Is fantasy just fiction? Or do we, by putting a story out into the world, change the people in that world a little bit at a time? This concept is one of the first things that you’ll be introduced to in Metaphor: ReFantazio, as you guide a bunch of characters of all different races across their world in a rat race style bid for the throne. Is Metaphor: ReFantazio an analogue for some great storytelling, or is this more like an analogy for something awful? Let’s find out.
Metaphor: ReFantazio opens with a pretty interesting premise: the world is filled with multiple tribes, such as beings with horns, long elf-like ears, or wings. In this world, lesser tribes are looked down upon by others, all the while an everlasting threat from demonic creatures known as humans roam the land. Humans are powerful and notoriously hard to kill, but a single man, the decorated general of the kingdom, vows to keep the people safe from the human threat. Behind the scenes, however, General Louis slays the king with plans to usurp the throne to burn the kingdom to ash.
The opening of Metaphor: ReFantazio features regicide, a failed assassination plot, and fantasy racism. The king’s death triggers his final magic spell- one that forces the role of king upon whomever gains the trust of the people in a few months’ time. With the crown’s rightful heir in a coma and unable to participate, the protagonist’s group has to work against both Louis and the crown theocracy to change their world for the better.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is about both fantasy and reality. The main protagonist, whom you can name whatever you want, carries a book that seems to describe our world, while you sit at your PC or console of choice and explore his world. It’s also quite auspicious that a blond strong man appears, telling the populace what they want to hear in order to bring his machinations to fruition. The politics of the tribes, kingdom, and even how Metaphor approaches its concept of magic form the whole of a title with a solid focus on storytelling with little down time, though the story falters a slight bit towards the end.
Metaphor: ReFantazio marries the stylish presentation and time management from the latest Persona entries that we all love, with the strategically nuanced Press Turn system from Shin Megami Tensei. This combination of mechanics excited me more than I care to admit, in fact, because the Press Turn system is one of the finest battle systems Atlus has ever used in their JRPGs. In this system, each character gets a turn, but if you hit a weakness or score a critical hit, you only consume half a turn. This means that proper team building and strategy effectively rewards the player with twice as many actions in combat, though it’s worth mentioning that your enemies can exploit your weaknesses to create more attack opportunities for themselves.
The combat system works well with the Archetypes, ancient personifications of powerful magic that give the party access to various abilities. Each Archetype has its own skills and passives that it learns as you level up, and they also have different weaknesses you will need to cover for as you progress through Metaphor. Entering an area where all of the enemies know dark element spells may mean you will have to constantly revive your Healer, since dark is one of that Archetype’s primary weaknesses. Outside of a handful of very late-game Archetypes, any character can use any possible class by grinding out enough Magla to teach it to them, which means you have a tremendous amount of party customization that you can do as you progress through Metaphor.
Archetypes are unlocked either by story progression or by progressing Bonds, which are functionally identical to Social Links in Personas 3, 4, and 5. In Metaphor, you’re typically on a timetable to get specific story events finished before the deadline hits and signals game over, but until those deadlines approach you’re free to hang out with pals and help them overcome their problems. The individual character writing for Metaphor: ReFantazio is quite good, as you may help a conman who lost the few things he cared for learn how to work towards a greater goal, or you may help a woman who worked her way up from poverty to a life of affluence but lost her respect for life along the way.
Every single Bond has multiple Archetypes locked behind it, which incentivizes you to spend time with your followers and continue learning about the characters. As you raise Bond ranks, you’ll also be leveling your Archetypes, which is required to unlock the adept or elite level of each class. There will be many times that you’ll need to give inspiring words to your followers, which means you’ll also need to spend time raising your royal virtues like courage or intelligence because some activities and bond levels are locked until you reach a certain virtue score. So, you’ll have plenty of activities to fill your days.
Each day in Metaphor, you’ll have the option for a daytime activity and can do something else at night, unless you venture into a dungeon in which case that will be the only activity you can do that day. Rather than be nebulous about it and get told to go to bed like Morgana the talking cat orders players to do in Persona 5, Metaphor is very up front about how much you can squeeze into a day. So, if you want to speak at a podium to potentially increase your popularity with the commonfolk and raise your eloquence virtue, you can do that, which you might need more eloquence to convince a little orphaned girl that she can make new friends even if her father isn’t here to help her.
When you’re not forming bonds, fighting in the colosseum, or raising your virtues, you can raid dungeons to complete a large volume of side quests, too. Very often when you reach a new city, you’ll encounter people who may need you to dungeon dive and find specific items for them or to defeat certain monsters. Dungeon crawling takes your entire day, but it’s worth it to gain the items, cash, and experience you’ll need to handle whatever your story objective is at that time. Most puzzles in dungeons are simple enough, and you can even defeat enemies without going into battle should you out level them, making farming a breeze.
You will struggle with resources should you make optimal use of your time when dungeoneering, however. At the beginning of the title, items that restore MP, which you’ll use for special attacks and spells, are pretty few and far between. But there are some tricks you can use to maintain a healthy flow of resources while you dungeon dive. Equipping the Wizard Archetype on one of your characters, which regains significant MP when a buff effect is active, can regain tons of MP by equipping easily found accessories that buff the equipped character when they enter battle, for example.
It is worth noting, however, that in Metaphor: ReFantazio experimenting with your party can be expensive. Mag, the currency you use to unlock Archetypes for each of your party members, isn’t exactly in large supply until extremely late game. You get a very strong party member late into the title, roughly around the same time you unlock special, final Archetypes for your characters that take hundreds of thousands of Mag to unlock each, since you’ll need to have mastered, or come close to mastering, multiple different classes you may not have known you needed to unlock and level. If you’re a completionist, Metaphor: ReFantazio will have you grinding for long enough to get rug burn.
That being said, if you’re playing on normal or even hard difficulty, this isn’t a game difficult enough to warrant doing a bunch of level grinding. Many powerful boss encounters got nuked at lower levels than what most people encountered them at due to excellent use of buffs on my party, debuffs on the bosses, and excessive fishing for critical hits to score extra turns. If you’re just worried about finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio, it will keep you busy for a good 50-60 hours depending on how many side quests you want to do. If you want to unlock everything and get all of the achievements, however, you’re easily looking at 90-100 hours of total play time, with much of that final 30 being spent grinding for Archetype experience and doing a second playthrough to fight a powerful super boss.
As for replayability, Metaphor: ReFantazio does have a New Game+ mode, and you carry over items, equipment, and Archetype levels across your playthroughs. Unfortunately, though, your Archetypes will need unlocked again on NG+, so if you unlocked a class you really, really liked in the last 10% of the game… unfortunately you’re going to have to wait until the end again to use it. I’m not exactly sure why Archetypes have to be unlocked like this in NG+, least of all if it was done for balance concerns considering your damage largely stems from your weapons and you get to keep those late game weapons. In any event, there’s a super boss you can do exclusively on a New Game+ run, so there is at least one more activity to do after you’ve beaten the title.
For visuals, Metaphor: ReFantazio looks notably dated. Some of the characters are slightly off model, given their character portraits, and extremely low resolution textures cover walls or even necklaces of specific characters that you see close up pretty often during bond or story scenes. The graphics are still beyond passable, the art style simply doesn’t make up for how ugly the title can look at some points. As far as the music goes, however, Metaphor has a phenomenal soundtrack that mixes fantastical themes with chanting through some of its most effective tracks. Some of its backing tracks are less memorable than others, but the battle themes will definitely be brainworms for a lot of players.
Overall, Metaphor: ReFantazio is Metaphor Re-Fantastico. The gameplay mechanics are beyond solid, combining the time management and social links from Personas 3, 4, and 5 with the Press Turn combat of Shin Megami Tensei. You’ll have quite a lot to do at any given moment, but the time limit isn’t so strict that you’ll be super pressured to use a guide just to max out all bonds.
Metaphor’s story falters a bit at the end, but the gameplay is so good and engrossing that this will last you a solid 50-80 hours depending on how much of a completionist you are. If you don’t like JRPGs, especially if they’re laden with fantasy politics, then this is certainly one to avoid at all costs. However, if you’re even remotely a fan of Atlus’s JRPGs, Metaphor: ReFantazio is sure to be a hit with its experimental combination of game mechanics and its strong class system due to the Archetypes.