Metaphor: ReFantazio

✋🏻Absolute cinema🤚🏻

Atlus has crafted a new story with a heavier tone than their usual Persona series, marked by outstanding character development and world-building. It tackles complex themes like diversity and racism with nuance, while also exploring relatable, heart warming themes such as turning dreams (fantasies) into reality. Each theme is good written with many side content to shine on them more and were thoughtfully concluded, with meaningful messages and satisfying conclusions to the characters’ arcs. The story wraps up every plot point and side theme, creating a complete journey from fantasy to reality.

This new Atlus series stands as a fully realized experience and a true masterpiece in the gaming industry, one that I can’t wait to see more content from in the future.

GAMES LIKE THESE ARE WHY IM STILL ALIVE WHAT THE FUCK‼️‼️‼️‼️

It definitely looks like atlus is just laying down comfortably with their golden egg formula of jrpgs and raking in the money,
Or maybe its the opposite and theyre stuck on that formula and too scared to change.either way that ship has sailed and it definitely shows,with most stuff in this game being a husk of their former entries.the characters quests were never shallower,the dialogue an unending blabber of nothingness,the annoying ps2 fetch quests and the same time management mechanic they’re been using for around 2 decades now.this was all either unchanged or a big decline from other games and that is a huge disappointment,not only because its from the director of my favorite game series,but also because when i heard he was working on a new ip for 8 years the expectations were of something new,and this was anything but that.
Its sort of conflicting writing all this bc game did pick up the pace and started evolving nicely,the story though the regular Atlus morality blabber had a great 2nd half and maybe one of the best villains in a game or any media even though he too was mishandled,having ideals so stunning,but the way he gets to them being once again so lazy!
Anyways ,the combat also took a turn for the best at the 2nd half with some of the best,and memorable bosses i ever fought in turn based and overall.
But that was around the 55hour mark,and its just not right to dismiss all that time because of a good last boss and a tear jerker ending.

Metaphor Refantazio is the newest game from Studio Zero, consisting of the development team that worked on Persona 3,4, 5, and Catherine. Seeing the sales numbers for Metaphor I doubt many people have played all of the above so it's easy for people to read “fantasy persona” and consume that falsely as FACT. The poignancy of SMT for me, different from Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and other classic JRPGs (except maybe Mother 3) are the themes. Even amongst the new wave persona trilogy every atlus game aims to have some kind of a unique over arching “theme.” I enjoy video games tho so I'll take some solid turn based combat on top of those themes any day, but that often comes at a price. Especially in the olden days of fantasy JRPGs, which Metaphor aims to revitalize, grinding and padding plagues the runtimes. Now, 40 years after Atlus began, Metaphor still manages to be too fucking long. Persona 5 Royal solved many of the original games problems, and some of 3 and 4's problems, but they shove 30+ hours of padding and any theme can grow stale. In an attempt to ‘learn’ or ‘evolve,’ Metaphor tries to solve the padding issues by eradicating story pacing. The arcs in Metaphor are the closest to kishotenketsu I've seen out of an Atlus rpg, but they have little to no story significance. The director Katsura Hashino said that Metaphor was about “anxiety,” and due to the strange pacing choices the whole game makes out to be a facade for what Hashino really wants to say. This is more obvious in the bonds, which I believe are the strongest overall the persona series has been. Basing character plots around anxiety rather than tarot cards is surprisingly freeing for the writers, and you can tell that changing the ranks from 10 to 8 allowed them to tell a more concise story. Where P5R shined was intertwining party characters into the overall plot, where the stories the social links told were extensions of the games overall story. IMO P3 and P4 didn't do this, at least not well (Teddy-_-). However, Metaphor does not return to form, so to speak, because it has different aims than P3 and P4 in how it handles its themes. That's all to say: at its very core Metaphor plays nothing and feels nothing like Persona.
I'll wrap back around to the story and themes but that's a good transition into the gameplay. I seesawed constantly in this exhilarating limbo of thinking this was the worst combat in the entire series and thinking it was the pinnacle of turn based combat because of how different it is to SMT. No Fusion, no skill inheritance(kinda), and no demons. The archetypes are far more akin to equipment in DQ or FF than anything we've seen from SMT. You can rotate your archetype, that archetypes abilities, and your actual equipment on the fly meaning deep and rapid customization opportunities. To encourage this rapid experimentation you are almost always allowed the opportunity to pay for information about enemy strategies and weaknesses. This becomes problematic as sometimes you aren't given this information and sometimes you forget to buy it if you are allowed it. For example to find the locations of the divine towers you HAVE to buy the information. For every other location in the entire game you obtain the location upon accepting the quest. This mistake costed me 1 day in game and I was pissed off. Coming from Persona I had no idea how tight the calender was so every mistake gave me a severe level of anxiety, which I shall get to later. Another time I lost an unnecessary day was the Minotaur boss fight, which I drained all my MP grinding to get to, leaving me incapable of beating the boss. I went back to Grand Trad, ate, and returned to the dungeon knowing I need to skip every enemy and head straight for the boss. But what's that? The boss is impossible until you grind 4 MORE levels? Hey man that's fucked up. For the rest of the game if I hit a point in which the boss was impossible on hard after a few attempts, instead of dragging my dick around the dungeon grinding for an hour or more I would drop the difficulty to easy, woop the bosses ass, and move on with my life. Many of the optional and side bosses are like this, and with many of them being re-skins I eventually hit a point where I said fuck the side quests and let whoever needed help rot. The main story bosses are far better designed, and general ads present the most strategic moments due to the planning that is required of you to even survive. You are never given too much money or mag so what you buy - items, equipment, or archetypes - is often limited which adds to the challenge of theory crafting a build. That is unless you grind it every dungeon for an extra hour, which makes you a cuck BTW. But, in spite of all that hate, when this game clicks it fucking clicks hard. When all the pieces come together and you spend ten minutes in More's library making a build and you're still pushed to your limit in combat that's when the game is untouchable. I remember when I got Heismay I went “well, I guess I need to remake my entire build to add 1 party member,” and it was fun changing my entire play style even though it was expensive and time consumong. I think they noticed how expensive it would be to add party members as the game went on which is why Masked Dancer, Summoner, and Berserker are so OP by themselves. It's a testament to the games design that even after getting all the party members you are forced to keep swapping to who is best suited for a specific fight. I doubt it's possible to soft lock yourself, but I can see someone picking shitty archetypes (ie; brawler, merchant, thief) and ending up with a useless party member. Another big new addition is the over world real time combat which maintains tension between battles. I really like this, far more than over world combat in Persona, but it should be noted that on hard difficulty if you loose in the over world you are guaranteed to loose the battle.
Before I talk about story I'd like to bring up the music and art direction which are both very good. It's hard to go wrong with these in an Atlus game and this is no exception. The particle effects are my favorite innovation, and the mixture of what seems to be CGI stop motion and the regular models, if that's the correct term, is beautiful. I saw an interview where Hishino talked about how these as well as the combination of RTC and TBC were to meld together the feeling of reading a manga and watching a movie or anime and I think they succeeded. The game is visually stunning and atmospheric and anyone who tells you otherwise is jealous. The shortness in comparison to P5R means no baseball, no part time job, no romance, no tokyo, and the game is overall less immersive, but it wasn't trying to be so I don't fault it for that. I barely met requirements but I had minimal performance issues which lessened as atlus continued to patch the game post launch. But I want to talk about story now so in conclusion: game pretty and fun, not immersive but atmospheric and unique.
As I said each arc of the game is superfluous to the overarching story, but they are not superfluous to the overarching theme. In my most humble of efforts I will attempt to “rhetorically analyze” the theme of ‘anxiety’ in Metaphor Refantazio. Anxiety is your fight or flight which is an amalgamation of natural and trained responses to uncertainty. It's very scientific. In Metaphor anxiety is the source of all magic and whoever has the greatest control over it is the strongest. This means, very simply, no matter how delusional, the person with the strongest resolve wins. The reason Louis loses in game is because Protag has a stronger resolve. That's kinda bullshit. The whole game learning about people needing to overcome their anxieties in order to grow, and the ending is just “I'm better at it than you tho so you're just gonna end up following me.” This hits pretty deep because I'm not sure what the message is then supposed to be because the game contradicts itself so much. If utopia is unrealistic, why is the Protag validated to search for it? And when he finds it he's like no that's fake because lore reasons, implying it's unrealistic to search for utopia but within your own beliefs and resolve there will be peace. But he becomes king and everything is great like wtf. And the entire prospect of being king in game before you was to carry peoples anxieties, meaning ideally you'd want to deal with your anxieties on your own and not toss them aside because they pile up. Kinda strange then that once you become king you have the power to make people's lives better when the message should been fuck the kingship everyone should learn how to deal with their problems on their own and don't unload them onto everyone else. Now, there is one slight caveat. When a looking at the story, when seeing the themes, analyzing the ending, it all looks kinda like the Protag is supposed to be Jesus Christ. Now in a game filled with sacrilegious themes and indulgence that's pretty fucking ironic. Well anyways it's not as bad as Death Strandings ending because at least I almost agree with it, but it's unfortunate how there's never been a big AAA story driven game that goes “yeah the answer is Christ,” and leaves it at that. But shareholders and producers would never allow that, especially not shit hole Japan. Eh I dunno maybe 8/10, worth playing and the story is extremely captivating, but the themes are imperfect and even with all the quality of life there remains many aspects which keep the turn based jrpg formula quite tedious.

Great
100 hours, the last 20 hours dragged a bit but stil great game