melee attacks to magic spells that summon a horde of swarming cats. Customizing your team with the right loadout is simple enough that I never felt overwhelmed by it (which does happen in some games if I’m honest).
You gain experience and level up like in any JRPG, and you can further power up and learn new moves via Wizart. Wizart is… exactly what it sounds like. It’s art made by Wizards. You’ll find a ton of Wizart all around Shibuya in the form of graffiti, and staring longingly into it will grant you a new move, extra experience, or some other equipable stat boost. When you begin, you’ll only have one slot available for stat boosting Wizart, but around the midway point of the game you’ll unlock a magic shop where some cats can upgrade you to carry more. I don’t mean “cats” like in the 70s sense, like groovy cats. I mean they’re literal cats. Just wanted to be clear.
Aside from the main story path, there are a ton of sidequests, usually at least a handful of new ones every chapter. These, unfortunately, aren’t super engaging; they more or less boil down to “Go to this place, beat this enemy” or “Go to this place, find this glowing thing.” Completing side quests is still pretty important, though, as doing so decreases Shibuya’s “malice.” When you begin the game, their Malice is at 100%. As you complete quests, this begins to decrease, which has the benefit of giving you access to Wizart that you previously couldn’t see. I’m not sure why making the populace less angry makes the graffiti more visible, but oh well. So the side quests aren’t great, but they’re simple enough that you can knock them out at the start of each chapter in just a few minutes so that you can reap the benefits.
I have a lot of good things to say about this game. I haven’t even touched on the music, which, again, is by Yoko Shimomura and is amazing. But there are issues with Reynatis, issues that are far from dealbreakers for me, but I want you to hear about them regardless. With Reynatis, as with a lot of FuRyu titles, there are a ton of really interesting gameplay systems at play. The issue is, they don’t all stick the landing. They’re ideas that definitely sound good on paper, and you can maybe imagine how they might have worked in the finished product, but they fall short. Let me give you an example. The trending system. So when you’re wandering around Shibuya, if you happen to Liberate yourself and get into a fight with some bad guys, the people around you will notice and start recording you with their cell phones. As this goes on, you’ll start to trend on the special app that’s been created to monitor bad wizarding behavior. The more time that passes, the higher you begin to trend, until eventually the M.E.A. is called out to deal with you. I’ll be honest, I never once survived an encounter with the M.E.A. when this happened. They’re tough. So you might be thinking, hey, that’s like Grand Theft Auto’s wanted system. Which it is. However, there’s a glaring flaw with it – if you leave the area you’re in, your trending level resets to zero. And you can then return immediately to the place you were without consequence. Even more than that, you can fast travel at any point in Shibuya. A press of a button and you’re in another area, then another press and you’re back, and again, your trending level is gone. So what’s the point of the system? Chances are, this had a different sort of implementation, one that was maybe more punishing and difficult to deal with. Maybe it didn’t playtest well, and maybe it was too difficult to remove altogether without hurting other aspects of the game. So this workaround was inserted. And truthfully, I can’t IMAGINE how irritated I would be if I couldn’t just immediately fast travel and get rid of my trending level. I think it would have hurt the experience.
But do you see what I mean? It’s not a bad idea, but it’s not implemented well at all. There are a handful of small things like this – issues that, to me, are not ruining the experience, but that I can’t really ignore. Like the irritating “find the wanted posters” quests that pop up around the halfway point of the game, or the fact that you’ll constantly have to retrace your steps through Another, or that Another in and of itself is a pretty boring dungeon. This game, and a lot of FuRyu games in general, are like a beautiful picture that you take a jigsaw to. You cut it up, you make a puzzle out of it. That’s great! But then you take a saw and hack off some of the connectors and throw them away. You can lay all the pieces out, and you can still SEE the beautiful picture, but it just doesn’t click together in that satisfying way you really want it to. The fantastic story and the fun combat carried me through it quite easily, but I know some people are going to be put off by the small things, and that bums me out.
Something that I imagine will be difficult for a lot of people is separating what you typically associate with a game that looks like this from what Reynatis actually is. I’ve played games that look like this, that didn’t have a big budget behind them and had to sacrifice fidelity. They tend to have inscrutable stories and bad music and monotonous gameplay. Reynatis is not that. It’s a complex story about societal breakdown and the ways in which our basic systems can fail innocent people. One character says, later in the game, “The law doesn’t protect us. I see no reason why we should follow it.” If you’ve been at least somewhat aware of the cultural shifts happening in the Western world over the last several years, this line will probably resonate with you in at least SOME way, regardless of where you stand on the various issues it touches on. I don’t know if similar shifts are happening in the East, because I spend most of my time online looking at video games that I think are cool. But maybe it is, in which case, this story is even more pertinent.
A lot of the discourse around this game feels exaggerated to me. There seems to be this idea that every game has a certain benchmark that it has to achieve, whether that be in graphics, in story, in gameplay, whatever. But as the medium evolves, we’re being blessed with a huge variety of different games, and different TYPES of games. If Square Enix is Disney, putting out Marvel movies with a ton of special effects that make box office bank, then FuRyu is like an off-Broadway performance of an original dramatic play. Sure, you can say that both are experiences that are meant to be enjoyed in a similar fashion, but you would never compare the two directly. Personally, I’m a fan of both big budget movies and smaller-scale theater. I don’t judge the community theater performance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I saw because the monster effects weren’t the greatest. That’s not what they’re trying to do. Even in Hollywood, sometimes stars or directors will step away from big budget films for a while to do stage work, which is kind of what Reynatis feels like to me.
If we’re overly critical of the small-scale experiences, the low-budget titles that are setting out to give us a unique game outside the mainstream, then we run the risk of homogenizing the medium. Pretty soon, every video game that’s not an indie will be a AAA experience. Personally, I don’t want that. So let me sum it up like this: If you favor story, music, and those sorts of aesthetics over graphics, if you’re tolerant of a few wayward gameplay systems that don’t work the best but don’t really matter to the experience, then you should at least give Reynatis a try. FuRyu is an antidote to AAA fatigue, and if your tastes are similar to mine, then they deserve your support.