Metaphor: ReFantazio Review

SEGA is back on the rise, and in no small part, thanks to Atlus. Not many will be unfamiliar with the name that has brought titles such as the venerated Persona series and great RPGs like SMT. Back at it again, with Metaphor: ReFantazio, Atlus has more or less proven themselves to be one of the RPG and JPRG developers out there.

A turn-based JRPG with great story elements that lets you embark on an epic adventure. The game borrows so much from its cousins, the Persona series, that it often risks being a clone. Yet, Metaphor: ReFantazio does a fantastic job at taking everything that makes Persona… Persona and turning it into a whole different and new game.

The game starts with a fantastic tutorial that not only sets the pace but also creates a great atmosphere. It is incredibly direct, giving you a fun and relatively short tutorial. Without really spoiling much, you are a character to save a prince who has been cursed. The king is dead, and now the kingdom is in peril, and there's more than one force at play to utilize the turmoil. 

Metaphor: ReFantazio quickly gets much, much more complex, especially with your own choices. You have to deal with a calendar and time, with each event being in concert with a ticking clock. You have limited time and a lot to do from speaking with NPCs, developing companions, or training yourself. Everything is a choice, and everything has a consequence.

Of course, there's a lot to do. The first notable thing is that you will be moving around the town, which looks absolutely stunning, by the way. You can interact with objects and places, talk to people and gather information. Of course, you can also talk to your companions, improve your relationships, and so on. 

Metaphor: ReFantazio’s combat system will be familiar to Persona fans as you are placed in a turn-based battlefield with front and back ranks. Each character gets a turn and an action in that turn. Enemies wander around in the world as you can move up to them or sneak behind them to smack them in the face, transitioning into turn-based combat. You do this by breaking their posture bar; this allows you to hit them a few times, potentially killing them before the battle even begins.

This is especially helpful for dealing with mass amounts of low-tier enemies. This is pretty neat, as you don't have to wade through a dozen battles to complete an area. This overall really gives a fast-paced vibe to the game where you zoom around the dungeon or mission and take out smaller tier enemies before engaging the big ones.

Once you enter the turn-based combat system, you really encounter the usuals, different actions, having a specific HP, there's the turn order, and so on. Some of the more unique elements include SMT's turn system, where each side has an allotment of moves. Synthesis moves, on the other hand, are multi-character moves that see your party work together to do really powerful strikes. This, of course, comes at a higher cost of turn points.

Metaphor: ReFantazio's combat mechanisms, however, seem odd; the main objective is to avoid running out of mana, which means that you're stuck with no way to recover from using too much mana early in a dungeon. Compared to Persona, this game's ambush mechanism is dreadful. It makes little difference whether you manage to get the upper hand, deal 6 hits or more, and reduce the monster's daze gauge to one pixel until its tail hits you.

When that happens, your party gets "surprised" and must take damage from every monster in the battle, which will gradually weaken them. So, it becomes a necessity to choose your class wisely before engaging in battle. They got rid of all-out strikes, knockdowns, and staggers, and they included a hotkey to start the fight over after you've discovered their weaknesses. Since you can no longer avoid enemies in the overworld, at least they were kind enough to provide the ability to kill them. This will come in handy when you're over-leveled.

Similar to Persona's attributes and five stats that affect not only the outcome and effect of a character's abilities, you have your Archetypes in Metaphor: ReFantazio. These are essentially unlockable classes that are powerful transformations that have different abilities and spells as well as weapons. You can be a dashing armored knight, a brawling warrior, or an elegant image. You unlock these classes as you meet more people and further your bond with them; furthering said bond also unlocks bonuses such as skills. Of course, unlocking them doesn't mean you get to use them. You have to actually spend one of the game's two currencies and level up certain archetypes. To level up, you'll find yourself delving into dungeons more often than your average Baldur's Gate 3 player. 

This is useful since the game enjoys more than a few quality-of-life changes that see you breezing through the dungeons without really feeling the grind. The real worry is with the time. Aside from tackling dungeons and whatnot, you also have to deal with a myriad of 'fetch quests,' which basically show you reach those dungeons as mentioned above. This progression is highly natural and often feels like a linear experience, even when it's not exactly the case. There's a variety in the dungeons as well, ranging from stealth sequences to timed missions.

Metaphor: ReFantazio encourages you to experiment with the Archetypes and companions, making it extremely easy to switch between them. Different Archetypes net different reactions from enemies and the enemies themselves have varying resistances. Your Archetype also affects your weapon and skills when not transformed. Added to that, the archetypes are incredibly cool and varied, and the game leaves you itching to find a new one so you can test it out.

However, the additional grinding for the abstraction of social stats on top of your basic stats is a bit frustrating. Finding random individuals to talk to and level up your social skills is somewhat more exhausting. Instead of a school providing random events, you spend ten days doing nothing but conversing with two people, watching a star graph slightly fill up, sleeping, and repeating until you complete the mission. The part of the mind prison where you level up your personas is strange, looks exactly like Persona, and serves no useful purpose whatsoever; worst of all, it no longer features the Wardens, who were fun to watch. 

Metaphor: ReFantazio’s combat has been dumbed down a lot, and to many, things might seem way too simple. The strategy elements have all but disappeared, really, with a lot of it just falling back to 'DON'T RUN OUT MANA,' as I mentioned earlier. But at least there's not a lot of grinding. It also takes a while for you to get into it. Despite the killer introduction, it'd take a good 4-5 hours before you get on your footing in the game. Still, everything after that is just one high after another.

The enemies are all weird, which, of course, is a good thing in a game. The monster design is fantastic and unique, often making you wonder what else the designers and developers have in store for you. The game also seems to have improved in its performance since the demo, with the occasional jitter and hiccup.

Remember how you're in a fantasy world with magic? Yeah, that's implemented exceptionally well. Metaphor: ReFantazio's world is massive, not in physical size, but in what it contains. The world is immaculate, with a lot of variety. You have people with a different color, wings, horns, elf-like ears, and so on. Funnily enough, no humans around.

There are varying beliefs and a visible class divide, and the game does a brilliant job of portraying all of that. It really tackles all the modern political debates with a cultured attitude, and at no point does it feel forced, fake, or strange. The magic is woven brilliantly as well.

The story is highly involved, and the world is actually affected by your choices. Speaking of which, the choices are fun and intriguing, with your main character not just feeling like a blank slate. As for the others, you need only one word. Gallica. That's it. Atlus made a great mascot for a character, and most of the other characters share the same spark. They're all intriguing and fun to talk to, making you really feel the vibes.

As an Atlus game, Metaphor: ReFantazio has a lot to live up to in terms of art style and design, and it does all of that and more. The game is already a beautiful thing, with its persona-like art style benefitting from the new setting. The anime-esque characters also fit pretty well, just like previous Atlus titles. That's not even starting with the UI. 

The UI is an Atlus classic and one of the major selling points of the game. Whether you're running, talking to someone, or mid-battle, the effects and UI do a really good job of making the game feel otherworldly. There's always something going on the screen, and that can often be overwhelming. It's almost indescribable how well-made the UI and effects are, and you can only really feel it if you're playing it.

The sound design is great, with each theme being different, and the voice acting leaves nothing to be desired. The battle theme has this ethereal chanting that gets you hooked and is really one of the many cool and minor things that make the game better.

Overall, Metaphor: ReFantazio leaves little room for criticism, and you'll find very little to complain about except for the $70 price tag and grinding for the abstraction of social stats and the ambush mechanism during combats. Other than these, the game is a well-rounded great that is an all-out barrage on the senses. You don't just play it; you experience it. The game is a great starting point for newcomers and a must-get for fans.