Journeying to an ancient ruin is largely uneventful, as your party takes in the sights of a grand fantasy world and bonds over the sandworm delicacy you ate from the last town. But the calm quiet is interrupted when another political candidate attacks your Gauntlet Runner. Brutally beating them down gets you hundreds of new fans — that’s just what happens in a battle for the crown.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is a massive new role-playing game from the makers of Persona — a grand tale of conspiracy, revolution, and societal anxiety. While Metaphor strikes out in its own direction with its bold narrative choices and tactical combat system, it stumbles when it integrates the tried-and-true Persona formula. Comparing Atlus games to Persona 5 is a tired practice at this point, I know, but in this case, it’s genuinely impossible to talk about one without the other.
A lot of Metaphor’s structure is based on the Persona formula, and only when the game breaks from that tradition is it at its very best. Metaphor is one of the year’s most important games, especially in terms of the prescient social commentary it wants to provide, but it could have been even better if it took an extra step outside of Persona’s shadow.
A Royal Revolution
Metaphor takes place in the Kingdom of Euchronia, where a religion called Sanctism holds just as much legislative power as the king himself. The people that inhabit Euchronia are made up of seven different tribes. Prejudice between these tribes runs rampant throughout society — from the masked Mustari tribe being labeled “Pagans,” to the beastly Paripus, who are often discriminated against by the bigger tribes for being less intelligent.
After the king is assassinated by an upstart lord named Louis Guiabern, a phenomenon called the Royal Magic activates — creating a competition to crown the next king. Whoever earns the most popularity of the people by a given date will be crowned the next king, regardless of who they are. You play as a young boy of the Eldan tribe, a tribe often seen as outcasts or freaks. You enter the competition for two reasons — to assassinate Louis and earn a spot on the throne for the prince, who was assumed to have perished 10 years ago but is secretly alive.
If you’ve played any Persona game, you’ll know they’re extremely heavy on story, and Metaphor is exactly the same. As you compete in the competition for the crown, you’ll travel across the entrancing kingdom of Euchronia, visiting different towns, meeting the people, and solving no shortage of problems. This is a tale filled with heart, emotion, and shocking twists — but one that also integrally has multiple meaningful themes to impart.
Metaphor is a heavily thematic game that weaves multiple pieces of social commentary throughout the experience, and it’s shockingly progressive in its worldview. The primary theme is the idea of how “fantasy can influence” reality. This is represented in a couple of different ways: the hideous monsters of the land called Humans and in the novel the protagonist reads, which is essentially an idealized version of our world. The game’s big meta-message is that the media we consume can inspire us to change the world, but multiple smaller themes tie into that as it flows through the game.
The competition to become king is filled with larger-than-life personalities, candidates who all espouse their ideals — ruling through power, lifting a single tribe into dominance, embracing beauty, etc. But what’s remarkable about Metaphor is how revolutionary it feels, quite literally. The game’s narrative makes a case for change enacted by the people, and how we should inherently challenge our leaders — whether they be religious, ideological, or of the state. It feels like Metaphor is a particularly important game for this exact moment in history — a time when the world feels horribly divided, and when it feels like the average person has less power and purpose than ever before. Metaphor is a game about the power of the people, and society’s responsibility to make the world a better place. The way all of these ideas come together is utterly remarkable, and the game illustrates those ideas both through its main story and the party members.
On that note, much like Persona, the party members are the beating heart of Metaphor. Most of the game’s best writing, and most emotional moments, lie in their personal stories. Strohl is a fallen noble with a staunch sense of justice, struggling to ensure the safety of his people. Heismay is a father grieving his lost child, unable to find his way in life because of it. Hulkenberg is a knight who failed in her duty to protect the prince and has punished herself every day for it.
These emotionally complex characters masterfully play into the game’s themes of prejudice, oppression, and freedom. More than anything that’s my biggest surprise of Metaphor — how well the various weighty themes and topics are handled. As much as I love Persona, the writing in those games often falls flat, failing to really capture their proposed themes. Metaphor shows more sophistication on Atlus’ part, a willingness to think about these topics on a larger scale. To be clear, however, things don’t really come together perfectly until the end of the game, and there’s a large amount of time the story spends spinning its wheels.
That leads me to my only major issue with Metaphor: the implementation of Persona’s time management and social systems.
Wasting Time
As masterfully as Metaphor tackles its narrative, I can’t help but shake the feeling that it didn’t need any of those Persona elements. Metaphor is at its best in those big story swings, but it feels like the time management and social stats (called Virtues here) are completely ancillary to that story and core experience.
The big problem I have here is how it differs from Persona. In the Persona games, time management is an extrapolation of exploring a high school setting, and the protagonists’ adolescence. These systems work in support of each Persona game’s main themes — these are games entirely about building bonds, exploring yourself, and learning about the world. The time and social stat mechanics support those ideas brilliantly.
With Metaphor, however, it feels like elements of the game were built around wanting to use that time management — this is an evolution of Persona so it has to feature that formula. But the pacing and impetus of the story simply doesn’t support the formula. Having to boost your stats, meter out time for followers, and juggle all the other activities doesn’t feel like it meshes with the story of fighting for the crown. At the same time, these features simply aren’t implemented as well as they are in Persona games.
I never felt like I had a good understanding of how the time of events was flowing, or how many free days I could expect on the next dungeon. That might be part of the point, but to me, these time management systems hurt the pacing of the story. Big events feel needlessly drawn out, while the game’s best storytelling lies in the bonds you build with Followers.
I consistently kept thinking I’d enjoy Metaphor more if those simulation elements were taken out entirely — which was surprising to me considering it’s my absolute favorite part of the Persona series. It’s the one mark against a game that I otherwise adored on every point, and one that does evolve Persona’s formula in one other key way: combat.
Combating Injustice
Metaphor has one of the best turn-based combat systems in video game history, period. It’s a brilliant evolution of Persona’s weakness-exploiting combat, raised to new heights by a brilliant job system.
The crux of the combat system is turn icons, with each character getting one turn icon. This means you can take four actions on any turn, one for each character, but exploiting an enemy’s weakness will give you an extra turn icon, while getting your attack reflected or dodged can wipe out your turn icons. Like Persona, this is a combat system that’s easy to pick up initially, but drastically grows in complexity as you advance through the game. There’s an extra wrinkle thrown into the mix as you can directly attack enemies in the environment, with some light action-esque combat. Weak enemies can be entirely defeated with the action combat, while reducing a guard gauge for a stronger enemy will let you launch a preemptive attack that instantly depletes some of their health.
In Metaphor, you unlock different jobs, called Archetypes, with each one filling a drastically different role in combat. The Warrior can buff allies’ attack and heavily focuses on physical strikes, the Seeker blends magic attack and support, the Knight can distract enemies and soak up damage, and the Mage specializes in exploiting elemental weaknesses. On top of this, Synergy attacks let you combine the powers of two jobs for a variety of different actions, using two turn icons instead of one. There’s a vast web of different jobs to unlock, and the interplay between them adds a ton of different options for building your party and strategies. A big part of this is that each job can inherit skills from other jobs, giving you literally hundreds of ways to build your characters.
This is one of the few RPG job systems that can rival Final Fantasy, and I can’t overstate how much fun it was to level up jobs, unlock new ones, and mix and match skills to find the most powerful party I could.
Metaphor is also an extremely challenging game, more on the level of Shin Megami Tensei than Persona in that regard. Bosses can especially be real trials, and while I won’t spoil anything, the final gauntlet of bosses is truly one for the ages.
There’s also a lot of extra content to explore in Metaphor, between optional bounty bosses to take on, dungeons to explore, and side quests to tackle. But this is another area where things feel a bit mixed. All of the game’s main dungeons have unique gimmicks that make them feel vibrant and exciting, but the side dungeons begin to feel extremely generic after a while. They often reuse the same cave-like or forest setting, with almost no visual and structural variation. It’s odd considering how much genuine difference is packed into those main dungeons, and another reason why I feel like that time management system works against the game. Repeating dungeons and content that feel markedly similar stand in stark contrast to the wonderful nuances of the main story.
All For One
Metaphor: ReFantazio is a startling, insightful RPG that succeeds far more than it struggles. This genuinely feels like a massive step up for Atlus in terms of storytelling and writing, and the genuine way the game tackles its themes feels important. It also needs to be stated that the game’s visual presentation is astounding. Once again Atlus has outdone itself, with menus that practically look like a moving renaissance painting, and a soundtrack that perfectly captures the grand fantasy tone.
But at the same time, I can’t deny the structure of Metaphor simply doesn’t work for me — and I wish Atlus could have completely dropped Persona’s influence to strike out in an entirely new direction.
Still, it’s the way Metaphor made me ponder societal problems that truly surprised me, and is going to sit with me for a long time. It’s an important story about challenging the status quo and those in power — all in the name of making the world a better place. In my book, that’s exactly what we could use more of right now.
8/10
Metaphor: ReFantazio launches on Oct. 11 for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Inverse reviewed the Xbox version.
INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.
