Katsura Hashino certainly had a lot of time to reflect on the state of the world between the founding of Studio Zero in 2016 and the release of the Persona team offshoot's first game, Metaphor ReFantazio. This spin on the Persona formula may have the appearance of a fantastical story, but its narrative themes feel very much in line with contemporary topics--Metaphor deals outwardly with issues regarding collective anxiety and the social and racial disparities that fuel it. It's a game where a man who by any reasonable measure should not wield any political power is capable of swaying the public to his side with the declaration that only he can save them from an unjust world, taking advantage of communities who are woefully incapable of overcoming their own fears and misguided notions. It’s the most ripped-from-the-headlines story we’ve seen from Atlus. Metaphor also offered these Persona veterans a chance to remix the Persona-style turn-based combat with a jobs system, adding a degree of complexity that at times I found to be pretty overwhelming and even frustrating. But Metaphor is still a largely terrific spin on some old formulas.
Kingdom of Strife
Set in the fantastical kingdom of Euchronia, Metaphor is the story of an assassinated king, his cursed and dying heir, a would-be demagogue with an eye for the throne, and a resistance movement fighting to stop him. Upon the king’s death his spirit announces that his successor must be one who wins the support of the people, and the state church launches a tournament to organize the proceedings. Alongside these events is the protagonist’s mission to restore the prince’s health before the tournament ends.
There’s a lot going on in Metaphor’s plot, including the roles of state religion and prejudice in driving political tension, but one of the game’s standout components is chief antagonist Louis Guiabern. Louis—a delightfully calculated and charismatic performance from Joseph Tweedale—is a fantastic villain whose understandable motivations add just enough of a sympathetic bent to make him really compelling. I grew far more attached to Louis than most (if not all) Persona villains due to his constant presence in the story from the very onset, which gives him so much more time to develop and sink his teeth into the narrative.
The party you assemble is made up of members from Euchronia’s various races, called “tribes” here, and it is an eclectic group. Tribes are differentiated by unique physical features—clemar have horns while ishkia have wings; eugief are short and bat-like while roussainte are long-eared and tall, and so on. It’s a diverse cast with their own unique motivations for coming along on the journey, but what unites them is a common belief that they can forge a worthwhile future for themselves and their fellow citizens. It’s one of Metaphor’s strongest narrative elements, this idea that no matter how bleak things may be you can still refuse to accept it and fight for something better.
Crucially, the maturity of Metaphor’s cast ensures that the game’s themes are never taken lightly. It also means that the game is able to shake some of the pervasive caricatures and stereotypes that have gotten a bit repetitive across the Persona series—I’m pleased to say that your team in Metaphor contains no hot-headed, embarrassingly dull-witted boys (Yosuke, Ryuji, Junpei…)
This is the best-acted and best-written game to come out of Atlus. I was frequently surprised by the depth of the story, by some of the directions it takes and its dealings with political and religious actors—the well-meaning and ill-intentioned alike. It’s got a smart head on its shoulders, and all of this is a relief to say after some of the localization weirdness that weakened Persona 5’s script.
Metaphor is also great to look at, with beautiful character designs, distinct cultural aesthetics between the various tribes, and a world that looks rugged and rich with history. The visual design is at its least compelling in the game’s dungeons, which are uniformly muddy and bland, but the rest of Euchronia feels wonderfully lived-in. My favorite moments are the sightseeing stops that occur throughout the game, when you’re on route to a location and the team pulls off the road to see an environmental landmark or historical spot. These scenes are gorgeously illustrated and really pull you in.
On Archetypes and Killing Time
Metaphor is very much in line with the Atlus brand of calendar-games. It takes place over the course of several months that advance one day at a time, and during each day (outside of big story beats) you can take part in one afternoon activity and one evening activity. These activities typically involve raising your stats—reading a book to increase your Imagination or listening to a person talk about their culture to increase your Tolerance—and spending time with party members and non-party characters to improve your bond with them, unlocking various bonuses across the game. Persona veterans will immediately recognize everything here.
Exploring dungeons and fighting monsters is a key pillar of Metaphor and it’s here that I found the game to be at its most uneven. The turn-based combat system from Persona returns with some new tweaks and tricks. When running around in dungeons you have the option of initiating combat on a monster right away without any attacks needed. But if you get up on an enemy and hit them enough times you can stun them and start the battle with your foe already damaged and unable to take a turn. The risk is that if the enemy lands an attack on you during this phase, the battle will start in their advantage.
Additionally, combat now uses Turn Icons which decrease by 1 with every action. Landing a weak point attack no longer grants an additional action to the attacker but instead decreases the current Turn Icon by half. Most standard attacks consume 1 Turn Icon, but the more powerful attacks will use 2 or even 3. It’s more important than ever to pay attention to enemy immunities as well. If an enemy reflects or absorbs your attack, your team loses all of its Turn Icons. It’s a good, flexible system.
Notably, Metaphor employs the genre-staple job system, allowing you to put your companions into any of the game’s fourteen base “Archetypes” which can further develop into more advanced Archetypes. There are forty-six of them overall, with the advanced ones becoming available through your social bonds and requiring characters to achieve certain ranks in other Archetypes in order to be used.
This opens the door for a lot of possibilities and you can get pretty creative with it. The ability to easily add a small number of skills to an Archetype from another Archetype is huge, allowing you to try new things without leaving your favorite offensive or defensive skills behind. I liked the idea of using a healer Archetype who also has a devastating area-of-effect firebomb attack, or a life-stealing assassin Archetype who can whip out a party-wide heal when needed.
The consequence of such an open-ended system was that I never shook the feeling that I was playing inefficiently or incorrectly. I felt anxious whenever I had to burn two or three in-game days traveling to a dungeon, hoping that I wasn’t wasting my time getting into something that I was unequipped to handle because I had missing or underdeveloped Archetypes. The combat in Metaphor does feel markedly more punishing than the Persona games, and some of the boss battles are just downright mean. Countless times I found myself getting obliterated in fights and I had to step back and diagnose the problem. Is it my Archetypes? The characters I’m using? How about my equipment? Was there something I needed to buy in a shop before I embarked on this quest that is now too late to buy? Am I just bad? The questions would run through my head and sometimes I would come through with an answer and I would overcome the challenge and feel great about it. But the high number of times I just felt stumped were pretty deflating.
Part of why these situations were frustrating is because once a battle begins you are locked in with whatever Archetypes you had equipped. The game lets you instantly restart a battle at the press of a button, but incredibly this does not allow you to also change Archetypes at the same time. If it becomes apparent that a fight is unwinnable unless you have certain Archetypes on the field, the only way to course correct is to let your team get wiped and load an autosave or quit out and reboot the game entirely if it's faster. (And sometimes it was faster!) It's an overlooked quality of life feature that would've made me a lot more confident with the game.
Conversely, it’s also disconcerting that Metaphor runs into the same problem with enemy variety as Persona that turns these games into mind-numbing affairs. Over and over again you will fight the same pairings of fodder enemies in a dungeon, wiping them out in one turn dozens of times before finally reaching the end. The game does let you instantly wipe out lower level monsters when running around in a dungeon, but I would’ve loved to see it dynamically include those that I am soundly defeating in three seconds every time.
While I have a few misgivings about the structure of Metaphor’s combat, its world and story were absolutely worth experiencing. There are some lingering things I would love to see Atlus’ teams do better on: more enemy variety, a better-paced final month (it’s a big of a slog as usual), maybe some stronger writing around the social bonding (I like these characters a lot, but I don’t really need to hear the same “I feel like I can talk to you about anything” speech from every single one of them). This might be the point where the Atlus format starts to get a bit long in the tooth, but even when the tires start to spin a little they find ways to keep it interesting: in this case it’s the kingdom of Euchronia, steeped in lore, and the well-realized characters who are brought to life by some truly stellar performances, that make it all worthwhile.
