Metaphor: ReFantazio (PlayStation 5) review "A mostly brilliant and tense fantasy with a compelling message, marred by unexpected bloat at the eleventh hour..."

The first seventy or eighty hours of Metaphor: ReFantazio are terrific.

Crafted by Studio Zero at Atlus, the team also responsible for Catherine, Metaphor: ReFantazio is the developer’s first major non-Persona RPG in basically forever. And if you didn’t know that before playing it, you would have a good chance of guessing it shortly into the proceedings. The beautiful art style is familiar. The monsters, though not usually pulled directly from that other franchise, bear thematic similarities. And there are spell names and such that come from the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei universes. Besides all of that, there are frequent moments where the game just feels reminiscent, due to a familiar structure that can’t fade completely into the background even when it’s doing things on its own terms.



The story opens with the violent murder of an elderly monarch in his bedchamber. Much blood is spilled before the poor fellow goes quietly into that good night. However, it isn’t long before we learn that while his physical form may have reached its end, the king still had a few tricks left up his sleeve. In spectral form, he serves as the omniscient host of a new tournament that will determine the kingdom’s next ruler. He doesn’t even seem to mind that his murderer is a leading candidate.

The player character, who is not quite you, is a longshot candidate. The game has you choose your name from the beginning, which is separate from the name you assign the protagonist. I went with “Jason” as my name, because I’m an original kind of guy. And I chose “Herman” as the name of the heroic warrior who might just wind up saving the kingdom. Many important scenes include spoken dialog that finds ways to avoid uttering whatever names you choose, though they still appear on-screen. My advice is to do as I did and use only the most heroic of names if you wind up playing the game.

And you should indeed wind up playing the game. Probably. Its first seventy or eighty hours are not to be missed. I found myself thinking about it while I was at work ringing up people’s groceries, wishing I could be at home playing it and seeing what might happen next in times of heavy plot. Or I would consider a dungeon I’d been exploring, or ponder a particular side adventure. Such musing doesn’t occur as often as you might suppose, now that I’ve played and completed as many games as I have. It’s safe to say this one really got its hooks in me.



I mentioned the structure, which reminds me of Persona 3. With few exceptions, days are divided into three chunks. The first chunk happens automatically and usually involves your characters having a conversation about recent events. That brief chunk sets the scene, and then you can choose what to do with the afternoon and evening portions of your day. Typically, you can either spend some time with a “follower” to develop your connection with them (this game’s equivalent of the “Social Link” element players will recall from Persona), or you engage in an activity that might lead to a small stat increase, or you can head to a dungeon somewhere in the world. If you choose to venture to a dungeon, you automatically tie up your evening slot, which is something to consider.

Time is limited no matter what you do. When you delve into a dungeon, you can stay there and fight for as long as your resources and patience permit. But if you need to rest up without using restorative items, that ties up another day. And there’s so much to do in the game that you can’t really afford to waste even one precious moment. This tension instills every decision you make with urgency. Even a chore like washing one’s clothes might prove a critical waste of your time. I reached the end of the game with nearly all of my followers maxed out, and I truly wasted maybe ten of my available slots in total. Laundry happens even in worlds where there are dragons. Even that small indiscretion was enough to prevent me from (only just barely) managing that perfect run I desired. Seriously, you’re working with a tight schedule. Don’t dilly-dally.

Although time is limited, you face fewer restrictions than in Persona 3 (which I keep referencing because I played its excellent “Reload” earlier this year). In the older game, you could engage with key characters on only particular days of the week, which meant you practically had to keep a calendar going to balance everything. Here, you will usually find them only in the afternoon or evening slot. Exactly when they appear varies by character, but it’s not as hard to track. And sometimes, you have to complete a special assignment to keep them going, but a menu assists. The bigger factor is how virtuous you are. The game focuses on five dimensions, such as courage and imagination. Perhaps the most important of them is tolerance.

You improve your tolerance by listening to characters from other cultures as they tell their story, and by helping them through tribulations. There are eight races within the game, distinguishable by virtue of their stature, or rabbit ears, or horns (or lack thereof). They don’t treat one another especially well. Prejudice is very common in this fantasy society, and there is a lot of anxiety related to one’s place within the melting pot. As its title suggests, Metaphor: ReFantazio is a metaphor. You’re looking at a magic-infused world similar enough to our own that the villains may remind you of particular political figures, even though none of them bear the familiar names. Topics explored include xenophobia and the nature of democracy, though none of those labels are explicitly dropped that I can recall. But anyway, the discussion of tolerance is by no means an afterthought. The game’s core message seems to be that we could all stand to tolerate one another a bit more, and that we must not let our anxieties get the better of us.



Sometimes, while delivering that message, the game produces new anxieties by being rather difficult. There is a no-stress mode for people who simply want to advance the story. They will have to participate in all the usual battles, but the difficulty is lower and if they die, they can just continue with no loss of progress. Any energy they eliminated from a foe’s life meter is still gone. It’s probably not a terrible way to experience the game, honestly. I went with the “Normal” mode and was surprised to find it quite challenging, despite how easily I usually blow through such games. I’d say it lies somewhere between Persona and Shin Megami Tensei, and leans more toward the latter of those two extremes. I dared not even ponder the harder settings. Unless you specifically want a challenge and you have a lot of time to kill, I recommend swallowing your pride and going the “Easy” route, just so you don’t have to grind and obsess over stats and elemental affinities and such.

And there are a lot of those things to obsess over on the micro level, because the game explores “archetypes.” These are classes your characters study as the campaign progresses. The hero starts as a “seeker,” but as he meets other characters and builds relationships with them, he and they explore other affinities. Party members might become a mage, or a warrior, or brawler, or merchant, or so forth. Each of those disciplines has further specializations, and those specializations affect which gear can be equipped, what passive abilities prevail, and what new skills can be mastered. By the end of your run, you’ll have a whole web of classes at your disposal, which you can switch through at your convenience. Over time, you get to choose which abilities to retain throughout the process, enabling you to craft warriors and a party that suit your particular style of play. It’s fiendishly addictive.

Initially, the game feels like it has set you on a linear path from which you dare not stray. That situation evolves within the first few hours, however, and you find you have a lot of freedom within the established framework. You have to hit certain events, such as a raid within the capital city on X date, but otherwise you have the freedom to completely mess things up all on your own. Dungeons are not randomly generated like in Persona 3, but are instead deviously plotted with shortcuts and secrets. You can return to them as you wish to complete bounties and explore more thoroughly. However, the journey to each one eats up a lot of time. You really must consider such matters carefully to maximize rewards earned.



Hopefully, I’ve described all of the above in a way that makes it apparent the game has all sorts of potential, even though I haven’t had room to go into a lot of the specifics. And I’m happy to say it lives up to that potential for the bulk of its duration. I spent most of my time with the game feeling that it was one of the finest RPGs I had played in a long, long while. But there were times when the game just plain hated me.

Because of the freedom you have, you have the means to screw up your chances of success in a number of ways. If you spend too much time focusing on building up only a few particular archetypes, you might run into a boss that expects you to have built in a different way. Then you can swap out characters, or use synched attacks that yield more powerful effects, but you might still be in for an unpleasant time. And it’s not like you can just hop back to the nearest city and then return to the dungeon to try again, because doing so eats up more of your timeline. You’ll miss out on stuff. So, you have to constantly raid shops for the best restorative items… except they sell out of the stuff you really need and money is tight. I found myself almost constantly running out of magic. And the more basic attacks take way too long to whittle down enemy ranks, which makes for tedious play.

The game’s biggest misstep comes right near the end, though. It drags on for about ten hours more than it should have. Up to that point, there are some absolutely brilliant narrative moments. In the world you explore, you just don’t know what will happen next. Big surprises come around that defy convention, and you have to make your peace with some harsh realities. But then the plot slips into the background as you endure a couple of dungeons that remix the most frustrating elements of the game up to that point without adding much to the plot at all. You’re just going through the same motions one last time, and now there’s a boss rush besides. Oh, and the final boss battle just goes on for way too long. My first attempt lasted for most of two hours before the boss finally killed me when I was an attack or two from felling it. I didn’t enjoy that, and I didn’t relish reconfiguring my party even though I had access to virtually every bit of equipment and every skill in the game by that point.



If you’re the sort of person who enjoys playing a big JRPG until it finally stops being entertaining, I can’t recommend Metaphor: ReFantazio highly enough. You’ll probably delight in sixty or seventy riveting hours of play, and then maybe you’ll bounce off to something else and feel quite content with any time and money invested. Me, I felt compelled to see the story through to its conclusion. I almost wish I didn’t bother. It’s a perfectly exhaustive ending that resolves the various dangling character threads with an extended epilogue, and then you can play through again with certain progress saved. But those final hours chop the adventure’s momentum off at the knees and they take a long time doing so.

That nature of my full 90 hours spent with the game makes assigning a numerical score unexpectedly difficult, especially after I loved it wholeheartedly for so long, but I think I’ll go with...

Tweet

Staff review by Jason Venter (November 11, 2024) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.