Game Freak's Five Attempts, Zero Franchises Beyond Pokémon

Game Freak, the studio behind Pokémon, is betting on Beast of Reincarnation as proof that it can build something beyond the franchise that has consumed it for thirty years.

The game is ambitious, original, and by most accounts decent. It is also arriving to what amounts to a shrug.

This pattern has a name and a date. Rare, the British developer, released Donkey Country Country in 1994 to instant canonization. And for the next fifteen years, the studio cycled through original properties like Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Kameo. Each one performed worse than the last.

By 2006, when Microsoft acquired Rare, the studio had stopped generating new franchises that stuck. Not because the developers lost talent. Because the institutional knowledge required to build a new IP had been progressively cannibalized by the one thing that worked. Game Freak has attempted five original franchises since 2000. Town was cancelled, Temtem arrived as a calculated competitor to Pokémon and landed as nobody's first choice, Little Town Hero disappeared, Pokémon Snap spawned a few spin-offs that went nowhere. Now Beast of Reincarnation launches into the world as a competent experiment that nobody asked for and that the studio itself cannot seem to commit to promoting.

The difference from Rare's case is structural, not creative. Rare was acquired. Game Freak remains independent, but independence under the weight of Nintendo's expectations and quarterly expectations is not actually freedom, it is constraint dressed up as ownership. When a studio's survival and growth depend entirely on one franchise's health, experimental ambition becomes a luxury the organization cannot afford to fail at. Every failed new IP is capital that could have gone into the franchise that matters, and that calculus never changes. The real test is not whether Game Freak can make a good game outside Pokémon. They have already proven that — the test is whether they can tolerate a failure badly enough to learn from it, instead of retreating faster each time.

Independence under the weight of Nintendo's expectations and quarterly expectations is not actually freedom.