izigame.me

If you're that curious, stop being lazy and play the demo.
Keeping this one relatively short. If you played the demo and enjoyed it, you will likely enjoy the rest of the game. That being said...
I had a lot of fun with this. Reynatis is a solid game. The beginning did a good job of setting the tone and drawing me into the setting, as well as introducing characters. I got some Robocop vibes from this game's Shibuya, being riddled with drug users and a police force struggling to keep things under control. I also enjoyed some of the mystery behind the story and determining what's going on in Shibuya. It mostly comes together pretty nicely. Switching between character perspectives wasn't jarring at all.
Between the OST(someone make this available for purchase), characters, premise, and the interesting combat system, I can't say there's much I disliked. The main area where the game falls short is the execution of the story. I think there are some moments that could have been more impactful with improved scene direction. Despite that, voice acting is rock solid across the board, so delivery on that end was well-done. One might argue that the story takes some time to pick up, and it's not dramatic enough for some, but it wasn't a problem for me.
The only other thing I could note was that the game leans on being easy. Lategame this isn't a big deal, since bosses are seriously out to kill you regardless of how you feel about random enemies, and you get some challenge levels for fun, but early to mid-game it might seem too easy to get through battles. If they implemented a similar system to Crymachina, where you choose when to level up, this could probably balance things out a bit more. I'm not really sure how else to better balance the game without changing fundamentally how attack/defense in combat works or seriously overhauling enemy behavior. It gets crazy when several enemies are attacking you at the same time, and I wouldn't know how to change that without, well, making the game into another game. Oh, and you get TONS of healing items. I used a total of 3 throughout the whole game. They didn't really feel necessary, so long as you knew how to stay alive.
Good:

OST is excellent
The combat is fun to play, gives each character something different to play with, incentivizing you to try different characters, and the balance of switching between attack and defense works out well.
The game looks good enough for me. Shibuya looks good, and the character design is attractive and overall likeable.
The story plays out an interesting premise that isn't too over the top or typical.
Side quests aren't too tedious, and reducing malice is pretty rewarding over time.
Reasonable game length: Not too long, not too short. EDIT: For reference, my clear save shows about 28 hours of game time. Not as long as Tales, but not much shorter than the average Star Ocean. It'll be shorter if you don't do many side quests.
The stat parameters are clearer in this game than Crymachina. Furyu learned, lol
This game runs very well. I ran it at 120FPS at 4K with no trouble.

The "Bad," Note that I like most of what this game has to offer. I'm not that critical of it.

There are 2 main dungeons, and they do not change to any drastic extent. One might find their design boring.
One might prefer that dialogue plays out directly instead of so much taking place over the phone; I found this made for better pacing, and the conversations were still charming, so YMMV. There's only a select few cutscenes.
One might not think the graphics are good enough. If you're looking for high resolution textures across the board, you probably won't find it here.
The combat is not for everyone; do not come into this expecting it to be identical to another action/action RPG game you've played.
The story might not appeal to you as it did me. Some want more drama. As noted, some scenes could have had better direction.
There is a reveal later in the game that I feel could have been better explained. Note: I didn't collect all the reports yet.
Ease of combat might reduce the game to button mashing or cheesing power attacks; YMMV
I would have liked more time with the antagonist/s. A side story or something would be a nice addition.
Please give Nika's navel better textures, Furyu

I'm not going to complain about price or production value due to A) this game being standard retail price, and B) Coming from what is essentially a AA developer. I'm just not that petty. Overall, this game's a hit for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Can I recommend it? Sure, but I suggest you at least play the demo first, so you have some idea of what to expect. If I had to rate it, I'd give a 7-7.5 out of 10. Would play again. Will play the epilogue chapters later.

Reynatis is an action RPG leaning on the RPG side, so optimizing equipment and stats is more important than reflexes. It still is a fun action game but very easy as such; if you stock on consumable items to recover HP or counter bad stats you can take plenty of hits without dying. It has a just guard mechanic to revover MP faster which is decidedly RPG like in its execution and unintuitive for action game fans, which spawned much controversy. Basically you wait and react to a fullscreen prompt rather than the attack animation.
It has a lot of unique ideas, like suppressed (defensive) and liberated (offensive) states, stress levels (which boost offense but lower defense and might force you into liberated state), public attention which draws the cops. These gameplay mechanics reflect themes of the narrative, which seems like a belated rendition of the canceled Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Much lower budget but also unfiltered by company politics. If FFXV was suppressed, Reynatis is liberated.
The game is set in real world Shibuya at night, which is rendered in a beautiful color palette. It's not open world but segmented, which helps with escaping from bystanders taking photos of you on their smartphones and uploading it to social media after a battle. There are also portals to typical fantasy game like environments which have limited map access. A nice feature is that after a battle an arrow indicates where you were headed pre battle to avoid getting disoriented.
You will spend a lot of time walking around Shibuya and another great idea is the Wizarts, graffitis you can spot on the walls to acquire eqippable skills and stat boosters. These as well as items which are only visible in liberated state make the environments very interactive, requiring you to look around, even when you are following quest markers.
Character animation is lacking (no budget for motion capturing) and the characters and world are a bit low poly, but reasonably big and busy. Art design does offset these limitations and the BGM is top notch. FuRyu follows their usual strategy to hire big names, featuring scenario writer Kazushige Nojima, composer Yoko Shimomura and image art designer Yusuke Naora. Despite the low budget the game is reasonably polished with some exceptions, which boil down to minor annoyances:
Sometimes you will accidentally escape a battle because your attacks move you over the batte area's border. Using fast travel can (very rarely) break story progression, in which case you need to return to where you last saw a quest marker. Subquests can be done at any time, even if characters involved shouldn't be able to participate at that time. In the latter half the difficulty bottoms out and makes the bosses push overs, which is cool in how much of a power rush it is though.
After the incredibly low ratings the game got I was kind of worried for its quality. But if you don't expect an action game and aren't compulsive over graphics/open world the game is actually quite amazing and among my favs this year despite strong competition. It even compares favorably to FF7 Rebirth, the high budget Nojima game of 2024.
Rebirth has an amazing open world and great character writing, greatly adding depth and new mystery to a known narrative. But it being the middle part of a larger story and so much optional stuff to do, the pacing is not well suited to the kind of narrative earlier FF was known for. And I really don't know how the Remake series hits for people who didn't play the original.
Reynatis is self contained and thanks to its smaller world, the story moves at fast pace and gripped me in ways an open world, which is more enjoyable as a game but distracting from its narrative's direction, simply cannot. I want both of these types of games. Linear games with more limited interactivity/agency, which is used to close the gap between player and game character rather than trying to create an illusion of freedom, still have their place. True freedom in games will only ever exist outside the narrative.
Reynatis concludes one part of its story but also ends on a cliff hanger. The free DLC episodes (3 out of 9 released at time of writing) take the story further and shake up expectations also game play wise. Reynatis is an amazing experiment not possible on AAA budgets, and so far the payoffs have been worth it. It remains to be seen how successful its last experiment will turn out: the post game episodic releases bridging into a sequel (?) or concluding the other side of the events unfolding.

TLDR: I'm a sucker for any game with Shibuya, so I enjoyed it. It has its technical shortcomings, and it's pricey for what it offers, but it's a cool experience with a lot of passion behind it and I personally liked it a lot. I haven't played the DLC chapters yet (UPDATE: I did! see below), but did play the TWEWY crossover and otherwise 100% the game. I got 30 hours out of it, including reading all of the reports, enemy bios, and non-voiced dialogue OUT LOUD, so it is short for the price. Some more detailed review below:
Story: Classic (though modern-styled) JRPG, I completely lost the plot at the end but that's to be expected. Think Nomura-levels of "what on Earth is going on", only slightly mitigated by the collectible reports. The more accessible part of the story provided a shockingly non-tropey and semi-realistic view on drugs, the police, and sensationalism of the public (flawed since it's a fantasy universe, but refreshing nonetheless). Otherwise, I enjoyed the messages the cast sent to each other- fleshed out their personalities and grounded the story in the modern day. Some dialogue seemed weird, which I assume was a localization thing. Also, some character motivations were strange, and again towards the end I stopped understanding what most bosses and some main characters were thinking.
Graphics: As everyone says, they're not great graphics for this day and age, but I honestly don't care. IMO it's a bit higher than standard for Switch, and I'm used to a lot worse. Some environments seem flat, but overall they make it work, even if it feels like you went back in time a decade or so. Load times were also fast, and I suspect the graphics contribute to that, so I'm actually grateful. Big exception to this is the TWEWY crossover- those models are, uh, really funny. And short. Couldn't stop laughing. (I love TWEWY. I thought it was really endearing, haha, but those poor models.)
Controls: I played with mouse/keyboard, don't know about controller. I didn't actually know that you were supposed to be able to attack with mouse at all, so I never found that an issue, but I didn't like how some buttons weren't re-assignable. I ended up with a silly setup using mouse outside of battle for mouse camera vs both hands on keyboard (more buttons) for combat. So, little to no camera switching in combat, but it worked fine.
Gameplay: Combat was honestly pretty interesting! The attacking but was pretty standard, but having characters not preemptively dodge but rather right after when suppressed was new. Each character felt unique in combat which is awesome. Combat never was difficult though, and even the final boss was brute force with items that I picked up throughout the game.
For Shibuya navigation, a large part of movement is liberation/combat/faster movement/item detection in populated areas that puts you on a wanted list. It is easily mitigated by just moving to a different area, but besides that I found it was a cool way to do some storytelling through mechanics- I'm sure there's some social commentary about self-defense or the mental toll of publicly being your true self when you're marginalized or something. Should be noted that an end-game item helps with item detection, so don't worry about having to find stuff in large public areas.
Weird that selling items was introduced late in the game, and I do feel like a lot of mechanics weren't super developed (like, the shop mechanic was used for one thing and restaurants just sold different flavors of HP heal). Note that the settings provide an option to remove the confirm dialogue to make selling a lot easier and faster.
Bugs: Post-combat screens let you move while combat results are being displayed unless it was a story event, but there's this weird extra button press you have to make sometimes. Some of the UI transitions are a bit clunky. Also, game thinks I didn't sell a unique item I definitely did when mashing the sell button, so, uh, I wouldn't sell items too quickly? Then there's the mouse attack thing that everyone's talked about, but it didn't affect me.
Music and Sound: Genuinely surprised that music was by Yoko, as it felt very much background to everything that was going on. It worked with the game, but there wasn't any time when I felt like the music stood out or helped make a scene memorable, and that's a shame. There were some scenes where there was no music at all, and while it kind of worked, they could absolutely have put something in there to make it feel less dead.
Characters are semi-voiced and only in Japanese, which is fine with me, but might be a turn-off for some. I learned, like, 2 phrases lol
DLC: By the time combat becomes slightly difficult, the item and wizart DLC isn't necessary, and the costumes- well, I guess get those if you really care about how your character works. Again, haven't played the DLC chapters yet. (EDIT: see next paragraph :) ) Obviously if you're interested in the art/designer commentary or music you can get those respective things. Mini art book is in English, full art book has both Japanese and English versions.
UPDATE: I played the DLC chapters (free, but downloadable content nonetheless). Sari's chapter is fine to play, but I wouldn't recommend playing the post-game ones unless you like being left on a cliffhanger for a few months or potentially forever if it gets cancelled (they're releasing a series of these chapters). The original ending can be satisfying enough, even though it leaves things to the player's imagination, and these chapters ruin that in spades.
CAN YOU PET THE DOG: There are no dogs in this game, but there are cats. Interacting with them (I don't think it's a physical pet, just respectfully distant admiration of feline) removes your stress. meow