Metaphor: ReFantazio is a worthy, epic successor to the Persona legacy

Is it possible for an old-school fantasy role-playing game to have something meaningful to say about the politics of fear, anxiety, and hope? Metaphor: ReFantazio, the new game from the creators of Atlus’ best-selling Persona franchise, tries like hell, bless its odd, expansive heart. Intentionally or not, this is a video game about the raw, beating heart of democracy that’s arriving on store shelves just a month before the U.S. faces an extremely divisive national election. And if the game can’t really bear up under that self-imposed burden—if its efforts to reckon with why people choose extremism, violence, and self-serving populism when faced with the horrors of scarcity and intolerance ultimately collapse into a very familiar video game moral about the power of friendship and good intentions—then those existential failures hopefully won’t obscure the fact that this is also one of the best new RPGs in recent memory.

Despite being set in a fantasy world—loosely patterned after 19th century Europe, albeit a 19th century Europe where magical gun control and racism between different animal-like races of people are a natural part of the discourse—the structure of Metaphor will be immediately familiar to fans of Atlus’ previous Persona games. Players are once again put in the shoes of a quiet, charismatic teenager with an interesting haircut, and asked to manage their day-to-day schedules while also delving into dungeons and battling fantastical monsters. The basic gameplay loop—choosing how to spend time with your friends and allies to bolster your relationships produces meaningful benefits on the battlefield, while also breaking up the dungeon crawls—remains incredibly compelling… even if the change of venue saps the game of some of Persona’s inherent charm.

The three modern Persona games (starting with Persona 3 in 2006) still serve as gaming’s best expression of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer “go to school, save the world” power fantasy: They draw much of their emotional power from contrasting the mundanity and general bullshit of teen life with the high-stakes fantasy battles happening in the midnight margins. By its very nature—you’re revolutionaries/political candidates, not kids also expected to pass your midterms while saving your classmates from getting eaten—Metaphor can’t scratch that particular itch, and the resulting focus on the serious takes a few octaves out of the game’s emotional range. (There’s still humor here, provided mostly by a fantastic translation and localization, but no room for the minutiae of day-to-day life in between the battles that make the Persona games so special.)

What it has, instead, is a serious attempt to focus on the concept of “kingship,” a question that breaks out when the leader of the fractured, failing state of Euchronia is assassinated one quiet night amidst the numerous, frequently over-the-top injustices that happen in the country as a matter of course. When this sudden death causes, not just turmoil, but the dead king’s giant stone face to rise from the ground and go full Zardoz, declaring that the throne will now pass to whomever the people most desire to lead them in several months’ time, a kingdom-wide race for the crown breaks out. Your slowly assembling party of misfits has their own reasons for entering the race, centered on their personal beefs with leading candidate/royal assassin/obvious Lucifer analogue General Louis, but they soon find themselves nevertheless forced to reckon with what leadership actually means in a modernizing, fractured world. 

As we noted above, Metaphor: ReFantazio can’t quite resist the allure of pat answers and easy solutions to the hard problems it very deliberately brings up; while the game genuinely tries to reckon with Euchronia’s broken state—riven as it is with racial divides, pressures from a totalitarian church, and, uh, regular attacks from gigantic Attack On Titan-esque monsters known as “humans”—its actual stance on political action never evolves very far past “good decisions come from embracing and understanding your own anxieties, bad ones come from ignoring them.” And while you could argue that it isn’t necessarily fair to criticize the game for taking a light brush to these kinds of politics, which are pretty much bog-standard for the genre it’s operating in, we’re also not the ones who attempted to make an 85-hour video game rooted in a surface-level interrogation of Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia, and ultimately couldn’t come up with an ideology more compelling than a shrug and an “Eh, gotta do your best.”

What complexities Metaphor: ReFantazio—yes, the name is irritating, but your brain eventually starts to elide it—skips over in its ethos, though, it fully embraces in its play. The fact is that Atlus, through the Persona games, the wider Shin Megami Tensei titles, and the Etrian handheld gems, has fully captured the title of “masters of turn-based RPG combat” from Square-Enix over the last two decades, and Metaphor is the purest expression yet of said mastery. Adopting the basic skeleton of combat from the SMT games—which put a heavy emphasis on attacking enemy’s weak points in order to secure more turns for your side, while managing buffs, debuffs, and status ailments to swing fights in your favor—the new game adds in a bit of blatant, welcome theft from the Final Fantasy franchise by lifting its “Job” system for itself. 

Called Archetypes here, the switchable professions are the core of Metaphor’s combat, and a welcome change-up from managing Personas or demons in earlier games. Although not quite as diverse as we could have hoped—most of them boil down to a stat distribution, access to a new weapon type, and roughly 8 skills divided between active spells and passive benefits, as opposed to major mechanical changes to how a character fights—the Archetypes still allow for a massive amount of customization to your combat teams. (Helped along by the ability to bring a small handful of skills along from previous classes the character has used, a number that goes up as your relationship with the various characters your protagonist connects with deepens; one of several ways Metaphor marries together its two gameplay halves.)

The game matches that freedom and power with a willingness to force players to use them to their fullest extent: One of the things the game lifts from the Etrian titles, which it contains numerous light allusions to, is a belief that dungeons and combat encounters should be punishing, impactful affairs. Although Metaphor lets you skip too-easy combat encounters (one of several very welcome quality-of-life features in its bag of tricks), those fights you do have to weather will push your resources and planning to their limits. This is not a game that’s afraid to kill you on the first run through a boss fight, forcing you to suss out its gimmick or underlying logic; it also wants you to reach the end of its multi-level, frequently complex dungeons feeling just as exhausted as your characters, hurting for healing items, magic power, or status effect curatives. (The more support-focused Archetypes can help with this, of course; Metaphor is a game that expects you to use every tool it’s offering you to its maximal effect, whether that means visiting info brokers to find out bosses’ weak points ahead of time, or remembering to use buff skills to keep your teams alive.) Playing through on the game’s regular difficulty, we were struck by how well it matched pace with our party’s steadily expanding power; the result is a game that’s an all-timer for fans of this style of complex turn-based combat.

Beyond all that, we found ourselves frequently swept up in the sheer scale of Metaphor: ReFantazio, which occasionally takes on the full grandeur of a sort of mid-apocalyptic road trip. The visuals are gorgeous, whether we’re talking about its lush, eye-catching menus, or especially the character and monster designs. The Archetypes are complicated but lovely, appearing like Art Deco armor suits, but nothing beats the look of the monstrous humans, almost all of which have been sourced from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. (If you’ve ever wanted to kick the shit out of creatures from Bosch’s 15th-century triptych The Garden Of Earthly Delights, here’s your chance.) Those visuals line up well with the game’s initial full-bore pursuit of darkness—in the first hour, you’ll be treated to murders, mass corruption, and public executions, just to kick things off—even as its edges inevitably soften as your hero rises toward superstardom. Even as it loses touch with some of its more daring impulses, though, Metaphor maintains its grip on character, and the pure joy of a really good JRPG fight. It can’t quite match the magic of the Persona games it operates in the shadows of—there’s just a tad too much immediacy to things to ever embrace the hang-out vibes so important to that series’ tone—but it’s still a deeply satisfying, if occasionally surface-level, trip through the darker and more harrowing sides of its fantasy world.