Action RPG Beast of Reincarnation from the Pokémon Developers Leaked Three Days Before Release — the Game Had No Denuvo

A cracked build of Beast of Reincarnation spread across piracy sites on August 1 — three days before the official launch of the action RPG by Game Freak, the studio behind the Pokémon series. This is the Japanese developer's first major game outside the monster-collecting franchise and its first project on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, so the launch was drawing plenty of attention even without a leak. PC owners ended up in a particularly awkward spot: a working copy showed up online before the game went live on Steam, and the first impressions of how the project behaves on computers came not from the press but from people who downloaded a stolen build. Neither Game Freak nor publisher Fictions has commented on the leak.

The leak coincided with preload going live — files became available to anyone who had pre-ordered a few days before launch, and crackers reported a finished build almost immediately. Normally Denuvo slows that scenario down, but the store listing carries no third-party DRM notice, which is exactly where it would be disclosed. What went wrong remains unclear: some blame poorly encrypted preload files, others suspect the copy came from someone who had early access.

There's an added awkwardness in the fact that the PC version wasn't sent out for review, so the public started judging its optimization by a stolen build. Those judgments don't line up. One player reported 30–40 frames per second on medium settings at 1080p on the handheld ROG Ally X, with no drops and no shader compilation at startup. Another, in the same discussions, complained that the game "is running like garbage" — 70–80 frames at 4K on max settings with an RTX 5070 Ti and no frame generation option.

For 2026 the story isn't unique: Forza Horizon 6, Subnautica 2, and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight leaked the same way before release. But for Game Freak specifically this is the second painful episode in two years — in the fall of 2024 the studio went through a breach that fans dubbed the "Teraleak," which put hundreds of gigabytes of internal materials and the data of 2,606 current and former employees online.

Beast of Reincarnation itself is a story about a young woman named Emma and her dog Koo, who wander through post-apocalyptic Japan in the year 4026 and fight bosses, taking their powers along the way. Combat mixes real-time swordplay with commands issued to the dog, and game director Kota Furushima has specifically asked people not to file the project under Soulslikes. The release takes place on August 4 at 00:00 UTC on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with the standard edition priced at $59.99 and the deluxe at $69.99. Game Pass subscribers get the game right at launch.

Do leaks bother you at all — or do you just wait for release and stay away from spoilers? Tell us in the comments.