Game Freak Addresses Your Valid Concern About How Its Non-Pokémon RPG Will Run

Game Freak showed a pretty lengthy look at its new action-RPG Beast of Reincarnation during today’s Xbox Developer Direct. The studio is primarily known for its work on Pokémon, though. Given that recent entries like Scarlet and Violet were notorious for being pretty ugly and running very poorly on the original Switch, you might be wondering how Beast of Reincarnation looks as good as it does. Will it end up having similar technical troubles? Well, we won’t know for sure until the game launches in the summer, but Game Freak was recently asked this exact question.

Speaking with game director Kota Furushima, IGN asked about Beast of Reincarnation’s ambitions after games like Scarlet and Violet and Pokémon Legends: Arceus struggled with performance despite not chasing nearly the same level of same fidelity or scope. Furushima’s answer might sound encouraging for Beast of Reincarnation, but it also feels like Pokémon is catching strays.

IGN: Game Freak has received some criticism in the past few years for the performance and look of some of its 3D open world games. Beast of Reincarnation looks to be fairly ambitious. What would you say to those who are concerned that it might struggle in the same ways?

Furushima: I think when it comes to Beast of Reincarnation, and I guess we would regard it as the scale and the ambition of the title, when we approach game design, we’re not looking to make, say, a title of a certain level of quality. We’re looking to deliver a very specific game experience, and visual fidelity and graphics, this is something that supports that game experience, everything that goes into that. That includes things like bug fixing, optimization. Everything is there to serve the gameplay and the experience. Our focus is on that gameplay experience. Part of that, of course, is making sure that it performs really well, but our attention is more on getting the experience over to you and making sure that our vision can get to your hands and your hearts.

The unspoken implication here is that Pokémon games are not the type of “specific game experience” that requires the aforementioned bug fixes and optimization. It feels like an offshoot of the argument people who run defense for Pokémon games make by saying “people don’t play these games for the graphics,” as if that means they shouldn’t still aspire to not look like GameCube games. 

Elsewhere in the interview, IGN asks about the size of the team working on Beast of Reincarnation since Game Freak is a relatively small developer that is also working on Pokémon projects year-round. Furushima says the multi-studio headcount is “quite large,” but the actual internal Game Freak team working on Beast of Reincarnation is “relatively small” and mostly leading the project through direction and management.

“We managed to seek out a lot of partner companies to work with us, companies, studios that are able to realize the vision of this game in the way that we wanted to make it, so we’re lucky to have a lot of people working on it externally as well,” Furushima says.

It sounds like Beast of Reincarnation might not suffer the same technical troubles as Game Freak’s Pokémon games since it’s not being developed primarily internally like Legends: Z-A and the upcoming Gen X games. Will any of Beast of Reincarnation’s fidelity end up rubbing off on Pokémon? Who knows. Beast of Reincarnation is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S this summer.