I am 35 years old. I wear glasses all the time, but with them on, my vision is 20/20. I play video games, most typically in a living room with a large, LG OLED TV, and I sit on a couch about five feet away to watch it. In this manner, I enjoy all sorts of films, TV shows, and video games, almost always with subtitles on and, in the latter case, with plenty of text that I have no trouble seeing.
Until now. Until Beast of Reincarnation. This text is too small.
It is simply too small! Maybe you look at that and think, “That’s no problem, I can read that.” If that is the case, I invite you to blow it up to TV size and stand five feet away.
If that is not illegible to you, what if we put it up against a white background?
Hello?! Did NO ONE say anything about this during testing?
Maybe you somehow think that’s an acceptable size for text to be. Okay. What if we went into the menus and made it even smaller? Like this:
Or this:
Perhaps this:
What is this? A video game for ants?!
To be clear, there is no way to make the text bigger. Absolutely no options to do so. Our own reviewer, Kenneth Shepard, also pointed out a related problem. When you start the game, the voice acting is in Japanese by default, with subtitles on. You can switch it to English, but only after you’ve started the game, and only through the main menu, not the settings in-game. You may run into the problem Kenneth did where you don’t know you can change the language through the menu for most of the game (there’s nothing that suggests you can until you dig into the options off of the game’s main menu and find it), and thus are reliant on the very tiny subtitles to know what’s going on. Or maybe you just enjoy the voice acting in Japanese and want to keep that on?
Too bad. Dialogue is constantly happening during battles and other action scenes, so if you can’t immediately parse the text before it’s gone while also swinging your sword around, you’ve potentially missed plot-relevant info.
I, a person with (glasses-on) 20/20 vision and a completely reasonable video-game-playing setup, could not read this text without leaning forward, squinting, and staring for several seconds. It hurt my eyes after a while. But I am not the only sort of person out there. There are many people who find text that I can easily read difficult to make out for whatever reason, and who could use text accessibility options (such as being able to resize it, text-to-speech in menus, etc.) even in situations where I would not. I imagine they will find Beast of Reincarnation to be even more troublesome to read than I did, and that stinks. It’s 2026!! We have easy fixes for this stuff!
Game Freak, you are a AAA studio that’s been around for decades. Get it together. This text is way, way, way too small.
