Metaphor: ReFantazio

When I think about what I like most in JRPGs in general, my mind usually travels with little flashes of static images, often also remembering a theme song associated with them, and looking at the details of the pixel art or the design of characters and monsters. With Shin Megami Tensei V and the Persona series it's a bit the same for me. I visualise Shigenori Soejima's easily identifiable designs, and Shogi Meguro's urban themes ring out. In essence, it's about gameplay, art, narrative and sound fitting together to create a strong identity in a genre as long-lived as it is saturated with projects. Atlus has been climbing to the top of JRPGs for years, success after success, and now, on their 35th anniversary, they deliver their most rounded, daring and different project. Their Project ReFantasy, already known as Metaphor: ReFantazio.

"Do you believe in the power of imagination?" a distant voice asks you in the first moments of the game. And whatever you answer, from the very first moment the story is already setting the tone it is going to show you. Metaphor: ReFantazio takes place in a fantasy world, where magic is in the air (literally) and monsters are the daily bread, but it is also a dark world, dominated by some of the worst forms of humanity: racism, xenophobia, religious radicalism, tyranny... despite the fact that people like us do not live in it. The design of the world, having been created from scratch and not based, as in previous works, on a Tokyo affected by the supernatural, is brimming with unique life and personality. The creatures you encounter, beyond the humanoid-designed NPCs (not humans, because I'll get to those Humans later) are unlike the studio's previous creature designs.

This transcends also to the world design, to the cities and buildings. It is not for nothing that one of the main attractions for this title has been not only the work of the great development heads of their own successful franchises, led by Katsura Hashino, but also the collaboration of artists such as Ikuto Yamashita, who worked on designing the EVAs in Neon Genesis Evangelion, or Koda Kazuma, who was responsible for the stage design of NieR: Automata. The creative team has even created their own alphabet to give their world a more unique feel.

And where do we fit in? Well, our character, the hero (who for the first time in the studio has voice acting), is a member of the most sparse, unknown and despised race, the Elda who live in the Kingdom of Euchronia, a multicultural empire where nine different species of humanoids known as tribes live together in an uneasy truce. Our character starts out on a mission to find a cure for the curse of his childhood best friend, the crown prince, hidden by a group of loyalists in the face of a deep web of political intrigue that seeks to end the monarchy and reclaim his Royal Magic (the most powerful) to create a new world. As the adventure begins, the king is assassinated in his bed, but he has left a contingency plan in place. The next ruler of the kingdom can only be chosen by popular acclaim, and anyone can participate in this Tournament for the Throne. The hero is determined to take part in the tournament on behalf of the prince, and he will have a group of followers, both active and secondary, to help him in the adventure.

I won't say much more about the story, but I will stress that it is an epic that unravels little by little, with important twists and surprises, while interweaving religious and racial conflicts and class struggles, and while being a fantasy epic at the same time that, even though it is so ambitious and touches on so many sensitive issues, works. It works and it engages, too.

Nor should one be overly alarmed by so many new features, because in practice Metaphor plays like a Persona 5. With its trademark in-battle menu design, we have the options of physical attack, guard, item use or special ability, with a familiar "elemental strengths and weaknesses" system. Certain enemies will be resistant to certain elements or weapon attacks, and weak to others. So the character pool must be balanced to try to encompass as many fighting styles and magic as possible, and this is achieved through Archetypes.

These Archetypes are a kind of magical power unknown in this world, where magic is channelled through devices called detonators. This new magic is born from within people, once they face their latent fears, triggering an Awakening. And they can take many forms (up to 40 types) and each of them would be a class for the characters. All archetypes can be controlled by each character, using a "secondary economy" in the game called Magla (basically, magic that can be stored and quantified). There will be conditions for finding them, either by progressing through the story, or by meeting certain level or mastery requirements of other Archetypes, as some of them are improved or expanded versions of the originals. Social vehicles are present, and through them we will also forge synergies in the team, such as characters protecting or assisting us without spending turns, or combining attacks to create devastating Synthesis abilities, also necessary to defeat the toughest monsters of this world, the Humans. These enemies, inspired by the surreal designs of Bosch, are just one of the mysteries we will discover in the game. To get a good understanding of how these Synthesis attacks work, here I recall another great JRPG from 2024, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, to illustrate a close reference.

No two playthroughs of Metaphor: ReFantazio will be the same between players. While the start may be more or less the same, very soon the map will open up and both the choice of party members and their Archetypes and the decision to choose one mission or another (because there is a continuous time cycle, variations between day and night, and even weather conditions that can affect the exploration and empower enemies) becomes key. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to say now, but I have a feeling that it's not possible to see all the content in one run, and in fact there will be several different endings.

Before I finish, a very reassuring warning to those who have never played an Atlus title before and want to get started with this one. Metaphor: ReFantazio is Studio Zero's most accessible game to date. There's no previous background or experience with any series, and the difficulty levels are highly customisable so that everyone can experience its story.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a celebration of a form of storytelling that has been perfected over 25 years, and here it explodes to give us a title that really does come to feel unique and special. You can expect deep character development, a changing world and a sense of humour that is hard for any other studio to replicate in a project of this scale. As I previewed in my preview a few months ago, Shoji Meguro's soundtrack work is, for lack of a better word, excellent. Combining choirs, reciting religious verses, wrapping everything with a transcendent epic, his music becomes a common thread between the city exploration phases, the dialogue, the dungeons and the battle.

Having tested the game on both its PC (via Xbox) and Xbox Series X (my main game) versions and also on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, I have to say that I haven't encountered any issues or bugs of note, again wondering how a game of this size can be condensed into less than 40GB, in the case of the PS5 version.

Metaphor: Refantazio has managed to meet and defend itself against the high level of expectations that have been growing among gamers over the last few months. With a rich and expansive story and world, memorable characters, a timeless soundtrack and game design praised by some of the best developers in the genre today, I can only recommend jumping into this fantasy.