Hello, I am Laguna from J&L. English is my third language so I would like to apologize in advance if my thoughts seem to lack coherence or are oddly written. It takes me quite an effort to review something while I attempt not to write like a 6th grade student would, so sorry about that.

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This review contains no spoilers that I'm aware of!

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The creators have put a serious amount of work on the presentation of this project, and this is probably the first thing that you will notice about Reincarnation -Dawn of War-. This game will most likely be successful at getting your attention and has enough content to keep it for a short time while you enjoy the short demonstration.

Graphics, visuals, atmosphere 4.5/5

Hirei's illustrations display quality that resembles that of commercial games and is the strongest point in this department. The battlers and characters in-game are faithful to the drawings and show smooth and appropriate animations. The portraits' face change depending on the character's emotion. Everything about the character design deserves my most sincere congratulations.

Enemy sprites are very good, but they are not animated and there isn't a great variety of them throughout the demo, often relying on re-palettes of the same battler for different enemies.

The in-game tutorials, text boxes and custom menus all keep a similar and appealing style that is not difficult to get used to. Some of the item icons are not original and will ring some bells if you're used to seeing this sort of resources, but they still look perfectly fine with the rest of the game.

The map design is well above the standard and is often improved by different ligthting effects. Some of the buildings have signs that would give each area of the city more personality if the buildings colour and appearance were more unique and the maps weren't as overloaded with recurring items such as crates and urns. The corpses and trails of blood are well distributed and give a good impression of what's going on.



The single indoor map doesn't stand out as much and holds quite an odd proportion with the building seen from outside.

It will be interesting to see how the mapping and atmosphere develops in different places and situations in the future.

Music 4/5

The BGMs consist of both original tracks and some songs from other sources (if I got the right idea). The in-game music always seems appropriate and there is enough quantity and quality of it. Menu sound effects are well chosen.

The sound effects during battles is often off and un-synchronized, which can really put you off and should be fixed in future releases.

Gameplay 3/5

Reincarnation doesn't bring a particularly original battle system and the rest of the game mechanics can be quite simplistic.

The checkpoint system is well thought and explained and serves its purposes perfectly.

The encounters have a balanced appearance rate but can be skipped without much punishment. Enemies strike hard and have different abilities. The player's regular attacks don't always do a lot of damage, which encourages the use of skills (which have neat animations) and alternative strategies. This could make for quite a challenge if it wasn't for the fact that there is an absolute excess of items to be found. They are too common for the lenght of the demo and size of the party. After using many of them in the boss battle, I still had this many...



The more valuable items are somehow as, if not more, common their weaker counterparts. All the items in the game serve a purpose, which is something positive, but there is little reason to find such an amount of "Phoenix Down-like" items, for instance. This, along with the counter-intuitive selection of enemies during battles, are some of the flaws in the game's core that can potentially take a lot of enjoyment from the experience and should be addressed in the future.

There is also a minor issue with the leveling system. Levels, at first, are gained so easily that fighting battles and obtaining XP doesn't becomes a satisfying goal. The party can achieve a massive level up after defeating the demo's boss. This does not affect gameplay directly, though.

The boss battle needs some slight rebalancing as well. While the boss' minions can be taken out in a single turn, the boss itself has both very high HP and non-dangerous attacks that will make the final minutes of the battle slightly boring. The battle would improve a lot if things became harder when the boss' HP was nearly depleted or if the boss HP was lower but the player didn't have access to so much healing.

Witht he exception of the Reinforcement Points implemented in the battle system, Reincarnation doesn't offer many original features yet and I am convinced thats some new additions would help battles become deeper and more interesting. For an example of my idea of original system, think of FF7's Materia system or Vagrant Story's weapon crafting system. As it is now, with weapons "locked" to characters (probably due to the fact that sprites show the equiped weapons during battle) there is very little to do outside of battle.

Note: I realized that the script for the battle system was made for the game and I feel bad about giving this much criticism, but I'm convinced that it will be a lot shinier once these details have been polished.

Story 3.5/5

The introduction is magnficiently put together, but it explains so little that it can be skipped without much consequences. The demo does not start with a very shocking event and doesn't end with a breath-taking cliff-hanger, but everything in between these two points is driven by good quality dialogues and cutscenes. The main characters have well defined personalities and the player is even offered a choice to make during the events of the demo.

The recurrent nordic names can be slightly off-putting, but this is no more than a personal opinion.



It would be most delightful to see the current plot become more complex as in the future releases of Reincarnation -Dawn of War-. The game often mentions events in the past that the player knows nothing about, so it is natural to expect that more things will be revealed about them as the story develops.

Conclusion 4/5

As it is now, Reincarnation has extremely good points and an overall great quality.

The game, however, will be very close to excellence if the gameplay issues mentioned above are solved and the story becomes more captivating, and a potential masterpiece if it manages to deliver new and refreshing elements along the way.