Reynatis is a new JRPG developed by FURYU, the developer behind Trinity Trigger and The Caligula Effect: Overdose. Despite a compelling premise and worldbuilding courtesy of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts writer Kazushige Nojima and an excellent soundtrack composed by Kingdom Hearts composer Yoko Shimomura, Reynatis’ repetitive gameplay and backtracking, as well as multiple frustrating gameplay elements, render the game a bit of a slog for anyone but the most diehard of JRPG fans.

Reynatis takes place in an alternate Shibuya, Japan, wherein magic-users called Wizards are an oppressed minority. Forced to suppress their abilities, Wizards are persecuted by the Magical Enforcement Administration, or MEA, as well as targeted by a mysterious organisation called the Guild which distributes a highly addictive magic-enhancing drug called Rubrum, which can cause magic-users to transform into dangerous monsters. The story follows Marin, a loner obsessed with becoming the strongest Wizard, and Sari, a member of the MEA who tries to use her magic to keep the peace.

It’s an interesting enough premise with enough twists and turns, despite Marin not being the deepest lead character. This is especially noticeable as the scope goes beyond Shibuya when Marin, Sari and their growing party start to explore alternate dimensions called Another via magical gateways known as Fog. The game is separated into chapters, however, their lengths are very variable, with early chapters sometimes lasting only a few minutes and comprising of very little gameplay. There is also no small amount of padding, with many of the early chapters dedicated towards Marin and company venturing into the Fog, fighting a boss, having a short conversation, and then going back without really progressing the plot. Things don’t really pick up until several hours in, once Marin and Sari’s storylines start to properly converge. There is also no English dub, so unless you speak Japanese, you’ll have to make do with subtitles.

Gameplay-wise, it’s sort of a combination of The World Ends With You‘s exploration of Shibuya and Kingdom Hearts-style hack-and-slash combat. Reynatis isn’t like Harry Potter; Wizards in this setting fight not with wands but with magical swords, hammers and guns, leading to flashy spectacles. At the press of a shoulder button, the player can switch between Suppressed and Liberated mode. In Suppressed mode, you have your hood up and cannot attack, however, you passively regain magic points and can dodge more easily, as well as travel in the city without attracting unwanted attention. In Liberated mode, you unleash all of your magical powers and see hidden items in the city that would otherwise be invisible to you, however, citizens who can see you will identify you on sight as a Wizard and alert the MEA to your whereabouts.

The switching between Suppressed and Liberated modes is a concept that works well with the story and in principle, it sounds like an interesting gameplay tradeoff. In combat, it works rather well, with swapping between the two states whenever you need to switch between offence and defence flowing nicely. You can have up to three active party members at once, and chaining together powerful combos by switching between them mid-attack or to quickly recover from getting knocked down felt great. Dodging attacks at the right moment while Suppressed can also absorb mana from foes and get you back into the fight more quickly.

Where this system becomes annoying is that even when you’re Suppressed, pedestrians in Shibuya STILL somehow identify you as a Wizard and drag you into random street fights with anti-Wizard thugs, MEA agents or Rubrum-addicted monsters. If you go into Liberated mode to try and defend yourself, this obviously blows your cover, and even if you don’t leave Suppressed mode, your Stress meter will go up, eventually preventing you from Suppressing your abilities.

These random encounters also interrupt the flow of side quests. If you go into a Liberated state for even a few seconds, you then need to leave the scene and come back to that area and hope you don’t get spotted the second time around so you can actually talk to whoever you need to talk to. Fortunately, you can fast travel throughout Shibuya, making getting around the city fairly streamlined. Unfortunately, you cannot fast travel once you leave Shibuya, which leads to one of the game’s most frustrating elements, which is the various missions in Another.

The game also has a large number of multi-stage boss fights, where players must take down multiple bosses in a row. If you fail, prepare to take the whole fight from the very beginning. This particularly tried my patience in the game’s latter half, where many gruelling boss fights would be bookended by another gruelling fight, wasting a lot of time and effort whenever I got a game over.

Most of the fights, both in Shibuya and Another, usually take place in tight, enclosed spaces; while you can lock onto enemies to aid the camera in making sense of what is going on, the camera still often fails to keep you and your enemies in the frame and overall can get very disorienting as you are zipping around with flashy aerial maneuvers while the camera is facing a wall. The poor technical performance of Reynatis on Nintendo Switch also warrants a mention; while the aforementioned small environments aid the game to perform mostly acceptably during combat encounters, the frame rate plunges in some of the larger areas. These performance problems were especially noticeable in Shibuya’s iconic Scramble Crossing, one of the largest single areas in the game.