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

i really love this game so much and i love the followers and actually care about almost all of them and their stories and stuff related to them. the turn-based combat is pretty much the exact same as the usual SMT turn-based with a few really nice twists and features (turn skips taking half a turn icon, a few moves and accessories that actually add turn icons), but the overworld combat is SUCH a nice feature here and it's pretty fun to strategize how you fight some of the enemies, as in whether you want to just overworld-combat them to death or stun them and jump into a squad battle that's really heavily tilted to your favor (heismay's buffed opening volley/ambush damage lol). overworld combat makes grinding actually a little bit more engaging as opposed to running shadows over with the morgana whip, and the MC's archetypes all have MC-exclusive passives that revolve around overworld combat and killing/stunning enemies using it, which really encourages you fight overworld as opposed to just fighting them turn-based. the story appears pretty flat at the beginning but idk, something about it really draws me as the game progresses, and i got really really invested in it once some of the twists started. the gauntlet runner in general is such a nice part of the game (spending that travel time in the gauntlet runner reading, hanging out with followers, planting etc.) and just makes the journey much more personal and much more fun, like i actually feel excited taking it to go out to dungeons and forests and whatnot, doing requests and finally coming back to town to hand them in and all that. the follower bonds all max out at a very reasonable and appropriate rank of 8, making them not a hassle to level up, as they dont have a sort of hidden progress bar like persona, instead if you hang out with someone, they'll level up. the way they balance this is making it so that you can't hang out with the same person 2 days in a row, and making followers more scarcely available than persona. the game not having a real romance system is in my opinion a good thing and is refreshing, instead opting for a strong platonic bond between the MC and his followers, but the game does have subtle signs of some of the female characters expressing an interest in the MC past platonic (catherina, eupha, junah. i mightve missed someone else). anyway, 10/10 for me, it almost beats the nostalgia bias i have for persona 5 royal.