3/5 ★ – Elesh's review of Metaphor: ReFantazio.

Metaphor is a game that took a strong foundation - Persona 5's fundamental gameplay structure - and tried to take it out of the comfortable framing of high school and apply it to a much more difficult canvas: A sprawling fantasy world enthralled in a crisis both political and mundane. The writing in this game was - overall - quite good. It tackled philosophical and political theory in an interesting way, had solid character writing, and a story whose path was, while ultimately predictable, interesting to follow and think about. I do think this game's protagonist lacked even the interest of a normal self-insert protagonist, feeling pretty disconnected from everyone and everything. Where the character writing shined was when the other members of the cast interacted with each other and in the rare moments one of your associates really felt like they were interacting with both the player and the character. Sadly, the former only came up in any significant way on a few occasions and the latter really only happened for a handful of the characters. But when it did, I could really see what the writers were trying to accomplish, and it was beautiful. Sadly, they really failed to deliver any sort of meaningful impact or connection outside of those few moments and the ending fell completely flat after a fascinating build-up in the early and mid-game. In terms of gameplay mechanics, I don't want to spend too long nitpicking here, but what I will say is that I appreciated the idea of the mechanics, but felt the implementation resulted in a system where ordinary enemies felt like they were too costly and too frustrating most of the time while bosses - for the most part - felt strategic and tense. Over the course of the game the frustration of dealing with the game's fodder grew until it became a weight around the game's ankles, dragging it into the mire. And by the end-game, I was just exhausted and ready for it to be over. I really enjoyed the game's progression system overall. I appreciated the evolution of the persona system into the archetype system present here - allowing a much greater degree of flexibility and control over your party's abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. I think its biggest flaw would be how time-consuming it is to progress new jobs you wish to switch to and how little progress is shared between characters. I do want to give the game some unfiltered praise. The game's visual style is spectacular - similar to Persona 5, they make use of a unique art style and very distinct visual aesthetic to create a cohesive and coherent visual experience start to finish. This is something the Atlus teams have proven exceptionally good at since Persona 4 and Catherine and I truly wish more developers would put more effort into this. It can really make up for a lot. This has been a very hard review to write. I think this game has three different stages that all feel drastically different... and are of vastly different quality. This makes it hard to give a cohesive single score to the game, for the score I've given of 3.5 feels like its underselling how much fun I had in the opening acts as the game unfolded before me... but also fails to capture just how frustrated I was by the end. I think the best description I can come up with for Metaphor is that it is a game with a strong premise and some good ideas that mucked up execution in a number of ways that really built up over time for me. If the issues I had with the game's combat and writing failed to impact you in the same way they did me, then I suspect you'll probably love this game because there is a lot of good here, it is just hidden under a lot of problems.