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« on: May 26, 2026, 03:10:01 pm »
Game 7 - Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - 84 Hours
Ohh boy. This game was a hard one for me to finish. I don't think I've ever been down on a game this much in a very long time, especially one that's been so well received by others. The TLDR is that I found this game to be a painfully anemic spiritual successor to Persona, with a lot of problems that added up to an underwhelming experience.
The best part about the Persona series is that juxtaposition between the high-school simulator and the dungeon crawling fantasy. In Metaphor, however, the setting is about as generic fantasy as you can get, which takes out a lot of the intrigue for me. I thought it was going to be a reverse fantasy, where the main reality takes place in this middle age setting, and the “fantasy” is a world akin to our real-life modern reality. This is present, yes, but only as far as the story and isn’t actually realized in gameplay, which was incredibly disappointing. The best part about the setting was the relationships between the multiple races, but the rest of this game’s world is not all that exciting if you’ve played a JRPG before. Compare it to Persona, and it feels like so much is missing.
This sentiment of “something’s missing” came through the strongest during the road trip segments which are prominently featured as part of your day-to-day story. You'll be traveling along the ground through the water and in the air and you'll be watching these cutscenes where the characters are standing as still as statues with their hair not even blowing in the wind. Then you'll stop along the way to feature this panorama of this broad landscape or a town but there's no 3D exploration at all and it's just provided in the form of text that you read. Then the final dungeon that you get to ends up being a carbon copy of the previous dungeon and there's really only three layouts for the entire game (tower, jungle, tomb). Outside of the 5 major cities, any other towns you visit is just a single screen with maybe a shop or dialogue option. It was painful to watch your party takes in these beautiful vistas that serve as brief respites during your journey because I wanted to actually explore those through gameplay! I thought the game was going to have more open world exploration, as was teased with the large desert area outside of Grand Trad. This seems to have been dropped entirely in favor of tedious and overly long dungeons that just don’t feel exciting to explore.
I found the combat while pretty decent to be at the end of my experience very long and tedious. I don't like the mixture of real time and turn based combat. The combat is either extremely difficult or extremely easy and it is all based on whether you can get the jump on the enemy in the real time combat version. And a lot of enemies have fast, unpredictable and uninterruptable attacks, and if they hit you first, you might as well just run away and try the fight again. I did end up liking the archetype system, and the different ways that you can customize characters ended up being really fun to explore. It was definitely my favorite part of the game and the bosses offered up some really satisfying challenge. But outside of combat, there’s maybe about half of the activities that you could do in P5: no ability to romance any characters, no jobs, no clubs, nothing.
The last thing that just didn't do it for me was the visual design and the music. I will say that the character design is incredible and the human designs are top notch. The monster designed though is about as generic as you can get, and overall I just really didn't like the visuals the constant shifting of magla crystals in the environment - felt very distracting to me. The user interface just wasn't very strong, and the music just isn't very good. It's either generic, or a heavy reliance on these fast vocalizations that clash incredibly with the amount of spoken dialogue that happens during this game, especially during the battles.
And of course, the nail in the coffin for me is the 80+ hour story. Like other Atlus games, I question why the game needs to be that long finish the story – it’s overall just fine, but I really didn’t feel like it was worth the massive investment. There’s a lot happening in the story, sure but to me it really boils down to unrelated smaller story plots that are done to gain favor in your bid for king. There’s a LOT of political posturing and flowery dialogue about how to run a country and yada yada yada but it just didn’t really resonate with me because the overall story movement (except for the anti-religious movements in Martira) didn’t really feel all that exciting. The main antagonist, Louis, still manages to fall into the typical villain video game pitfalls with most of his backstory really coming out towards the end of the game.
Metaphor is a fine game, but really didn’t capture me like it did for other people. For a game that’s been scored only one point lower than Persona 5 and was a contender for GOTY, I felt like the move away from the Persona series led to a lot of sacrifices, and it didn’t feel like Metaphor had enough time in the oven to really flesh out the new ideas.
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