Metaphor: Refantazio

Playtime: 42 Hours.

Suspended 17 July 2025.

Played on Hard difficulty on the PS5, if there's any meaningful version differences. At some point, got the Strategy guide (which is very well produced, btw!) to try to motivate me to continue the game, but I still burned out partway into the 3rd location, Brilehaven. I remember having a Magic-focused MC.

I really don't think this subgenre of modern Persona games structured as life sim / JRPG hybrids works for me at all. In fairness, this opinion has developed over time as I've completed more of the modern Persona games, and kind of culminated with P5R which I thought was kind of miserable; so I knew that in trying this game there would be a pretty high chance I wouldn't be interested in completing it. I'm honestly pretty happy that I managed to get as much time out of it as I did, and that I did find substantial enjoyment a decent chunk of that time (else I'd have quit much earlier). But there is still quite a bit of diappointment that for all this game tried, it still didn't successfully break away from the tired trends and the same issues that all the other games had. In general, I think quite a few of my complaints about the overall gameplay apply in somewhat equal measure to all of these kinds of games, and aren't necessarily unique to Metaphor.

First, there are plenty of things I think are pretty cool, and are actually quite fresh. I really like this world; it feels alive, like a real culture (or set of cultures), not just as convenient plot devices. Lots of characters are also pretty interesting, and there's even a "mascot"-ish character in Heismay that isn't just obnoxious, but is actually probably my favorite character in the game so far. Adult characters in a real world, not kids doing dumb shit in high school. The conception and main driving motivation of the plot is also pretty interesting to begin with. On the gameplay side, I like the change to the Press Turn system, which I maintain is better than yet another weird mutation of 1More. Giving enemies on Hard +1 Turn is also a really neat way to up the difficulty and to shake up gameplay, since that extra press turn allows for more dangerous enemy tactics. Some of the other minor changes like drawing in the timeline of the game and removing the relationship point requirements get rid of a lot of dead air.

That said, there's a more-than-fair share of gripes I had with my time in the game that ultimately led to me losing interest, both from a plot/narrative PoV and a more mechanical one. While the story starts out quite strong, especially through the intro dungeon and the first arc, things started to cool down quickly for me when I realized that it didn't feel like the game had anything more to say beyond just "racism is bad". While that is admittedly a bit of an oversimplification of the issues that the game does actually try to portray, I haven't felt much actual nuance in the way things are written; sometimes it slips a bit far into the territory of showing how the "underdog" is always justified, and that the most populous/powerful races are all basically evil. It can get sort of offputting at times, given that I figure the entire point of the game's message is supposed to be that all of the races are ultimately more alike than they are different, and that not only can everyone find ways to get along, but the good & the bad are distributed across the entire population. As it is, I started tuning out of the story conversations at some point since they kind of feel like an essay from a high school ethics class at times.

But then again, this is partially a product of the entire formula. This kind of sim/JRPG hybrid thrives on splitting up the entire game into a number of arcs, each with its own time limit and dungeons. P4 basically got into a pattern of sending someone into the TV every month or so, and P5 had the whole "villain of the week" thing going. They did try to vary it a bit more in this game, but the same old habits still slipped through. "Find some injustice in this area and solve it" is every arc in this game, basically. It all kind of blends together a little bit for me. But far more than this (which is a very small, almost insignificant issue), this entire structure forces several other decisions. Social stats and time-consuming activities feel like a waste of gameplay time, since they're needed to pass days in the schedule and to feel like you're making some kind of "persistent" progress. The random weather, erratic schedules, and so on also make it very annoying to optimize your schedule, which has always been a pain. But worst of all (for me), the inclusion of the same standard S.Link system in this game means that every major character's side story must follow the exact same structure. Some small issue, misunderstanding/trouble, and a heroic resolution at the end, in exactly 8 acts. They all end up feeling predictable, even boring, because you can kind of get an idea what the tone of each event with each character will be, and it sort of shears away the unique personalities that the characters actually have when your most significant interactions with each of them are so similar.

Now we get to the mechanical gripes. The big one is the dungeons, always the dungeons. This time, they've tried to ease things out a bit by adding a bunch of little mini-dungeons for side quests, instead of stuffing them all into the one big dungeon (or one big side dungeon). It helps somewhat, yet not enough; it means that the side content takes up days, but the same issues with optimizing each of the main dungeons for single-day completion have not changed a bit. Just like before, in this game it leads to lots of obnoxious grinding tactics to conserve/regenerate mana and for farming money. Furthermore, given that the timelines in this game are actually really tight with long arcs only lasting a couple of weeks at most, the extensive traveling & dungeon crawling is even worse in some ways than ever before. This is yet another fundamental weakness of this entire type of game that completely kills my interest; out of the desire to have as much time to interact with the rest of the game, I feel like I never have an actual choice of when to do certain content. I have to sit through hours of sim content one day, then do hours of grinding & dungeon crawling the next with extremely limited resources and annoying optimization strats. Obviously a lot of this comes down to me, but this really is a systemic problem as well.

For this game, they obviously couldn't use the same SMT demons as they always do so they came up with a separate concept of "Archetypes", or classes. Each character can individually switch between classes (cool), but you have to separately unlock them for each character (annoying). But I kind of hate the system, because they decided to have few (if any) duplicate skills between them. This results in certain specific builds requiring certain specific archetypes to be unlocked and leveled, even if you only need a single skill. The methods of transferring/selecting off-class skills are also kind of badly designed IMO, but there's a lot of unnecessary and tedious gameplay to get a build up and running. It doesn't help that certain archetypes have really weird unlock requirements, like Hulkenberg's Magic Knight class tree requiring maxed Mage archetypes. Note that her base stat distribution gives her terrible magic proficiency. Then, lots of good skills and combos are only unlocked near the endgame as they're blocked behind S.Links, meaning you're stuck with kind of mid-level builds for the majority of the game. Opinions vary, but I personally cannot stand this system. I'm honestly kind of impressed how they managed to bungle up a class-based system this badly in some aspects, even if it isn't wholly bad.

The worst of everything for me is that the menuing in this game sucks ass. The game encourages you to build up a ton of different archetypes for each character, then makes it incredibly obnoxious to actually go into the menu and do that; you have to go through like 3 sub-menus to switch, and there's no better shortcut. Also, since archetypes change your gear, you might have to hold onto up to 4 sets of gear if you want all of your characters to stack a single archetype (which does happen sometimes!). There's also a set of separate menus that you have to navigate to if you want to change your off-class skill slots, which are again per-archetype, per-character. It's impressive how terrible all of the menuing feels, but it also makes much of the dungeon crawling gameplay enormously obnoxious to deal with. This (along with some other, less significant UI gripes) was probably the chief reason why I just can't stand playing the game anymore. Trying to interact with any portion of this game feels sluggish; the UX feels like it prioritized style over substance.

When I originally paused the game, I was kind of planning on going back to it at some point -- maybe just pausing for a bit to finish some other stuff. But after stepping away from it for a little while and letting all of these annoyances stew in my head, I really can't justify spending any more time on this anytime soon. I haven't had even the slightest interest in touching the game after I stopped, which is probably the most evident sign that I should probably just move on. Also, I didn't really notice until now, some of the textures & models look awful - not sure why (LOD issues?).