Metaphor: ReFantazio

 

Release: 2024

Developer: ATLUS

Publisher: SEGA

Gameplay Stats: 115 hours, 44/44 achievements

Oh my goodness, what can I say about this game? It's super similar to Persona 5 Royal that I finished last year, so I suspect that post still mostly works. I don't really feel like doing a long write up, so here are my quick thoughts.

-Love that the game still has 2 styles that synergize really well. Combat feeds into visual novel portion which feeds back into combat.

-They changed the knock down from Persona to giving an extra turn. Made the game more challenging! Certainly less exploitable. The other way might be more fun though.

-Didn't really like the tight calendar. I believe P5R was 8 months, Metaphor is only 5.

-No romance in this game. I don't really have strong feelings either way about this, but it felt different than P5R for sure.

-The archetype system was pretty interesting. At the start I felt like I had to do a ton of menuing to make sure I wasn't missing out on A-EXP, but later in the game I learned that the extra A-EXP you earn is turned into consumables anyway, so you don't miss out on anything. If I'd realized sooner I wouldn't have changed my party around as often. Was going to say more menuing was a bad thing, but it was my fault I was doing so much menuing.

-I really hate that there was only 1 achievement that had to be done in NG+ for beating a superboss found towards the end of the game. I really didn't want to play this game for another 100 hours (even though I had a great time) so I used a hex editor to allow me to fight the boss at the end of my first play through. I still did all of my grinding manually, just didn't want to have to do it twice. I believe all of these games have a boss like this, but others don't tie it to an achievement.

-I liked the addition of some simplistic overworld combat. It didn't amount to a whole ton of depth, but it was a cool addition that made me pay attention when wandering around the dungeons.

Really enjoyed this game! It was a bit heavy handed with the message, but I'm not really going to complain about strong anti-racist sentiment in 2025. I didn't like this quite as much as P5R, but I chalk that up to style mostly. I liked the music and juxtaposition better in that game. Music in here was good! Definitely too many barks when grinding though, it was obnoxious. Like, I have killed 1000 of these fishmen in a row. Someone really doesn't need to comment every 3 seconds when I kill the next one.