Is the game bad? No. Are there a lot of questionable decisions? Yes. I'd wait for a discount.

The game recommends Cinematic Mode (cutscenes locked to 24 fps; turn it off. It's super janky) and some options turned on by default are pretty bad. Depth of Field causes a lot of artifacts when trying to place things into focus and is better off disabled. There's plenty of other tweaking to preference you may end up doing in the settings.

The biggest offender at the moment is the camera. Weirdly closed in can't really be changed. Does not work well for giant fights. I'm sure nexus mods have many tweaks and fixes available now for people who are badly bothered by it.

Other than that the combat starts off basic but your later skills provide a lot of additional movesets and it does get fun. I do appreciate that skills are tied to your stats just because it kind of forces people to not braindead dump into strength and instead choose a build to preference.

Music is really good as well. Art direction is fantastic. Definitely Nier automata vibes. There's a lot of patches that will assuredly come in and fix some issues, worst case nexus mod will fix said issues if just much earlier than gamefreak will. Just wait for a discount.

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Edit: It seems the game is being brigaded with a lot of nonsense and very little is actually being talked about the game so I'd like to add some information that I figure may be helpful.

- It's not a souls game, it does have parrying mechanics but with later skills the parrying almost becomes a suggestion. It's best to treat it like a jrpg. There are a lot of story heavy moments and you'll probably get called back to base often to progress rapport with your team mates often but if you're into that you're going to like this game.

- The world is apocalyptic. One of the complaints I see often is the game isn't alive and full of npcs to the level of grand theft auto. If you aren't of mind to explore a world that keeps getting its civilization wiped out by an angry poodle of some sort every 100 years then you're going to have a bad time.

- I personally think the story has been very engaging. Yes, the character is dull. That's a part of the story. There is growth in that regard. I love it. There's so much mystery thrown out at you and you look up and you'll have even more questions. It's got me hooked.

- The combat is dull and stiff if you choose to make it dull and stiff. That is the default, you keep that kind of combo if you're going to be a level 1 purist. Build into vitality and start learning to throw that hair back and forth and get those aerial combos in and you're going to have a lot of fun. Or build into strength and raise that gauge for chain combos. Or just focus on your gun. You have options and none of them are bad, unless you want to be a level 1 purist like all these negative reviews I guess.

On an additional note I find parrying to be very responsive and on point. I love the satisfaction of getting that wild 5 hit combo down in rhythm from some of the later deranged mobs. Dodging Red * skills is extremely forgiving and much easier to do than working with the parry system. I think they got the combat locked down very well.

- There seems to be consistent negative reviews that the game doesn't look hyperrealistic as there should be a required expectation that they cannot discern reality from between the game and their mom's bedroom. From my personal experience with my attached specs I run it highest 60fps perfectly fine with graphics similar to ff7 remake/rebirth/clair obscur. I did have to tweak settings including turning depth of field off because it didn't just blur out of focus objects, it made in focus objects janky and pixelated. It just doesn't work.

The camera is an issue they need to fix, that's as far as negativity goes for graphics. Gameplay I find is still fine even with the semi-booty locked camera.

Let me be clear: If you're expecting elden ring 2 or gta 6 then you're going to have a bad time. If you're expecting a lightweight sekiro/nier automata that you have to screw around in settings a bit with then you're going to love this game. Story's great and it's been an atmospheric trip so far. It's a shame it's stuck in the 50% range at the time of this review because I honestly believe this game is not getting fair representation but I suppose it was bound to happen.

I gave this game an honest shot and was actually having a pretty fun time during the first 10 hours, but there are so many issues with this game that all combined makes it impossible to recommend.

- Lack of game settings. The game defaults to FSR1, there is no FSR 4.1 (or even 3.1), the DLSS is a severely outdated 3.7, there is no DLAA/Native resolution option for the upscaling, there is no Frame Gen option, there is no option for film grain or volumetric fog which is forced upon you unless you create your own Engine.ini file, there is no FOV slider and the deafult FOV is arguably way too narrow, there are no subtitle size options, no dynamic HUD option, no HUD scale option, no full screen option, no other Ray Tracing options other than on/off, no option to disable the camera speed acceleration (the camera starts moving faster the longer you hold down your analog stick on your controller), no color/saturation options to fix the washed out colors.

- Visually the game looks rough, and the textures feel like something you'd find in an old Nintendo game. Really low resolution textures, jagged edges, huge "shadow boxes", and the blacks look grey. Colors look really washed out, also the same as you'd find in an old Nintendo game. It just looks sorta blurry, flat, grey and washed out.

- Performance isn't great, despite the rough visuals. FPS dips and stutters will occur throughout the entire game.

- Some actions share button inputs with no option to separate them. You jump and interact with things using the same button, which means you will jump at times when you want to interact with something and you will interact with something when you want to jump. Eventually this gets incredibly frustrating.

- There's like 3-4 songs in the entire OST. The songs are quite nice but you get really tired of hearing them over and over again as you play for 20+ hours.

- For the dialogues and story the pacing is so incredibly bad. Each character speak slowly, then there is a pause for anywhere between 2-10 seconds before the next character speaks. Rinse and repeat for hours upon hours of dialogue that moves the story forward in a snail's pace. The same things will be said over and over again, and there is no option to skip most of these cutscenes. Your only option is to advance the dialogue by pressing X on your controller, but that doesn't always work either because before the next line of dialogue is played it still has to wait for the duration of that first line to finish and you can only skip the current line of dialogue being played which means you can't "spam skip" through a lengthy dialogue with no substance.

- Story sadly goes from interesting to disappointing as you close in on the ending. Towards the end of it the game dumps all essential lore on you within 10 minutes through audio recordings made by one of the characters. It's such an incredibly lazy and boring way to present the story. Overall the presentation of the story is just terrible, with multiple flashbacks to different times in the past. The writing is also very odd, but maybe it's lost in translation a bit since I played with English voice acting instead of the Japanese one.

- There are no side quests or side characters you will stumble upon and help. There is no incentive to explore the open world as the only rewards you will get are currency or upgrade materials. You won't stumble upon something interesting - EVER.

- Character models are really stiff. Some animations such as Emma's jogging or crouch walking animation look hilariously bad.

- The enemy variety is god awful. You will have seen 99% of enemies within the first 5 hours of the game, and then these enemies will basically be the only enemies you fight for the rest of the game.

- The boss variety is honestly insulting. The very first boss you fight in chapter 1 will also be the main boss for a later chapter. The same will be true for the other chapter bosses too. You will fight the same boss atleast 2 times, with some being fought I think close to 10 times by the end of it. And this is MAIN STORY BOSSES, it's not optional content.

- Everytime Koo discovers something in the world he will bark, and then Emma will comment on it. The same interaction will happen hundreds of times throughout the game with zero variation.

- In combat, everytime you want to use a Koo skill Emma will say "Koo" the exact same way each and every time. This becomes annoying incredibly fast, and there is no way to disable this.

- In combat, as soon as you max out on the resource used by Koo your trusty "spirit companion" Violet will say "Remember to use Koo's skills too", without fail. She ALWAYS does this throughout the entire game. It doesn't matter if you are in the middle of an enemies attack string where you actually don't have time to use Koo's skills without it interrupting your parry, she will still remind you to use Koo's skills. You can't disable this. She also backseats you if you take too much damage, telling you to be careful and learning the enemy moves. It ends up feeling like she's mocking you as she tells you this for the 20th time against the same type of enemy you have fought since chapter 1.

- If you have the pre-order bonus that changes Koo's fur you will be sad to learn this doesn't affect cutscenes. Koo and Emma will always use the "default skin" in all cutscenes.

- There are different armours you can find in the world, but none of them change the look of Emma's outfit. You can't customize Emma's outfit in any way other than removing her hat, which again still reappears during all cutscenes.

- There are some trinkets/charms you can equip to Emma and Koo that gives them slight buffs, but after the first 5-10 hours you stop caring about them as they don't change or evolve past that point.

- The only thing that changes between different swords is the look of the weapon and what temporary buff you gain from it for when you successfully parry an enemy attack. Base damage remains almost entirely the same between all swords.

- Ranged weapons include a bow and a crossbow, but their damage is so low they end up being close to useless in combat. By the end of the game you end up forgetting they even exist.

- There are some bugs that can happen where your character gets teleported X amount of distance away from the enemy. It makes no sense and looks really janky, and can just reset the combat entirely if you get teleported far enough.

Despite this really lengthy list I am convinced I missed a lot of negatives. Asking 55€ for this game is insulting. I honestly would hesitate to recommend this game even if it was free to play.

I have no history with these devs and never played their Pokemon games, but it's clear to me they're not competent enough to pull off a game like Beast of Reincarnation in a satisfactory way. Any future projects from GAME FREAK I will likely avoid.

Don't waste your time and money playing this, unless you can get it for free and literally have nothing else to play.

Man... So close yet so far.
This review is posted @ 20 hours for a full playthrough on Hard (hardest default difficulty before NG+)
This game just doesn't meet any of the expectations I'd have for virtually any aspect.

Combat - 6/10
Combat reminds me a lot of Sekiro, except now there's the added "burden" of commanding your ally CONSTANTLY. Commanding Koo puts you in a slow-mo where the enemies are still attacking you. It also just breaks the flow and feel of the fight to me.
One of the skills you unlock later, Laido, creates a very long end lag to your own character's attacks. This ends up delaying movement and healing a lot, and the skill itself was useless to me. While it's optional to take upfront, one of the achievements is to unlock and upgrade everything.
The camera is fine for the most part except on some of the larger bosses where your camera angle is behind the boss making all their attacks obscured.
Ranged weaponry is very underwhelming. You have a limited number of arrows / bolts to use in a fight. Probably due to being on hard mode, but I'd be emptying out my entire stock of arrows killing a single enemy. With upgrades later on they actually start to pickup again later, but that mid-game section feels poor in terms of ranged weapons.
Combos just don't even seem feasible to pull off. Fully investing into skill speed, applying root or shock on a boss (CC), and they still swing back and break my combo before it finishes. As others mention, you end up defaulting to the very short combos to even have a chance of getting the finisher off.

Enemies - 2/10
The same 15 or so enemies get reused over, and over, and over for the entire game. The same enemies you see in Chapter 1 are still reused all the way until the end in the overworld with barely anything being added. Elite enemies are just tankier versions of the same enemies.

Bosses - 1/10
Boss design feels underwhelming at best. Bosses are mostly all 2 phase and the second phase is just the first phase with an extra move or two added in. But that's not all. Almost every boss in the game you have to fight twice, meaning that you actually have to fully beat them 4 times. Twice in a row in the first fight, and twice in a row in the second fight. This just isn't satisfying. Not to mention that you have the SAME cutscenes for end of phase 1 and end of fight. One of the bosses you have to fight and clear on THREE separate occasions which I found insane. And the movesets are identical across all 3 fights. This might just be an issue with playing on hard mode, but the bosses just feel like sponges and it becomes a slog. Their movesets are also quite limited so there isn't even too much you need to learn. Cleared nearly every boss on the 1st to 3rd try on Hard. There just wasn't that much going on.

Map Design - 5/10
I'll lump in movement and traversal in this. The first set of maps are huge and very empty. One note is that you can jump very high, and the devs did make some use of verticality in this. However the emptiness feels even worse with this in mind as you're not just scouring large, empty horizontal maps, you're scouring tall vertical structures as well with the same results. A lot of the rewards are just generic loot. Add on the fact that it's not a 1 click button to claim loot. You click to open the box, then have to claim the loot from the box, adding an extra delay. One thing I did quite like was the Keeper Golem mechanic that allows you to choose 1 key point of interest to reveal on your map. Later on in the story the maps becomes corridors.

Music / OST - 5/10
I liked what I heard, but there wasn't much to hear. The same tracks are played over and over again for the most part. Maybe 8-10 hours of the 20 hour playthrough was done in the overworld with the same track playing.

Story - 3/10
Pacing is atrocious. I was relatively thorough and there was very little information for the player up until the last 20% of the game where all the story gets dumped on you at once.
Overall felt very similar to Nier Automata. So I can't even really say it's original.
Cutscenes were terribly stiff for story. Very long delays / pauses between characters speaking. They're basically all brick walls that's how little animation there was.
The majority of the early game was just focused on teaching Emma what "love" means - about 8-9 chapters worth, and then the entire story is told in the span of 3 chapters.

Overall rating - 4/10
Genuinely feels unfinished, especially at a $80 CAD price point.
There's a stark difference between the size of the maps between the first half and second half of the game. Lack of music, enemy, and boss diversity. Imagine this, you re-fight the first boss again before you're even given any substantial information on the story. So pacing just felt off.