Game Freak Brings Its Pokémon Partnership Lessons to Beast of Reincarnation
Director Kota Furushima says Emma and Koo's inability to speak is central to building their bond through play.
Game Freak is drawing on its long experience with Pokémon to build the relationship between Emma and Koo in Beast of Reincarnation. The upcoming action RPG takes a very different visual direction from the studio’s monster-catching series, but director Kota Furushima says its central human-and-beast partnership comes from ideas the team has developed over many years.
Emma and Koo cannot speak to one another, and that silence is a deliberate part of the game’s design. In an interview with DenFamiNicoGamer, Furushima explained that giving the characters a shared language would have changed the feeling the team wanted players to experience.
“The truth is that it’s incredibly important that there’s no talking,” Furushima said. “When you don’t speak, you gain something else. We wanted the game to give you a certain feeling, and that wouldn’t happen if talking had benefits over keeping quiet.”
Without dialogue spelling out every part of their relationship, players have more room to interpret Emma and Koo’s actions. Furushima said that silence allows the player’s imagination to take over, with the bond growing as the pair spends more time together.
That approach also separates Beast of Reincarnation from Game Freak’s more familiar projects. The studio’s past games, including Tembo the Badass Elephant, Drill Dozer, and HarmoKnight, generally used a cartoon-inspired visual style. Its new action RPG has a more realistic presentation, yet it still carries forward the idea that a partnership can develop through interaction rather than exposition.
“Therefore, in order to build this kind of relationship, we chose to do so through gameplay,” Furushima said. “Our company has really thought about how you can build relationships and create that feeling of becoming partners through gameplay. I think we’ve put everything we’ve been able to cultivate in that regard into this game.”
The result is a relationship that players will need to understand through movement, combat, and the pair’s shared journey. Game Freak has not simply transferred Pokémon’s formula into a darker-looking world. Instead, it has carried one of the studio’s core ideas into a new kind of adventure.
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Beast of Reincarnation
Developed by Game Freak
