Metaphor: ReFantazio Review

If you’ve only seen a trailer or two of Metaphor: ReFantazio in passing, you might be baffled about this strange fantasy concoction from a collection of Persona creatives at Atlus’ Studio Zero. Combat and the rolling daily schedule filled with relationship building will be familiar to fans of Persona’s school-sim slash dungeon-crawling antics. Everything else sets a distinctly different first impression. 

After an unusually bloody opening cutscene featuring a fantasy king slain in his bed, events switch to you, the player, interacting with a “scheming man” in what looks like present-day Tokyo. You engage in a conversation about the symbolic aspects of fantasy in contrast to reality’s stark mundanity. Ideas about utopia. Should fantasy be contained to fiction, and how much life could it take on if it wasn’t? After this idiosyncratic and foreboding opening, you’re immediately plonked into the video game proper, amidst a backdrop of mediaeval high fantasy interspersed with elements of steampunk and the odd splicing of industrial architecture. There’s also a lot of xenophobia and alienation, targeted specifically at your mysterious player character who represents the maliciously oppressed tribe of human-looking Elda. Humans are the most feared of all beings in this world and there’s a lot of metaphorical allusion played with here.

So, it’s going to take some time for players to quite work out what this game is doing or saying due to its bonkers and indulgent prologue, but things eventually shake out to be quite reasonable. Or well, at least it makes sense in my head. Our scorned hero is setting out on a journey to the Royal Capitol to slay the kingslayer and lift a curse that binds the prince heir to perpetual rest. Along this journey, we meet some like-minded comrades. Upon reaching the Capitol, the assassination plot goes balls up due to the interference of a magic spell cast by the late king. A monolithic visage of the king’s face now hovers over his subjects and declares a democratic election to decide his successor, a spanner in the works for the aspiring usurper and your mission.

A hover-sword is sick but a follow-up needs to add flips and tricks

Now, your only shot at lifting the curse is to sway this kingdom to your popular vote, as any potential candidates will be granted magic immortality until it is over. In short, you will adventure about this world to gain standing while finding a way to overcome the kingslayer and political rival Louis and lift the prince’s curse. Oh, and Louis is giving Griffith vibes, so be keen for that. It’s all a far cry from the amnesiac adventurer who wakes up in a village and a surprising counterpoint to Final Fantasy’s cultural imprint on the genre. I love what it’s attempting. 

The early game is remarkably sombre (despite bouts of surprising violence) and without the overblown fanfare or poppy funk riffs of the Persona series. Your initial companion is a fairy called Gallica and her first spell cast upon the protagonist is that of music. Just music. And then it erupts through the speakers: horns, baritone backing chants and a wailing alto belting it out over an epic fantasy anime theme. As a big fan of Atlus’ various RPG franchises, the first impressions laid down in the opening dozen hours constantly played with my expectations of spectacle. The game was always delivering fresh music, art, characters, and systems in a way that felt perfectly welcoming to both newcomers and sickos like myself curious about what this studio of roleplaying experts have in store with this fresh property.

Everything looks slick, with the exemplars of fashionable yet functional interfaces back at it again. Forging new bonds with supporters and levelling up is rewarded with a colourful, inspired mishmash of styles. A party select screen shows your characters as breathing, heavily stroked watercolour portraits. There’s a rebellious approach to fantasy fonts, with a gonzo variety of framing and text styles that only this studio could pull off so confidently in its readability. It is so easy to look past the occasional flat textures and sparsely detailed environments when every other element of the game is so masterfully artistic. This is not a high-fidelity game, but there are no pop-ins, delays, visual artifacts or bugs to speak of. What it lacks in detail, it makes up for with an excess of style that is head and shoulders above its competition.  

It’ll be a struggle going back to ordinary-looking menus after this

The turn-based RPG combat that players will recognise from Persona has been streamlined with a bunch of iterative improvements and design pillars borrowed from Atlus’ other tentpole RPG series Shin Megami Tensei and Etrian Odyssey. Facing your party of four against a bunch of foes also requires consideration for positioning now, with allies in the back row being shielded but dealing less physical damage. Unless you’re on the hardest or easiest of the five difficulties, you can always tweak your challenge settings on the fly. The hard as fuck game over screen is never a bummer (reads: “FANTASY IS DEAD”), giving players a bevy of attractive options for how they get back into the fray. Before initiating battle, you can do a little hack ‘n slashing of foes in the overworld with square to stun them and get a huge combat advantage when the encounter begins proper. Even better is hitting foes you have out-levelled, who simply die on the spot, saving you time grinding out redundant fights while still giving players the full reward.

Whereas Persona and SMT have relied on using the same bestiary of creatures from pantheons and myth, Metaphor resorts to goblins and familiar fantasy fiends. Its big innovation for the player’s characters is that they will channel heroic “archetypes” by the strength of their hero spirit (and tearing their hearts out, for some reason). There are more than a couple dozen of these functional character classes, and they do a great job of recontextualising Atlus’ now-standard assortment of combat skills and systems. Rather than managing a monster roster and building demons with your ideal skill set, each archetype has a specific set of abilities and stats that are strictly predetermined. After levelling these up like jobs or classes in other RPGs, you can carry over some skills before learning another archetype path with additional advanced types to unlock.

A funny one I encountered midway through was the Merchant archetype, a bulbous creature that houses a store of gold bullion in its stomach cavity. It deals damage to enemies by shaking an enormous abacus above its head, dealing one damage per coin it throws with a high chance of critical, and no enemies have resistance to this money shower. This archetype can later be evolved into the Tycoon. These continue to get sillier and are in direct conversation with Atlus’ backlog of RPGs, but that’s spoiler territory for the fans to discover.

The archetypes look like imposing fantasy mechas

Dungeon crawling is the core gameplay loop of Atlus’ RPGs, but Metaphor confidently brings the best variety of dungeons that their 3D RPGs have seen to date. Dungeons most closely resemble those of Etrian Odyssey, seeming quite bland and basic on the surface but watch out for traps, puzzles, and plenty of hidden paths. Items from that series also cross over here, including its most famous and crucial for escaping a dungeon when doomed, Ariadne’s Thread. Due to the overworld map filling up with new dungeons frequently, some minor asset reuse is evident. Again, I didn’t mind though, these zones were always perfectly paced with one or two mega beasts patrolling and a satisfying handful of treasures to eke out during exploration. They’re arguably basic and forgettable, but they serve the purpose of being a brief and rewarding respite between the major, high-stakes hours-long dungeons that players will need to clear by particular dates on the calendar.

Both Japanese and English voiceover casts deliver resoundingly enthusiastic performances. After 30 hours in Japanese, I was surprised to play the remaining 60 with the English voice cast. It isn’t the prestige watermark of Final Fantasy XVI, but in my opinion, this is the strongest voice work we’ve seen for an Atlus adventure. It’s all done with breathless drama and a real desire to fully realise these characters and their idiosyncrasies in a world defined by its prejudices.  

Metaphor: ReFantazio isn’t without its issues, but its biggest one is annoyingly familiar for longtime Atlus heads. The tap of fresh content, biomes, enemies, and classes gets a hard shut-off when the game enters its third act. This is an issue I have with virtually all the third acts in Atlus RPGs before they get their inevitable redux release a few years later. The final 30 hours limited me to brutally long stretches of grind in a relatively tiny area against the same handful of foes I’d fought all game purely to bump up some stats. Hours-long, exhaustive boss fights that feel artificially difficult. I saw virtually nothing but recycled bosses and enemies at this point, with the game even making errant comments about how many times I had already faced off against particular baddies. It’s the stereotypical final act combat onslaught that often sours the denouement of many a JRPG. The cynical part of me suspects I’ll be paying full price again in a few years to get the marvellous third act that I’m sure Studio Zero has envisioned.

You’ve got to earn your stripes by slaying goblins by the dozens

Final Thoughts

A wild and successful experiment for Atlus’ Studio Zero, Metaphor: ReFantazio is a sober and confronting conversation with the player about reinventing the fantasy roleplaying experience that has been synonymous with Square Enix’s Final Fantasy. This excitingly realised world of magic and tech reflects the prism of current-day humanity upon its canvas in often confronting ways but with an excess of style to boot. You may even find a few metaphors about social cohesion and prejudice in here. Exciting for those Persona fans with an appetite for something bloodier and traditional but find Shin Megami Tensei’s brand of fantasy too indulgent with religious esoterica.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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