Metaphor: ReFantazio is another unforgettable RPG from the Persona creators

It would have been all too easy for Atlus to deny the creative forces behind Person 3, 4 and 5 the chance to strike out on their own.

While the Persona franchise enjoyed niche popularity on the PS2, the coming out party of Persona 5 and its subsequent spin-offs had made the series a mainstay of modern gaming. Persona 6 is surely in development as we write this, but with Metaphor: ReFantazio, Studio Zero has firmly established another RPG franchise that can stand alongside the Japanese school-em-up, and even improve future Personas.

For all the ways Metaphor: ReFantazio is like Persona, the game tries its best to establish its differences from the outset. The game takes place in a fantasy setting, about as far away from the busy streets of Akihabara as you can imagine. The aesthetics are lifted from fantasy books rather than the popping, harsh colors of manga and anime. The soundtrack, no longer built on J-Rock anthems and ear-worm beats, is instead full of orchestral scores and chanting.

If you’re a Persona veteran, your eye will catch more than a few similarities, and intentional references, but after a few hours, we stopped thinking about the game as simply ‘fantasy Persona’ and instead as its own confident, incredibly well-made RPG.

Metaphor: ReFantazio follows the story of a kingdom in chaos after the death of its monarch. The true heir is unable to ascend to the throne due to being inflicted with a curse, and it’s your job to break it. Each in-game day, players will be able to do one activity in the afternoon, and one in the evening. Major dungeons must be completed before the in-game deadline, or the quest will fail and you’ll have to reset several days. The challenge is fitting in all of the activities you want to do in the time allotted before the deadline.

The activities vary in scope from traditional side missions and optional dungeons to conversations with your party. These conversations increase your bond with your party which can lead to more combat options, better items, and discounts in shops. There are also conversations and events around the world that increase the protagonist’s virtues, such as courage, wisdom, and eloquence.

Often, late-game conversations with party members require these virtues to be at a high level, so there’s an impetus to make sure you’re spending each of your days and nights wisely. We’d have enjoyed some more non-combat-based side activities to go along with these conversations, but it’s not a glaring omission.

The cast of characters is rich, and even late in the game, when it feels like it’s building to an obvious conclusion, new characters are introduced that have generous backstories, and quests for the player. The amount of things to do and dialogue to read in the game is staggering. Ultimately it’s a game that aims to balance long, combat-intense dungeons with long, exposition-intense conversations with your party. It does this excellently.

“The cast of characters is rich, and even late in the game, when it feels like it’s building to an obvious conclusion, new characters are introduced that have generous backstories”

On the combat side, the game is turned-based. While exploring overworld dungeons, you’re able to attack enemies with basic hack-and-slash combat. If they’re weak enough, they’ll die instantly, but if they pose a threat you’ll enter the game’s main combat system.

While its presentation is fairly traditional, the game’s turn-based combat shines when paired with the main battle mechanic: Archetypes. Archetypes allow the player character and their party to transform into magic spirits, harnessing long-dormant power.

These hulking brutes play on common fantasy tropes. There’s the knight, the mage, the cleric, the thief, and so on. As the game progresses, enhanced versions of these Archetypes can be unlocked and upgraded, as well as swapped around between party members.

Archetypes can also combine with other Archetypes present in the same battle party to deliver devastating moves in battle, at the expense of most of your remaining turn. There’s a great amount of variety to be found in experimenting with Archetypes, and the game does a good job of pushing you to explore your options.

One Archetype will be extremely overpowered in one dungeon, but then in the following one, it feels like the developers intentionally make them largely useless in order to force you to experiment.

Levelling up the Archetypes is very quick, so there’s very little reason not to change. By the conclusion of the game, we had maxed out over 20 of the available Archetypes just for the protagonist, and that’s not counting all those we maxed out for our incredibly overcrowded party.

“There’s a great amount of variety to be found in experimenting with Archetypes, and the game does a good job of pushing you to explore your options.”

Dungeons themselves are rather forgiving in the sense that as long as you have time left on your calendar, you can return to your base, recharge, and then get back to it the next day with a fully healthy party. There are checkpoints throughout the dungeon that you can fast-travel between, and the game’s autosave provides liberal checkpointing

While the in-personal stories between characters are strong, the overarching narrative isn’t massively engaging. There are some attempts to deal with real-world social issues that also fall somewhat flat and are distractingly simplistic in their worldview.

The pacing in the late game also falters somewhat. This is a fine line to walk, as the late-game introduces new characters that you’d like to have enough time to fully get to know and bond with, but you’re also keen to see how the story progresses, leading to friction.  While Metaphor’s main narrative isn’t one that we’ll hold long in the memory, the game’s cast of supporting characters is strong.

Metaphor: ReFantazio utterly excels from a presentation perspective. The art style is inventive and varied, the character designs are extremely detailed, even when a character is only on screen briefly, and the dozens of animations for Archetypes are so well done that it was one of the main reasons we were excited to unlock a new one.

The overworld dungeons can look a little bit unrefined and bland, but it’s never a major issue. The battle screen is colorful and stylish while still being easily readable in the heat of battle. The game’s major moments are punctuated with fully animated anime cutscenes which serve as both exposition and a reward for the player finishing a major dungeon.

Paired with the great art is the imperious soundtrack which will be almost instantly stuck in your head, even if you can’t make out a single lyric. While the moment-to-moment music isn’t as full of bangers as the Persona titles, the battle theme is sure to become iconic. It’s a high-tempo, pounding orchestral score that is punctuated with chanting that sounds like Serj Tankian is chasing you down the street.

Metaphor makes us very excited for the future of Atlus. While we can’t wait to return to the streets of Japan for Persona 6, the emergence of Metaphor: ReFantazio as a new franchise right alongside it means that the future looks even brighter for the developer.

We’d happily trade off a new Metaphor and new Persona going forward, and as much as Metaphor: ReFantazio already achieves, it feels like a second game set in this world, now that the team has found its footing, could be incredible.

A copy of Metaphor: ReFantazio was provided by Sega for this review.