I’ve been playing two games I think are criminally underrated: Rise of the Ronin and Beast of Reincarnation. Full disclosure — I played both through subscriptions, PlayStation Plus and Game Pass, not full price. I make it a habit to play through everything that lands in those libraries. Even when a game looks outside my usual taste, it’s basically free to try, so why not stream it for thirty minutes? There’s little risk. And if a game doesn’t work for me, I challenge myself to ask why it didn’t, because sometimes a game is perfectly well-made — just built for a different audience than the one reviewing it.

Reviewers Rate Mechanics. I Want to Know What a Game Feels Like.

My one criticism of a lot of game reviewers is their narrowness of perspective. They play games and rate them on systems, mechanics, a list of empirical facts — dead and lifeless. That’s exactly why great games get overlooked. So much criticism is based on what can be measured rather than what can be felt. What are the themes of the piece? What is the point of the game? What message, consciously or unconsciously, is it trying to send?

Take Death Stranding: imagine a world where instead of cutting others down, you find your own empathy, your own connections, and get rewarded for building support systems for other players. That’s not a mechanic you can put on a spec sheet. That’s the whole game.

Beast of Reincarnation Has the Mood Down

In Beast of Reincarnation, there is such a palpable mood, and that mood is the point of the thing. It reminds me of classic ’90s anime — not the isekai, escapist kind, but the isolated, fragmented, cautionary tales of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Angel’s Egg, and the like. Destruction, the power of nature, isolation and empathy — the themes are powerful.

I’d argue Beast of Reincarnation takes the best parts of the Soulslike genre: the item descriptions, the combat, the atmosphere. And here’s my real hot take — difficulty is not why Soulslike games are good. It’s the story, the pull, the respect for the player’s intelligence. I think the genre got popular despite its difficulty, not because of it. That fact gets obscured by a niche of hardcore players who mostly delight in their own ability to dominate a game rather than what the game is trying to say.

Rise of the Ronin Isn’t Ugly, It’s Just Not Playing By the Same Rules

Rise of the Ronin has been criticized for bad graphics and performance issues. I think it’s highly stylized but nowhere near ugly — if you look at it through a different lens, it’s genuinely beautiful. I fear there’s a monolithic lens people judge games through: good graphics if and only if you get uncanny mocap and smooth frames at all times.

Rise of the Ronin and Beast of Reincarnation both lack the uncanny look so many big Western games share — Ghost of Yotei, Call of Duty, Aphelion. Those aren’t bad games, but they share what I’d call a “Hyper-Saturated-Over-Budgeted-Coca-Cola-Marvel” look — a long way of saying corporate, mass-market art. Flat, yet technically impressive.

Caveat: I don’t think that look is intrinsically bad. I just don’t think it’s the only style worth appreciating. Compare it to Half-Life 2 and Skyrim, both of which have stylized characters with a real point of view — expressive faces, not uncanny ones. So what’s Starfield missing that Skyrim and Fallout still have? It’s got the corporate art look, market-tested but never gut-checked. A lack of soul.

The Influences Go Deeper Than Gaming

Both games pull from Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls, and Beast of Reincarnation clearly draws on Nier: Automata. But the influences that matter more to me sit outside of gaming entirely. I see classic Kurosawa in Rise of the Ronin — plus more gleeful B-movie samurai gore and drama. I see Takahata and Miyazaki in Beast of Reincarnation, along with the more meditative parts of Ghost in the Shell.

What Makes Them Actually Great

It puzzles me why more people don’t appreciate how unique these games are. Rise of the Ronin offers a genuinely fresh spin on samurai combat: fun side missions, cat collecting, arcade-like battles that are still challenging. With that many weapons and fighting styles, the combinations of play are nearly endless. Lighter and more action-movie-coded than its influences, it still delivers an engaging, stylized branching story with real historical texture.

Beast of Reincarnation hits on a more emotional level. It reminds me of Violet Evergarden — you play an embattled, empathy-stricken young woman navigating a hostile world. I think both of these games are gems, and I wonder if they’ll share the fate of Resonance of Fate: dismissed at release, beloved once the trends that buried it pass and the bones of the thing become obvious to everyone.

Or maybe I just see these games through a different lens now that I’m making games myself. I don’t put much stock in technical excellence anymore — it’s a dime a dozen. It’s still impressive when a team pours that time into pathfinding systems and ships something free of clipping and bugs. I just don’t weight it as heavily as I used to.

What is the game thematically? What is it as an experience? Textures popping in and out don’t pull me out of the immersion. Maybe that’s where things differ for me. Either way, it takes all kinds.

Go Play Them Yourself

I recommend wholeheartedly that you check out Rise of the Ronin and Beast of Reincarnation. I think they’re some of the best in their genre. But don’t take my word for it — go find out for yourself.

— Jackie C