Introducing Metaphor: ReFantazio
It’s no secret that the Megami Tensei and Persona fandom have high expectations for the experiences these games provide. Their characters, combat depth, and overall presentation have seen their popularity increase significantly year over year. However, Atlus has never struck me as a one-trick pony, and I could understand if their developers need a break from those worlds to tell new kinds of stories. Enter, Metaphor: ReFantazio. This new IP from the developer remains in the JRPG genre, but it marks an excellent starting point for players who don’t know where to begin their Atlus journey.
During Play Days 2024, I was able to play through three different demo experiences that lasted around 15 minutes each. This gave me an overall sense of the gameloop and mission at hand, but I feel like there’s still a lot that I have yet to see.
The first part of the demo seemed to take place close to the beginning of the game as the Protagonist and his fairy companion, Gallica, push forward through a siege against a stronghold. This was where I witnessed most of the story scenes. There were several high-quality animated cutscenes, but most of the story is told in text box interactions.
Relationships and bonding with the characters are important, and the game’s mission structure encourages this as you’re allowed to freely spend your time exploring dungeons, completing side quests, and eventually progressing the narrative.
The voice-over for the English dub was decent and showcased a range of emotional moments between the characters. There’s definitely a lot at stake, and each character met along the way has their own motivations and demons, literally. Anyway, I don’t think fans want the story spoiled too much, so I’ll keep this brief.
Character Bonds and Ship Exploration
I will say that relationships and bonding with the characters are important, and the game’s mission structure encourages this as you’re allowed to freely spend your time exploring dungeons, completing side quests, and eventually progressing the narrative. However, this requires charting out your adventure on the map and not wasting too much time.
The character interactions take place in dungeons, but most of your time will be spent on your ship, which is honestly bigger than I had originally assumed. There’s a variety of things to do aboard the ship, but in one part of the demo, I was attacked by a large boss enemy. Luckily, I brought my years of JRPG skills to the match and defeated it. The media at the station next to me were not as successful.
A Gorgeous and Immersive World
Like other Atlus-developed JRPGs, combat requires players to take advantage of enemy weaknesses, but in this game, you have a few different options for how you want to build out your party. By customizing your Archetype, you can access a range of abilities. These different archetypes can be considered job classes and give players a high degree of customization in their party.
Customization is what separates Metaphor: ReFantazio from other Atlus JRPGs.
Further, they level up independently, so this is likely a place where you’ll spend most of your time as you round out your character’s strengths. There are also Synergy attacks that allow party members to unleash powerful attacks together. I will say that customization is what separates Metaphor: ReFantazio from other Atlus JRPGs. You’re strategizing in a completely different way, as you don’t necessarily need to focus on fusion. Still, you do need to understand how many actions are left in your pool and how to utilize joint-party abilities. In the end, battles are mostly swift, and some can be won by attacking them on the field.
Final Thoughts and Release Information
One area of gameplay I wasn’t able to check out was town exploration and interacting with NPCs outside of a dungeon. This has me curious to see just how large this game gets and how the gameplay loop evolves over hours of gameplay. However, one thing is certain: this is an exceptionally gorgeous game. It features all these little touches of quality that on paper might seem overwhelming, but they are so satisfying on-screen.
Thankfully, we won’t have to wait long for Metaphor: ReFantazio because it’s releasing on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC via Steam.
