Beast of Reincarnation PS5 NG+ Bug: Players Trapped in Chapter 13 (Plus Series S Performance & Glitches)

It has been nearly a month since Game Freak launched Beast of Reincarnation, throwing players into the harsh, overgrown ruins of 4026 AD Japan. With the initial wave of players now completing their 40-hour journeys alongside Emma and her loyal canine companion, Koo, the community focus has naturally shifted toward the endgame grind and the highly anticipated New Game Plus (NG+) mode. However, recent reports indicate that transitioning into this second playthrough is not going smoothly for everyone, particularly on PlayStation 5.

Over the past 24 hours, our monitoring of community channels has picked up multiple threads regarding a severe progression blocker in the PS5 version of the game, alongside some surprisingly positive news for Xbox Series S owners, and a frankly hilarious technical glitch that summons a military vehicle into our biological wasteland. Here is a breakdown of the current state of the game and what you need to know before starting your next run.

The PS5 New Game Plus “Chapter 13” Progression Blocker

Starting a New Game Plus run is a time-honored tradition in action RPGs. It is the moment where you carry over your painstakingly optimized spirit stones, maxed-out blade arts, and your hard-earned synchronization levels with Koo, ready to completely dismantle the early-game Malefact bosses that previously gave you a hard time.

Unfortunately, for some PlayStation 5 players, hitting the NG+ prompt leads to a devastating dead end. According to recent reports, notably from Reddit user Babajaga76, attempting to start NG+ on PS5 sometimes completely bypasses the opening sequence. Instead of dropping Emma into the tutorial sections to reintroduce the parrying and blight-absorption mechanics against scaled-up enemies, the game abruptly loads the player directly into Chapter 13.

Why Getting Stuck Here Breaks the Game

For context, Chapter 13 is situated deep in the late-game narrative arc. Without venturing into heavy spoilers, this chapter involves navigating a highly corrupted zone where the parasitic blight has completely overtaken the mountainous terrain, requiring advanced use of Emma’s vine-hair traversal to cross massive chasms.

When the NG+ bug triggers, players spawn into this zone, but the narrative flags and quest triggers do not load properly. The game state is effectively corrupted:

• No Objectives: The UI fails to update with current goals.
• Invisible Walls: Sections of the map that should be unlocked via story progression remain permanently blocked.
• Broken Enemy Spawns: The Malefact encounters specific to this chapter fail to trigger, leaving the environment eerily empty except for ambient blight spores.

Players who have encountered this issue have reported that restarting the console, reinstalling the game, and attempting to reload the save file do not fix the problem. The save file itself seems to get tagged with conflicting chapter data, resulting in a soft-lock that completely halts progression.

How to Protect Your Save File

While we await an official hotfix from Game Freak in the upcoming patches, we strongly advise all PS5 players approaching the end of the game to take preventative measures:

1. Turn off Auto-Sync for Cloud Saves: Before defeating the final boss and rolling the credits, disable automatic cloud saving for Beast of Reincarnation.
2. Create a Manual Backup: Upload a clean, end-of-first-playthrough save to the PlayStation Plus cloud manually.
3. Hold Off on NG+: If you are determined to push your weapon scaling to the absolute limit, you might want to spend a few days grinding the late-game zones in your current playthrough rather than risking the transition into a broken Chapter 13 state.

Xbox Series S Performance: A Pleasant Surprise

While the PS5 community is dealing with progression bugs, the Xbox side of the player base has been discussing a completely different aspect of the game: hardware performance.

Beast of Reincarnation is built on Unreal Engine 5 and pushes a staggering amount of geometric detail. Between the photorealistic ancient Japanese architecture, the writhing biological horror of the blight, Emma’s dynamic plant-based hair physics, and the complex fur shading on Koo, there were genuine concerns about how the less powerful Xbox Series S would handle the load.

Recent feedback from the Xbox community, particularly highlighted by Brazilian players testing the game this week, paints a reassuring picture. One user noted that after several hours of playtime on the Series S, the performance holds up remarkably well. While they acknowledged occasional frame drops during intense combat scenarios—likely when absorbing large amounts of blight from massive Malefact bosses—the game remains “totally playable” and enjoyable.

This is a massive win for the game’s accessibility, especially considering its day-one inclusion on Game Pass. The intricate, timing-based combat system requires a relatively stable framerate. If you miss a parry or fail to command Koo to create a diversion at the exact right millisecond, the resulting stunlock can easily lead to a game over screen. The fact that the Series S can maintain the necessary responsiveness without reducing the visual fidelity of the world to an unrecognizable blur speaks volumes about Game Freak’s optimization efforts. If you have been utilizing Xbox Cloud Gaming or handhelds to play, local installation on a Series S appears to be a highly viable option.

The Bizarre “Summoned Tank” Glitch

In lighter, albeit incredibly confusing news, a bizarre technical glitch has been documented in the wild. A player on the subreddit r/NagesPlayground posted a short clip demonstrating what might be the weirdest bug discovered in the game so far.

While exploring and unlocking a supply box in the ruins, the game seemingly suffered a massive logic failure and spawned a literal military tank on top of the player character, causing Emma to become completely stuck inside the vehicle’s collision mesh.

Analyzing the Anomaly

To understand why this is so absurd, we have to look at the world-building of Beast of Reincarnation. The setting is 4026 AD. Humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction by a biological parasite, forcing survivors to live in isolated mountain settlements. The aesthetic is a unique blend of overgrown traditional Japanese culture and organic, mutated weaponry. The primary weapons are blades, spirit stones, and Emma’s own biological manipulation of the blight.

A modern-era military tank does not exist in this game’s visual vocabulary.

So, where did it come from? In game development, it is incredibly common for studios to use generic marketplace assets or leftover files from previous prototypes for testing scale, physics, or collision during the early stages of production. Back when the game was known merely as Project Bloom, developers might have used basic vehicle meshes to test environmental traversal or the scale of the massive Malefact bosses.

It appears that a reference to one of these early testing assets somehow survived in the final retail code. Under an extremely specific (and currently unknown) set of circumstances, interacting with a loot container caused the engine’s item-spawning pool to panic and pull the ID for this leftover testing object instead of a health restorative or a spirit stone.

While it is undoubtedly frustrating for the player who got stuck and had to reload their save, it provides a fascinating, unintended peek behind the curtain of Game Freak’s development process on their first non-Pokémon AAA title.

Looking Ahead

As we approach the end of the game’s launch month, the community continues to dissect every aspect of the mechanics, lore, and occasionally, the broken code. If you are currently playing on PS5, exercise extreme caution when attempting to start your New Game Plus journey until we receive confirmation that the Chapter 13 spawning issue has been resolved. For everyone else, keep exploring, keep commanding Koo, and if you happen to find a tank in the middle of a haunted bamboo forest, be sure to take a screenshot before it traps you.

We will continue to monitor these issues and update our endgame progression guides as official patches are rolled out by the developers.