Game review: Metaphor: ReFantazio

It's road trip Persona. You can spend time in friends but also you have a big thing you travel in and that takes time as well. And while traveling you can do stuff as well. The structure of the game is very Persona-like otheriwise, you are on a calendar and have limited time for things.

That said, the game gives you more than enough time to do every single side quest and all friends without much forward planning. I skipped about 4 side quests and did everything else, and had about 5 free days left at the end of the game that I just skipped.

It's SMT, basically. Turn icons and such. This also means enemies will sometimes add turn icons too, which is really annoying. The final boss will go 8 times in a row sometimes, which is stupid and bullshit. This also means that if you repeal its attack it will skip all 8 of its turns which is really funny.

You can hit and stun enemies in the overworld and if they're weaker enemies you just outright kill them. Every character can have every class and there are 46 of them. There are no demons / personas except for one class called Devil Summoner who can indeed summon devils and they're demons from SMT. It's probably the best / most interesting combat system they've done so far.

Its a pretty OK fantasy story with several twists that are telegraphed way ahead of time. They're pretty good twists that mostly make sense, I think. It still has the Persona/SMT thing of various magic explanation that you could not have known, but it's fantasy and also an ATLUS game so I give it a pass.

I liked the story oveall, the twists were interesting and the overall way it is told was pretty good. A lot of parallels with Persona 5 story in some ways, but in other ways also a completely different, grander, story.

It's almost exclusively choir / opera singing. They're pretty good, especially the academia track¹, but also since the words are impossible to understand² I did not find them as memorable as Persona's music. I wish there was more different tracks, too. The variety is somewhat lacking, even more so than is usual for ATLUS, I think.

The main cast finally has no characters that I would find even a slight bit annoying, unlike every single ATLUS game I've played before. All the friends you socialize with are cool and have good stories too. I like them a lot, it's probably one of the best parts of the game.

It's about the same as usual, grindy as hell if you play on normal. On easy it's more or less managable. The final boss is bullshit and I suggest you either make sure you are at least level 80 or switch the difficulty to a lower one. They never had a good final boss, so I don't really care about this.

In terms of gameplay and characters it's probably my favourite of ATLUS games so far.

In terms of story it's pretty good as well, a lot bigger than what they usually go far.

In terms of vibe Persona 3 will probably remain my favourite, and I don't think they will ever do anything like it again, but one can hope.

The length is about 70 hours, I did almost everything so I think it can be maybe 10 hours more at most, unless you grind a lot in which case add 10 more.

Would recommend if you ever wanted a Persona game where it's not "all in le head" and actually affects the world which you travel.

As per usual, thank you for reading my blog post. These have been few and far between, these days.