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General / Re: 52 Games Challenge 2026!!!
« on: May 27, 2026, 09:36:15 am »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, and 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, and 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 could feel the ache as your party takes in these beautiful vistas that serve as brief respites during your journey – 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 really stupid with the 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 game, I question why it needs to be that long to finish the story – it’s fine, but I really didn’t feel like it made a good use of it. 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.
I'm 55 hours into Metaphor and have the same general sentiment as you. I really don't see what made this a GOTY contender, as the story and characters are all very surface level. Visually, Atlas (after all these years) still hasn't figured out how to animate in a way that doesn't make everyone look stiff as heck. Side by side with a Square Enix game, or even something like Expedition 33 and it looks like amateur hour. I really don't get how they have gone so many years without improving in this area, it's been a problem for decades.
One thing I differ from you on though is the character designs. I just don't think they look that interesting. The human designs are cool, but of the characters you meet in the game there isn't a single one who I would ever buy a figure or poster for to show off. Maybe I'll meet one later on in the game I like but as of right now all the character designs fit firmly in the "fine" category. I don't hate them, but I also don't particularly like the either.
My favorite part by far, which you touched on, is the archetype system. Having the ability to mix and match abilities between classes to kind of build your own custom class makes for a crazy amount of skill expression in building your team. You can make some really broken classes. My favorite right now is my mage who actually gains mana each turn passively, allowing for easy dungeon clears as he can spam his skills and still enter the final boss with nearly full mana. I love RPGs with deep customization like this because it is fun to theory craft party builds that let you steamroll dungeons.
I enjoyed Metaphor, and I agree with all the above. I think combat and overall atmosphere helped with the story's shortcomings (which I enjoyed because the characters drove it). That said, I remember being more than ready for it to be over. I've played games longer than it but they either had better pacing, better writing, or a better combination of the two.