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

I wanted so desperately to like this. And after seeing it in glimpses, and the stellar reviews it got, I was sure I would. But unfortunately after beating it, I can’t say it met expectations. There were times when I really enjoyed it, but plenty of times where I felt underwhelmed. The game is good don’t get me wrong, but it ultimately feels like a step-down from other Atlus titles. I actually avoided as much information I could before buying the game. All I knew was that it was another Atlus RPG release and I was sold. But after playing for a few hours, I was honestly kind of stunned by how derivative it felt? The companion character, social links, social stats, the calendar system, the popularity ranking, and even the Velvet Room. Hell, even all the sound effects are the same. I didn’t realise any of this was in the game, and it feels crazy to say as a Persona super-fan, but I felt a little displeased at it. I bought this as the new exciting Atlus IP, and I felt like I had done this all before. And my feelings kind of stayed the same for a while. I think a huge part of it just didn’t work for me because it felt so strange in this setting. A calendar system where you rank up relationships makes a lot of sense in a high-school environment. But in this grand fantasy adventure where you are travelling the lands it just felt kind of silly to me. Having to level up my social stats while also fighting dragons and monarchs felt like I was playing two different games at the same time. Trying to tell this grand fantasy story this way just dragged the pace to an absolute halt. You keep hearing about evil schemes the villains are up to, but don’t get to see them until 31 days later, and the deadlines were just silly things like having to stay in a certain place because the weather won’t get better until 21 days time, or someone needs a month to be be a mechanic. However, eventually I did get into it. I think the thing that really drew me in were it’s characters. I didn’t love them at first, but by the credits I can confidently say this is an incredibly strong cast. Every single party member really shines. They all play a unique and interesting role in the story, and became such an endearing bunch. I have come away from this game really loving this cast. One of the major ways you’ll get to know these characters is through the social links. I have to say they’re mostly pretty good! Once I accepted that this game is just kind of Persona Lite, I allowed myself to get into their stories. However, maybe I’m too spoiled from the fully acted links from Persona 3 Reload, but I felt some of these not being voice acted left a lot to desired. It’s fine for the most part, but some of these links have incredibly dramatic and sad beats, and having no vocal emotion took me out of it. But social links aside, the main way this game distinguishes itself from Atlus’ catalogue is through its gameplay. I don’t have much to say except it’s pretty cool, but I didn’t love it either. Nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing bad about it either. The way you’ll be doing damage for most of the game is through archetypes. There is some fun experimentation to be had here, but all-in-all not a super big fan. I think letting every character have access to anything in the whole game is a little much, and I actually would have preferred a slightly more linear progression system. I think it would have let me experiment with each party member more to suit their role, rather than just having all these characters that can do whatever they want. I also think it’s kind of annoying that you don’t even get to keep the moves as you move through the upgraded classes. For example, you might have a strong slash or dark move on a base level of the archetype , and yet when using its evolved form, these moves are just missing. Meaning you have to use up skill inheritance slots just to keep the classes signature moves. Lastly, I think Archetypes level up wayyy to slow. It just feels contradictory to me to have a system that so clearly want you to play around with all the classes on all the characters (even showing a % of what classes you mastered for each character!), when it takes a huge amount of XP to even master one. All this does is incentivise me to do the exact opposite, and stick with the native classes, because by the time you’ve finally levelled these up, you’re so far through the game and facing enemies you can’t afford to bring in unlevelled archetypes against. And before people tell me I can just kill enemies lower level than me to level up - grinding is never ever a fun or worthwhile use of my adult time! I think just having the max archetype level be 10 instead of 20 would have solved a lot of issues for me. However, once I had my builds ready by endgame, the actual battles are very engaging. Lots of really cool and unique mechanics at play, both from the enemies, and the tools you have available. Like most things in this game, this system is actually great beneath it all, and with some streamlining could work really well. But what’s most disappointing about the combat is it’s overworld uses. I did hear about this before I bought the game, and I was excited to blend the real time combat in with the turn-based. But this overworld combat is so so disappointing. You fight every single enemy in the game in the same way, slash a few times, wait for a blue bubble to roll out of, and then slash again. It takes 5 seconds, and ultimately feels entirely pointless, and if the game didn’t have this, it would feel exactly the same. I would have loved if this mechanic was much deeper. Make my weapons do unique things, get my party members involved, give the enemies unique and learnable movesets. Something. Because as it is, it’s just so insubstantial. Now combat is all well and good, but where do we go to fight these monsters but the dungeons of course! It’s very disappointing that there are only 4 dungeons in this game. Hell, 3 and a half really because that second one is super short. And even these dungeons are very bland. A complete lack of choice or puzzles or visual flair, just flat rooms to run through filled with enemies. I just felt unimpressed every time I was in a dungeon, and even less impressed when I was in an arc which so clearly had plans for a dungeon, but the final game didn’t get to have like the Royal Mage Academy or Louis’ Runner. However, some dungeons are so bad (the last one) that I looked back thankfully that there weren’t more of these slogs; which really isn’t something I should have felt. They were so unenjoyable I’m actually kind of glad we didn’t get more. And what’s worse is these side dungeons are just laughably bad. Plain and copy-pasted several times over, being an empty forest, a brown tower and one-note caves. That’s it. PS1/2 level stuff. The main dungeons are a huge step-from from Persona 5’s palaces, and I’d even argue that Mementos and Tartarus are more fun than these side dungeons. This a huge flaw of the game that detracted greatly, and I expect once Metaphor’s honeymoon period is over that it becomes a more common critique. I honestly didn’t really enjoy the game until Virga Island. And that’s for a few reasons. It’s basically the only real dungeon in the game, in terms of gameplay design, length, and narrative relevance. And, I started to enjoy the down-time after the dungeon, partly because I had sunk enough hours in to finally accept I was playing Persona-Lite, and partly because here is when you get new good quality social links (including my favourite character) as well as the quantity to make the balancing of time management engaging. But while the character writing is strong, this overall story didn’t do that much for me. And it’s not even bad, it just couldn’t keep me interested in it for its length. Again, I felt the calendar system only acts as a hindrance in a story that’s trying to do and say so much, by dragging its pacing down so badly. There’s some cute moments, but by the credits I really just didn’t care anymore. I do feel that there were certain parts with rushed development, and this lack of room caused the story to falter too. There’s major story reveals 80ish% of the way through, but with a clearly cut dungeon, and some jammed in writing, these twists fell flat of any emotion for me. It’s hard to explains without spoilers, but I thought the beats explaining the Prince’s curse and all of the events and reasonings surrrounding it (why he was cursed etc.) were incredibly weak. And the whole Shibuya showing up in a JRPG trope didn’t do anything at all for me either. Some things felt overwritten to me, and some things very underwritten. Ultimately, I just don’t think the writing was strong enough to tackle these topics (game about racism but whole arc where you go to a foreign nation and convince the people their religion that has them covering up their faces and hair is total bullshit lol), and then the later half becomes super cliche. And I don’t enjoy bashing this game. but I can’t finish without mentioning these two things either. First of all the music. The main battle theme is great, but not a single other song felt memorable to me. Honestly maybe the weakest Meguro OST I’ve experienced. And secondly, wow this game is ugly sometimes. Lots of unimpressive stuff that reminded me of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, a 2019 Switch game (all of the vistas). Why on earth did a game released in late 2024 have a PS4 version that they so clearly had to accommodate for… But I also can’t finish without mentioning this beautiful UI and sense of style. If Atlus still has one thing in their bag, it’s this. There were times when I was having a blast, and other times where I had to force myself to turn the game on. A few times, I felt I was playing a 9/10, and other times, a 5/10. There’s more good than bad to Metaphor. I’m glad people love it and I can see why people are referring to it as Atlus’ Elden Ring. But to me it kind of just felt like I was playing with inferior mechanics I had already experienced in more fleshed out ways in other titles. Looking back, I can only really say I enjoyed the social links in this game. It’s still fun when it works, but frustrating and disappointing when it doesn’t. There’s good ideas here, and I’d be interested in the sequel if we do get one. Some optimisation and fleshing out of the weaknesses could really go a long way. But who am I kidding, they’ll probably just go halfway and add some new stuff to Metaphor: ReFantazio Retold in a few years.