I’m a fan of a lot of FuRyu-published games.
They throw a bunch of money and experienced writers at a small developer in order to hire some big names that also function as advertising. The budgets still aren’t big, but you end up with some really interesting games with fantastic gameplay concepts or enthralling stories and characters, and they always have fantastic music.
Some of these titles include the Lancarse-developed Monark and Lost Dimension, the Aquaria-developed Crymachina, the Three Rings-developed Trinity Trigger, and my favorites, the Historia-developed The Caligula Effect Overdose and The Caligula Effect 2.
And that brings us to the latest Furyu published title, Reynatis, which you may be aware of for either the fact it has Kazushige Nojima as its main writer (a writer of Final Fantasy VII and its remakes) or the fact it has Yoko Shimomura of Kingdom Hearts fame as the composer or for the fact it has a crossover with NEO: The World Ends With You in it (which also happens to be another of one of my favorite games).
And whilst trailers have looked decent, FuRyu titles are fairly budget, and Reynatis is trying to pull off an action RPG system vaguely reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy Versus XIII.
Now, I think many people will look at previous FuRyu games for a frame of reference. Amongst some of my favorites, we do have some really iffy action titles—specifically, Gemdrops’ Crystar and Aquaria’s Crymachina. And whilst I enjoyed parts of them, especially their more experimental concepts and fun stories, the combat is rather laborious.
The closest other would be Trinity Trigger, which is definitely better, but that title’s combat is more akin to Secret of Mana. However, it does have the important distinction of being directed by Takumi Isobe, who is the director of Reynatis, and I really enjoyed it.
This is a good start. But we can go further.
We know that Reynatis is being developed by Natsume Atari.
What else have they done…. let’s see… Ah, here we go, Kamen Rider Memory of Heroez, published by Bandai Namco.
Licensed game published by Bandai Namco could mean anything from the mastery of Dragon Ball FighterZ to the barely functioning Jujutsu Kaisen: Cursed Clash.
Now, I actually wanted a copy of this when it was coming out because it looked pretty interesting. For the uninitiated, Kamen Rider is a 50-year-old Japanese superhero series with many tie-in games. Besides the anomaly that is Eighting’s Climax Heroes (a fun fighting game that was re-released four times between 2008 and 2012), most of them are cheap arena fighters or depthless hack-and-slash games, usually starring the most recent riders.
Kamen Rider Memory of Heroes, released in 2020 as a character action game, focuses on the casts of Kamen Rider W (pronounced Double) and Kamen Rider OOO (pronounced o’s), which aired in 2009 and 2010. Kamen Rider Zero-One is also here because that was the airing season of the year, but the protagonist is practically a cameo appearance. It had an English release, but only in Southeast Asia, so I had to import it to play myself after it came out.
So how was it?
As a character action game, Memory of Heroez gives each of its main cast a whole collection of attacks to use at the same time. Each character has light and heavy rider attacks. Light attacks are small combos, whilst heavy and rider attacks are a significantly different variety of skills depending on the current form.
Memory of Heroez focuses on the form-changing aspects of its riders, using the transformation trinkets to swap into powersets with different ranges of attacks, defensive techniques, or just dealing big damage on form change.
It honors the source material of the show, letting you replicate the coolest parts of the casts’ individual seasons: Eiji’s clone finisher with his Gatakiriba combo form, which you can combo into, you can dash around the arena with Shotaro and Phillip’s Luna memory, Aruto can actually use the teleportation and light turrets from his Shining Assault Hopper form that only show up in a couple of episodes.
There is a stamina system, but this makes it so you have to time and be careful with your offense, and it stops you from just dashing away scott-free. Dodging certain enemy attacks will also refill your stamina, allowing for cool, immediate counterattacks. There’s an amount of skill to it.
Although it looks janky, it feels fantastic, and it’s a whole lot of fun, especially as a fan, when you know what it’s all referencing.
Now, why is any of this important? Well, that’s because we can compare the systems we know of in this game to Reynatis.
Whilst the characters in Reynatis don’t have trinkets to transform into different forms, we can, however, swap between characters in combat. There are a maximum of three characters per party, with two different parties, and each character appears to have one central combo string.
It’s perhaps evoking Kingdom Hearts’ autocombo, given how the sword-wielding characters can zip around the stage. But the important part is that you have three different attack combos on command. In addition, each character can equip two skills of your choosing. With each character having two skills, that makes for six skills (that’s kind of similar to The World Ends With You, now that I think about it).
However, to use these attack combos and skills, your character needs to have MP, preventing you from just spamming. You have time to decide when to attack and when skills are most important to use. Characters slowly regenerate MP over time when they aren’t in use, or the character in use can gain MP through dodging attacks.
This combination of apparent resource selection and stamina management suggests that there are many overlapping aspects in the combat development of both games.
And since Kamen Rider: Memory of Heroez was a pretty damn good game, it’s giving me some solid hope that Reynatis won’t disappoint, and it’s a good baseline for how it should feel. Then, they dropped a demo now available on the Japanese Switch eShop.
It does feel really good, and it should only feel better as the game goes on.
Reynatis will launch in the West on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam on September 27, 2024. Japan will receive the title on July 25, 2024.
