Metaphor: ReFantazio is an excellent take on a kind-of-tired formula
Better than its predecessors but still lots of room for improvement IMO.
I’m approaching the end of Metaphor: ReFantazio (though probably at least another dozen plus hours left) and I’ve got Thoughts. It hasn’t been the blazing joy that Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth was for reasons that I’ll explain1 but it’s made me like where the SMT-spinoffs have been headed since maybe Persona 4. It’s been fun and engaging and I highly recommend it but there’s a lot of inborn design problems tied to the calendar-centric gameplay that I think are holding it back. The writing is kind of not great too and I don’t think this one can be placed wholly at the feet of the translation2, but I can appreciate what it’s going for.
At first glance, Metaphor: ReFantazio is heir to the Persona series, and especially presents in the style of the later ones, but it’s worth pointing out that the game is pulling inspiration from large swaths of Atlus’ catalogue. Several Archetypes are direct references to other SMT-spinoffs. The Masked Dancer and Persona Master are clearly pulling from its direct predecessor while Summoner/Devil Summoner and Soul Hacker are fairly direct references to other SMT games. There might be others I didn’t catch. The game has an entire chapter that’s comprised of extremely unambiguous references to Etrian Odyssey.
Let’s start with the central conceit; with spoiler warnings for maybe the first few hours of the game plus what happens during/after the first major/proper dungeon. Like Persona 3 onwards (look, from here on I’m just gonna call it Persona instead of bothering to make this distinction when it’s not relevant but just understand it pains me too), Metaphor borrows from a traditional style of very-Japanese slice-of-life sim games that were more or less visual novels, often romance3, whose central mechanics revolved around using daily time slots on tasks to build up your main character to do a thing. Usually this was in high school as a student and usually the thing was to pick up chicks who had varying attribute requirements. These games usually have a ticking clock element whereby you have a deadline to accomplish all of this (say, by the end of a semester or school year).
Persona 3 and onwards did something relatively unique here by taking this style of game and plopping a regular-ass JRPG on top of it, so now you’re teenagers in high school solving a supernatural mystery but you’re also now going to class, dating your friends, unrealistically maintaining a perfect sleeping schedule, and then taking time out of your day to traverse dungeons. If you’re wondering why these games still have diversions around raising your knowledge or your courage and style, that’s partly why—those were the conventions of the genre it’s borrowing from. The social aspects were rearranged into mechanics tied to powering your background skills (cleverly flavored to the traditional Persona preoccupation with the Major Arcana) which tied into the actual dungeon crawling mechanics.
The Persona games adopted ticking clock elements, usually in the form of “not saving X thing by Y date makes Z thing unavailable” or, generically, if we don’t stop it by such and such date the world dies, so that every beat of the story & game has a deadline on the calendar. Metaphor does this too in ways that are slightly more clever and it also wisely drops the pretense in most cases that the consequences are direly severe when we can understand on the meta that the campaign ends prematurely and the game is over if you don’t do it by the proscribed date. However, Metaphor has a few issues with a couple of the specific scenarios being awkward to have the sort of lax time windows they have.
For example, the scenario around the first big dungeon is this: your adversaries have interrupted the late king’s funeral to attack the monastery/palace at the heart of the capital city in an attempt to heist the Royal Scepter. You then have several days for you personally and your two new best buds to go stop them.
Now, the major individual problems with this at least have explanations, but they’re not exactly great:
Why does it take the enemies so long to steal the Royal Scepter? Because it’s in a magically sealed vault and the guy leading the assault needs that long to undo the seal.
We’re in the middle of the largest city on the continent, why is nobody, especially the royal army, not doing anything about it, double especially given that it’s established there’s several people still trapped in the cathedral following the initial assault? Well supposedly it’s because the royal army has been in disarray and partly absorbed into the state religion’s militia and is so disorganized as a result that they’re not able to do anything except keep people out (unsuccessfully too, inasmuch as you’re able to sneak in no sweat).
How is this not a bigger, more world-shaking event? Life goes bizarrely on in the capital after the event starts and you’re still able to sort of casually jaunt around making new friends and visiting all the shops. Uh, also, during the funeral, the dead king has Majora’s Mask’d himself into the sky above capital and has initiated a continent-spanning gigamagical decree that the next king gets picked by magical popular vote.
All of the deadlines in subsequent chapters are tied into the game’s overall arc: since the king has no direct apparent heir, he’s arranged for his death to trigger a gigantic royal magic spell designating that whoever can amass the greatest popular support faith of the people becomes the next king. The state religion’s high priest is the default front-runner and its shadow organization immediately conspires to rig the race by proposing a series of contests to allow them to subvert their own rules to assert dominance let other contestants make their case for why they should be the next king. On the surface it kind of sounds like we’re narratively backdooring the idea of a democratic republic into this magical fantasy setting but it either seems that wasn’t the real intention or, if it was, this was clumsily fumbled to tell the story they actually wanted to tell.
For one, this isn’t exactly how democracies work per se. The game very-anime-style introduces a series of character candidates that all clumsily represents a mix of in- and out-of-setting ideologies4, but it’s all very surface level. Like it kind of feels like someone wanted to make a Japanese Disco Elysium but really half-baked it and gave up only a quarter of the way through. I’ve seen plenty of IT’S CALLED METAPHOR IT’S ALL A METAPHOR FOR STUFF GET IT but like well…
The main character/your (adventuring, not political) party’s platform is racial social equality, except like literally, as in there’s 9 physiologically distinct races5 and society is softly class-stratified along various racial attribute distinctions. If the game wanted to be brave6 there would have been some amount of deeper contemplation on why this happens, however the game only gets as far as the surface-level commentary of “roussaintes are naturally the strongest and so tend to occupy high social rank by virtue of being the best soldiers” and “paripus apparently like to party a lot and aren’t very smart so they’re all wastrels” type stuff7. There’s no real contemplation on what makes equality an ideal and while I’m tempted to uncharitably jump to conclusions like “oh, I mean, I guess non-Americans have never really had to think about the justifications that underlie the American ethos of equality and liberty” I think it’s probably more like it just never occurred to them that they ought to try8. Worse, there doesn’t seem to be much exploration of how your party intends to do it aside from “we’ll win and become king and then it’ll just happen because I decree it by virtue of being the new king” which, I mean, it isn’t even liberal democracy when it’s just instituting the next kingdom9.
This is sort of additionally made awkward by that also being the nominal position of your primary adversaries, so they have to distinguish this by making them have a cartoony villain “racial equality except screw all the weak people” platform. Despite the state religion’s pope being the initial front-runner, the old ideology is never presented as a serious threat despite a reasonable baseline expectation that they’d have a larger, unified wealth and cultural power base to pull from. There’s even a church-led conspiracy that fails to do anything important and then just kind of fizzles out towards the end. There’s also a narrative conceit for why all the candidates can’t just go around killing each other but that, too, gets casually tossed out the window in the third act.
So, the main story is kind of lame and undercooked, how about the character stories? These are usually some of the strongest parts of the Persona games and nothing’s changed here, there are some fairly strong small character moments. This comes with the common, video-games-wide problem where optional narrative content basically never gets to properly inform the larger narrative. Character development that occurs in the game’s equivalent of social links never gets carried over to what’s going on in the main plot. I continue to think this is mostly a failure of good writing and why I’ll continue to rag on video games for just not having good writing broadly. I think there are creative solutions that aren’t being deployed.
To my pleasant surprise there’s no direct romance, which is great and I wish more games were brave enough to cut out the badly written romance subplots. It didn’t strike me just how badly the female characters were written in the Persona games until I did a playthrough of the female main character in Persona 3 Portable and noticed they did the same treatment to all the male love interests10.
How about the game bits?
Personae have been replaced by Archetypes, which is somewhere in between functional personae and a regular class-based system. Normally I irrationally love class-based systems in games but this one sort of doesn’t work for me for a few reasons I can identify.
First, the game kind of doesn’t seem to want you to spend a lot of time in combat. Mechanically, once you’ve overleveled an enemy by a certain amount you can instantly destroy them in overworld combat, without having to enter into a traditional RPG battle (for reduced rewards—faster, better, and much safer but slightly less rewarding, though easy to grind). This is kind of good here because the Persona calendar style of gameplay with limited access to dungeons and limited resources once you’re in-dungeon means you especially don’t want to be spending resources on every battle anyways. Metaphor still shares the Persona early-game problem of having to juggle a too-limited spellcasting resource, but it seems to have anticipated this problem and gives you more tools right away to deal with it. Second, once you’ve mastered an archetype the game converts all additional archetype exp into a-exp items in 1000 increments, which means effectively you can keep on any archetype you want and forward the exp it’s earning into other archetypes.
Now these are both excellent mechanical adaptations, but also, aw. The things I like most about class-based systems in RPGs is reveling in the grindiness of it and in cycling my party through all the classes in a way that makes for entertaining variety (and then putting it all together at the end to give everyone a unique-but-busted cobbling together of classes and abilities), and both of those are things that deliberately eschews this.
I think centering the gameplay around a calendar and juggling slices of time is a gimmick that’s ready to go away. For one, in dropping the high school setting we’ve gotten so far away from what it was originally inspired by and ultimately referencing that it’s no longer an interesting adaption of an older convention. Most people aren’t going to recognize it as anything other than emulating what the Persona games were doing at this point, which is admittedly maybe all they care about anyways. It also constrains your storytelling in awkward ways as already outlined; on one hand it’s neat to see how many varied clever ways you can come up with to justify deadlines but you’re also forced to contort your game to try to make those deadlines make sense with the actual gameplay, such as being railroaded into having backwards restrictions on your dungeon crawling. Having to juggle time with so many possible tasks is an interesting challenge but when you’re tightly constrained and having to do it in the context of a 60+ hour long JRPG it’s way too tempting to just wait until someone’s figured out the perfect playthrough that inevitably reduces all the dungeons to a single day to save time11. Also, the game takes place over only around 5 months—and the game also cheats by only having 5 day weeks—which, along with not having recognizable holidays, sort of kills the novelty of the gimmick IMO.
Metaphor adapts Social Links to be tied to Archetype tiering. One improvement is uncoupling the dialogue choices from advancement—there’s still correct choices but you just get a little extra resources from it instead so there’s less pressure to have to get them right. The subject and plotlines of these side stories are a lot more freeform but I do think it also kind of loses a little bit from a lack of theming. Your party spends less time in a single location compared to Persona but Metaphor finds some fairly clever ways to use the time you spend traveling and incorporate a breadth of locations. But I also just kind of wish there was more followers and think this was a mixed casualty of tying them to groups of archetypes and trying to cram so much into the calendar structure.
The squad battles have just enough mechanical complexity to avoid being boring, which is essential for a JRPG. The quick battle restarts are kind of unusual but very welcome. The music is banger after banger and I even mostly got over the goofy chanting as time went on. I think the game is visually kind of ugly in a lot of ways that are probably entirely personal taste; the magla particle effects everywhere and the stylized chromatic aberration just don’t really work for me but I also kind of got over that the longer I stuck with it too.
Alright so there’s some words on Metaphor: ReFantazio. This is far from the first time I’ve done some video game commentary here12 but coming on heels of More on "taste" in video games I kind of wanted to approach this like more of a proper review compared to my previous writings on specific games. Time will tell if we continue along this route, either way expect these to stay mostly stream of consciousness since I have no real desire to go down the actual-reviewer path.
In a nutshell, it’s mostly related to how each handles their character class mechanics. I put Infinite Wealth down at 150 hours, will probably be wrapping on Metaphor around 80ish or so, barring poor comparisons for length. I reluctantly had to stop Infinite Wealth because I ran out of things to do aside from a second full playthrough to finish off achievements, but I’m already starting to feel the itch to move on from Metaphor and am trying to finish off as much as I can. In fairness to Metaphor, of the similar Persona games I only ever finished 3 once despite honestly enjoying all of them. I replayed Persona 4 Golden recently and man I tried but I didn’t quite make it all the way to the true ending. Something about these games that I can’t quite put my finger on always causes me to run out of steam close to the end.
The text translation seems fine to me with some very rare outliers. I’m playing with Japanese audio but apparently the English localization decided to go with a smattering of European accents which I’ve seen described as obnoxious but is fortunately less obtrusive in the text. The VA recording was done by a UK studio with UK voice actors but I’ve still seen people complain that the accents sound fake.
But also porn, lots of hentai games did this. The first one of these I ever came across was a mostly-softcore port of some game on Newgrounds.
There’s the no-tax libertarian guy, the “only beautiful people should be allowed to rule” guy, the shamelessly-pandering populist guy, the let’s-plunder-the-rich guy, the “let’s just party all the time” guy, the “I’m just here to advertise my family’s private company” guy, the race tribe essentialist guy, the guy from the race that lives way longer than the others who wants to severely tax the young to spoil the old, and so on.
Or “tribes” but come on. Though on second thought, I don’t know enough Japanese to know if the localization just chickened out.
Which, maybe it didn’t? I’m tempted to assume oh, well this was just being sold to the weird Persona 5 fan kiddos who weirdly mistook that game for being anti-capitalist but that would presume the Japanese fanbase was the same—which maybe they were, I guess I can’t say, it’s just unusual for Japanese entertainment culture to put American preferences first.
Some of these kind of don’t even make sense. Like the paripus one is weird but also several races have unique physical proclivities like the eugief have especially good senses but people don’t like them because they don’t look humanoid, I guess? The nidia are naturally attractive and charismatic but this somehow hasn’t socially or politically benefitted them and it’s apparently a negative stereotype that they’re better at social deception except they’re also unironically better at deception because they have unique magical abilities that allow them to be.
Trying to avoid getting too into-the-weeds on this but I’m not saying there needs to be a justification for proving aspirations of racial equality in the real world, rather that ideas of freedom and equality didn’t evolve ex nihilo purely from a desire to make society nicer for the underclass—that reducing a free society to only racial equality is very much kind of missing the point. (Also let’s be real most Americans haven’t had to “contemplate the justifications that underlie the American ethos of equality and liberty” either.)
If it turns out I’m wrong about all this in the last parts of the last chapter that I haven’t finished I guess I’ll have to edit in a metaphorical eating of my hat here.
To rephrase an old joke tweet, the feMC playthrough does a pretty outstanding job of teaching a guy to sympathize with girls getting constantly hit on by beta losers and the only guy with a personality and a character arc is into some other chick who doesn’t deserve him.
Metaphor mixes this up by having multiple smaller side quest dungeons but this only magnifies the problem of having to spend an entire day on each one!
Sadly it performs really badly compared to my cultural commentary posts but I don’t even care.