Imagine a world where their vision of a perfect society is actually what we have today. What kind of culture and history would such a society have? Taking a step further than that, what if we were playing out a fantasy that fantasises about our ‘utopia’? That is the self-eating serpent at the centre of Metaphor: ReFantazio.
The Kingdom of Euchronia is a world of kings and magic, curses and dragons, all put together by a supergroup team of extremely talented designers and artists at Studio Zero. Having spun out from Atlus’ P-Studio with long-time Persona director Katsura Hashino at the helm, and bringing fresh influences like Koda Kazuma (NieR Automata) and Ikuto Yamashita (Neon Genesis Evangelion) into the fold, you know you’re in for a treat.
In terms of atmosphere, the team’s design pedigree absolutely shines. Euchronian society is split into eight main tribes plus your persecuted ninth tribe. The eight tribes have distinct features, from big ears or shiny eyes, to basically being a bat- or dog-person. The less ‘human’ tribes are at the bottom of a fierce hierarchy, put in place by a corrupt (and frankly evil) state church, and used for inhumane experiments for magical devices that prop up the kingdom’s economy. You are part of an exiled ninth tribe, persecuted by the church and such a rarity that most people thought you just a myth.
The king on the board is merely a puppet of the church until he is murdered in the intro by the game’s antagonist, Count Louis. That’s when all hell breaks loose.
The villain of the piece is exactly as evil as he sounds, and is hell-bent on releasing Humans into society to wreak havoc in his quest for the throne. In Metaphor, Humans are tremendously powerful beasts, lifted straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Any semblance of humanity is long since gone, and they are now city-wrecking monsters. With Louis trying to burn down society with the help of the Humans, your mission is to create a utopia is one where all are born equal, there is no religious persecution and the church holds no sway over life and politics.
It’s never that simple though, is it? The game is incredibly nuanced in its themes, and explores the darker themes very well. It doesn’t hold back from bloodshed, gore or swearing for that matter — which makes sense considering that the vast majority of its population is seemingly British. God help anyone who doesn’t speak Scouse…
Metaphor: ReFantazio builds on the classic systems that you’d expect from a Persona-like, with some notable improvements. The friendship-simulator side of the game, where you need to become besties with all of your followers to unlock their ultimate powers, no longer relies on perfect answers and stalls progress if you get it wrong. Instead, a perfect answer simply nets you bonus magical currency.
Similarly, we have all the Virtue system, cooking, side quests, dungeon crawls and turn-based combat that you would expect from a game with the name Atlus slapped on the side of it. If anything, combat is tighter and more tactical than any of the Persona games, and Metaphor really shines for this.
A huge part of this brilliance is the Archetype system. Once each character awakens to their natural archetype (their Persona, basically), they can teach it to the rest of the team. This means that rather than swapping to Inari to use ice-based Magic as in Persona 5, you can simply make anyone and everyone be a mage with ice-based attacks. On top of this, once a character learns an ability, each other archetype they have unlocked can ‘inherit’ this skill for a fee.
All of this costs resources, of course, but the versatility this brings to combat is exceptional. The Synthesis system, where multiple party members attack together, based on the archetypes they currently wield, makes this combat system all the deeper. This is genuinely a 10/10 game if gameplay were the only metric.
This brings us to the sound design, which is eerily Uematsu-y. Indeed, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the famed Final Fantasy composer worked on this game, with familiar sounding motifs cropping up throughout. Music that gives you existential dread? Very similar. Dungeon stuff? Very similar. Boss fights? Very similar. It’s not quite fair to say that homework has been borrowed, but they clearly sat in the same proverbial classroom, possibly right next to each other, when doing their assignment.
While Persona is praised for its sound design, Metaphor went in exact opposite thematic direction, but to equal success. It is an absolute treat to listen to and you will quickly find yourself humming the music long after you’ve turned the game off.
For all this praise, Metaphor is less than perfect, falling down in a couple of areas.
The main offender lies in explaining the game’s more complex systems. The aforementioned inheritance mechanic is poorly explained, and it’s not until you’re a dozen hours in that you start to actually make use of it. Similarly, by the third city I had maxed out one of my friendships, with a message saying Strohl (the character) is ready for a new Heroic Embodiment. I had to reach the endgame — another 30 or so hours — before I learned what that actually meant, an explainer seemingly failing to pop up for me.
There are also graphics and optimisation issues. The game looks stunning from afar, thanks in no small part to the character and world design, but if you look closely there are myriad issues, including textures and — in one case — a character’s teeth being outside their mouth. We’ve also experienced a couple of issues with the game slowing down and a single crash on PS5. While these parts of the game feel particularly rushed, they’re at least things that are fixable in a future patch.