Game Freak's First Non-Pokemon AAA Ships on Unreal Engine 5, Day One on Game Pass

Game Freak shipped a game today that has nothing to do with Pokemon. Beast of Reincarnation released worldwide on August 4 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, and it went straight into the Xbox Game Pass catalogue on day one. Standard edition is $59.99, with a Deluxe upgrade sold as DLC.

The studio behind three decades of Pokemon is credited as developer; the publisher is Fictions, and Kota Furushima — previously on battle systems and sound for Pokemon titles — directs. It is the first AAA production Game Freak has put out outside that franchise.

What actually shipped

• Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam). No Switch 2 version at launch.
• Price: $59.99 standard, Deluxe available as a paid upgrade.
• Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass carry it day one.
• Setting: a blighted Japan in the year 4026, following Emma — a Sealer fused with the corruption she fights — and her dog Koo.
• Roughly 30–40 hours, per pre-launch coverage.

Why the engine line matters here

The game is built on Unreal Engine 5 — Wccftech's tracking pins the shipping build at 5.4.4 with ray tracing support. That is worth noting for anyone who follows Epic's engine rather than Epic's storefront: a studio with a long in-house-tech history moved a flagship original IP onto Unreal, and the visual result is the opposite of the anime look its Pokemon work is known for.

For UEFN creators the read is narrower but real. Verse and the Fortnite ecosystem sit on the same engine lineage, and Epic has already said UE5 and UEFN converge into a single toolchain in Unreal Engine 6. Every large studio that standardises on UE5 widens the pool of techniques, assets and hiring that eventually flows back down into the Fortnite side of the engine.

How it reviewed

Critics landed split but positive. Metacritic shows a 74 average across 35 reviews. OpenCritic has it at 76 with a 'Strong' rating and 63% of critics recommending it, with individual scores running from 60 up to 9/10. The disagreement clusters on the combat — parry-heavy, demanding, and deliberately unlike anything in the studio's back catalogue.

The Game Pass day-one placement makes the score spread less of a decision point than it would normally be: on Xbox and PC the game costs nothing extra to try. On PS5 and Steam it is a full-price purchase against a 74.