Game review: Metaphor: ReFantazio
Just finished playing the new ATLUS game. I've been playing through their catalogue this year and they're one of my new favourite games, I think. Never knew I would like something like these games, but turns out they're perfect for me. This post is for people who at least have some idea of how Persona / Shin Megami Tensei games play, since I don't want to explain that part.
Gameplay outside of combat
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.
Combat
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. I it's probably the best / most interesting combat system they've done so far.
Story
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.
Music
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.
Characters
The main cast finally has no characters that I would find even a slight bit annoying, unlike every single atlus gave 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.
Difficulty
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.
Overall
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.
Footnotes:
Okay, this is really funny. I just looked it up and apparently every single song in the game is in ESPERANTO, LMAO. Also, all written language in the game is also esperanto but with a custom font. It's actually kind of makes sense if you play the game, so that's a cool detail.
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