Game Freak says its Beast of Reincarnation team is ‘relatively small’ but it’s outsourcing to a wide number of partner studios
The Pokémon studio is taking a central direction and management role
Game Freak has shed more light on the development structure of its upcoming action RPG, Beast of Reincarnation.
Shown in more detail during the Xbox Developer Direct presentation on Thursday, Beast of Reincarnation tells the story of Emma, an “exiled protagonist” accompanied by her wolf companion Koo, exploring a world where parasitic plants called “the blight” have overgrown around the world.
Most of the human population has been lost due to the blight, but Emma has the ability to hunt Malefacts and seal their blight within her own body, so Emma and Koo have to prepare to defeat the titular Beast of Reincarnation by defeating powerful enemies known as Nushi and absorbing their blight to build power.
In an interview with IGN, game director Kota Furushima – who previously worked as a battle planner and sound manager in certain Pokémon games – was asked whether Game Freak had to significantly increase its staff numbers to handle a game of the scale of Beast of Reincarnation, given that it mainly continues to work on the Pokémon series.
Furushima replied that while the game does indeed have a large number of people working on it, they’re not all from Game Freak, and development has been outsourced to numerous other studios.
“The team is quite large, as you can imagine, but I will note that it’s not all folks internally here at Game Freak,” Furushima explained.
“We managed to seek out a lot of partner companies to work with us, companies, studios that are able to realize the vision of this game in the way that we wanted to make it, so we’re lucky to have a lot of people working on it externally as well.”
IGN says a PR then reached out to the publication after the interview took place, to clarify further that the internal Game Freak team working on Beast of Reincarnation is “relatively small”, but that through direction and management it still plays a core role in leading the project.
Beast of Reincarnation will be released this summer on Xbox, PlayStation and PC, and will be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one.
