Beast Of Reincarnation: Best Skills

Beast Of Reincarnation offers up two branching Skill trees (yes, literal trees) that you can peruse to unlock Skills for both Emma and her loyal Malefact companion, Koo. There are some extremely powerful and beneficial Skills to unlock in both these trees, but their strange presentation - extending both far above into the tree branches and below, into the tree's roots - can be a little hard to parse at first glance.

Each tree is split into two sections: the upper Skills, within the tree's branches, are for unlocking and upgrading special activatable abilities. These abilities are called Blade Arts (for Emma) and Bloom Arts (for Koo). The lower Skills within the tree roots, meanwhile, unlock minor nodes with various benefits, and each branch requires you to progressively upgrade one of the three attributes for Emma and Koo: Strength, Vitality, and Florescence.

This means if you want to unlock the best Skills early on, you also need to know ahead of time which attributes to level up, so that you can unlock those abilities in the Skill tree. If this is all a bit confusing to you, fear not! In this guide, I'll walk you through the six best Skills to unlock first in Beast Of Reincarnation - three for Emma and three for Koo - so that you know exactly what to do first in both Skill trees.

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Best Skills to unlock early

When looking at the best Skills to unlock early on for both Emma and Koo, it's best to strike a balance between powerful combat moves, such as Helm Splitter and Javelin; and also utility-based abilities such as Roll and Taunt. The latter Skills will give you far greater freedom to pull off the former Skills, making the combination much stronger than if you simply beelined towards all the strongest-sounding Bloom Arts and Blade Arts.

With this in mind, here are our recommendations for the very best Skills in Beast Of Reincarnation to prioritise unlocking early on:

Best Skills for Emma:

1. Helm Splitter: A powerful and versatile aerial attack which you can weave into any moment of combat, with devastating effects.
2. Expand Entanglement Gauge: Frees you up to use more Blade Arts, and extends the duration of your Entanglement Overdrive for both attacking and healing.
3. Roll: Fantastic for putting distance between yourself and an enemy, much more so than the default evade.

Best Skills for Koo:

4. Sakura: Javelin: A powerful bolt of lightning which allows Emma to latch onto the target for an aerial follow-up (and a Helm Splitter!)
5. Taunt: Gives you much more breathing room in dangerous fights by forcing enemies to target Koo instead.
6. Higanbana: Bloom: A very high-damage attack, great for eliminating smaller foes or dealing significant damage to Elites and bosses.

1. Helm Splitter

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Game Freak

• Requires: Hair Lvl 2 (12 Vitality)
• Description: When high in the air, drive your sword into the ground and deal damage in an area.

Helm Splitter is one of my favourite and most used Skills in Beast Of Reincarnation. It's very easy to set up - just leap into the air, and hold attack to bring your katana slamming into the ground below - and you can upgrade it steadily over the early-game to deal stupendous damage. There's an area of effect to the attack, which makes it great for clearing out grouped up smaller enemies. But it's also just a very dependable damage-dealer, great for whittling down boss health bars.

Its ease of use also allows you to insert it into powerful combos very easily. Towards the mid-game you'll unlock the Asagao Blade Art, which allows you to follow up the Helm Splitter with two more powerful Skill-based slice attacks. It's a devastating tool in your arsenal against nearly every enemy in the game.

2. Expand Entanglement Gauge

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Game Freak

• Requires: Entanglement Overdrive Lvl 1 (9 Strength)
• Description: Extends Entanglement Gauge.

As you attack, parry, and perform other moves in combat, your Entanglement Gauge at the bottom-centre of the screen will fill. Each bar of the gauge allows you to perform another Blade Art, and you can also activate Entanglement Overdrive by clicking Left and Right Thumbsticks simultaneously, which drains the gauge in order to slow down time for a brief period.

With all that explained, it should be very clear why the Expand Entanglement Gauge Skill is a vital Skill to acquire early on for Emma. Each upgrade to this Skill adds another bar to the gauge, allowing you not only to use your Blade Arts more readily, but also (and even more importantly) extends the duration of Entanglement Overdrive. Overdrive is an extremely powerful ability, whether you use it to get a bunch of free hits on an enemy, or to dash away to safety and heal up. That gauge is well worth nurturing early on in Beast Of Reincarnation.

3. Roll

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Game Freak

• Requires: Tracking Shot Lvl 2 (12 Florescence)
• Description: Quickly press evade twice to Roll.

Most early-game players don't even realise that Emma can roll. But you can unlock it very early by putting some points into your Florescence attribute and acquiring it in the blue left-hand root branch of your Skills tree.

A Roll is activated simply by double-tapping your evade key, and more or less doubles the distance travelled with a single evasion. If you've found at times that a simple evade isn't enough to get you out of the way of an enemy's attack, Roll is the solution. It pays for itself with how easy it makes backing off, finding space in a fight, and giving you time to heal.

4. Sakura: Javelin

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Game Freak

• Requires: Defeat Rangifer Nushi in Chapter 1.
• Description: Unleash a sakura branch javelin to skewer a target. A pierced target can be jumped to.

Sakura: Javelin is my favourite Bloom Art for Koo. It's unlocked in Chapter 1 after you defeat the Rangifer Nushi for the first time, so it's a very early-game Skill which you should prioritise upgrading and using as much as possible.

Javelin deals high single-target damage, and as long as you don't attach any mods to it (which I never do), it's very cheap to use in battle. The best part is that Emma can immediately latch onto enemies hit by the Javelin, sending her into an aerial follow-up attack on that enemy. It pairs beautifully with Helm Splitter, because you can seamlessly transition from the follow-up to a Helm Splitter without even touching the ground. For most of the game, my go-to combo was the following:

1. Sakura: Javelin an enemy
2. Latch and aerial follow-up
3. Helm Splitter
4. Blade Art: Asagao

This combination can often kill an Elite enemy in one go.

5. Taunt

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Game Freak

• Requires: Pounce Lvl 2 (12 Strength)
• Description: Koo howls, temporarily drawing attacks from nearby foes.

Taunt is one of the most useful abilities you can teach Koo. Unlock it and pop it into Koo's list of Skills which he can use autonomously in battle, and he'll start off almost every fight by drawing aggro on all nearby enemies at once.

This is obviously extremely useful for you as Emma, because you can spend the next few seconds safely whaling away at the distracted foes, often killing them before they even turn their attention back to you. It's also a great tool when you're fighting a new boss, because it gives you a few seconds to study and learn the enemy's moves ready for parrying.

6. Higanbana: Bloom

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Game Freak

• Requires: Nothing; unlocked from start
• Description: Create multiple higanbana blossoms to knock foes upwards. These blossoms can be jumped to.

The simple appeal of Higanbana: Bloom is that it deals the highest single-target damage of almost any of Koo's Bloom Arts. Certainly, it's the most damaging of the three that are available to you at the start of the game. A few early upgrades to Bloom turns it into an incredibly powerful attack which you can call upon at a moment's notice, either to initiate or to finish a fight from a safe distance.

Each Bloom also temporarily erects a tall plant which you can latch onto, allowing you to do a very similar Helm Splitter combo to Javelin, if you so wish. The added situational benefit here is that you can also just use the flower to escape the fray for a moment, whereas Javelin can only pull you further into the fray.

With that, you should have a far more solid idea of where to spend your first Skill Points and Attribute Points to unlock the best early Skills in Beast Of Reincarnation, for both Emma and Koo. To round off your knowledge, be sure to check out our guide to the best weapons to pick up early on. You can also check out our Chapter 1 walkthrough, or our guide to all Beast Of Reincarnation bosses.