Metaphor: ReFantazio Is a Wake Up Call Inside a Great RPG

By Diego Nicolás Argüello | October 18, 2024 | 3:20pm

Video Games Reviews metaphor: refantazio

Metaphor: ReFantazio Is a Wake Up Call Inside a Great RPG

Metaphor: ReFantazio is forged in perspectives. It’s a motif symbolized in a simple, yet meaningful recurring image: the protagonist’s eyes taking center stage in cutscenes. At times, they express wonder. Others, fear. At the heart of it is a lingering reminder of where we’re witnessing the events of the story from, and why we should keep it in mind throughout the adventure.

“Why is one of your kind here in Grand Trad?” is one of the first things the protagonist hears upon arriving at the capital. As shocking as the bluntness of it is, it’s not like he isn’t warned by the fairy Gallica, his traveling companion, as well as other characters that later become allies. “Just mind yourself, this city ain’t the friendliest to us ‘inferiors,'” Catherina, from the Papirus tribe, tells him.

In Metaphor, the protagonist, part of the Elda tribe, is constantly exposed to all sorts of racial rejection. Grand Trad is built in classism, with tribes that aren’t socially renowned by their lineage or political power deemed inferior. They’re forced to live excluded in a different district with scarce access to resources. As you interact with people from other tribes, you get poignant slices of their lives and the struggles to just exist around other people due to these rooted societary divisions.

Gallica tends to kindly share advice. “Let him say what he wants. Fighting someone like him would just be a waste of energy,” they say on one occasion. “Don’t let it get to you—you’re not to blame,” Gallica reflects sometime later. But when given the chance, the protagonist is also able to express his feelings. “It never gets easier,” reads one of his reactions to seeing and hearing so much prejudice out in the open.

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It makes for an interesting premise for the debut title of Studio Zero, the latest talent amalgamation from Atlus, which groups together veteran developers from the Persona series. Initially announced in December 2016, right in between the Japanese and Western release of Persona 5, the project was pitched as the next evolution to the framework of the RPG series, which was originally born from a spin-off of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, where students fight and recruit demons while dealing with heavy shit inside and outside their classrooms.

Gameplay-wise, Metaphor does everything it was supposed to: refinement over what came before. 2024’s Persona 3 Reload, a remake that ties elements of the original Persona 3 and Persona 3: FES via DLC, also refines its previous conventions. When I reviewed it, I noticed that it did so to the point of oversimplification, while the combat itself suffered from feeling stagnant. In that review, I also dived into how the popularity of Persona 5 turned it into an influential tidal wave that was permeating almost everything that came afterward. Simply put, it was time for something that could contest that homogenization.

Metaphor; ReFantazio

In the case of Metaphor, the premise itself already sets it apart, with a presentation based on a fantasy and medieval setting. Instead of capturing people’s hearts, a group of characters has to cruise through a kingdom in the midst of a competition to select the new king after the previous one was murdered. The structure is similar at first glance, with turn-based combat and social activities to increase bonds, and the protagonist’s own stats being the main event still. But there are multiple additions, some big, some small, that help it feel fresh. There’s an active combat system now that takes place before the turn-based sequences, and can give you a vital advantage if you plan accordingly. Instead of collecting Personas, you now study and level up Archetypes—jobs, in essence—with more being unlocked once you meet certain characters in the story. You really need to know what you’re facing up against and think accordingly. The UI is once again gorgeous and painstakingly detailed (like, there are programs dedicated solely to them running in the background), but it immediately sets itself apart from the homogenization that Persona 5 established. It has its own identity, and not just around the overall feel of things.

One can trace some of the elements of Metaphor back to the original Persona 5, which is the last project director Katsura Hashino worked on before moving to Studio Zero. Namely, how everybody treats Persona 5’s protagonist, nicknamed Joker due to his status being on probation, charged for a crime he didn’t commit while trying to defend a woman from a politician forcing himself. As somebody with political influence, especially with the police, it was easy to frame him. There are dozens of other examples of “corrupt adults” that the Phantom Thieves need to face throughout the story. In terms of handling politics, it’s a rough draft in contrast with Metaphor, but a draft all the same.

Studio Zero plays around this idea of societary rejection, but does so in ways that are both blunter and smarter than before. Alongside the search for the new king, and many other plot points presented as exposition during the first few dozen hours, arguably the most interesting is the presence of a fantasy book in the hands of the protagonist. It showcases a utopia in which there’s no inequality, no class divide, and no higher conflicts. From the beginning of the game, before you even start playing it, an introductory question sets the tone. “If fantasy is born from hope… a desire to make the world better than it is… then that hope can be made manifest. Thus change does come, and thus is fantasy forged into a new reality,” reads one of its answers.

The characters that join you in the adventure are all fascinated by the book, reading new excerpts in each sequence. Every time, without fail, there’s both a reflection and a desire for their reality to match the fiction. The examples of the current conditions are abundant. You help people from other tribes who are excluded from shopping, or who aren’t considered to work on specific kitchens around the capital. In an armor shop, you can find a “Noble Tuxedo,” which increases all stats by one, but also costs 40,000 Reeves, the in-game currency, an absurd amount of money for a single item. You also get the other side at times: there’s an activist woman who becomes a regular character to speak to in order to increase one of the protagonist’s stats. “People like you who see injustice and actually try to do something about it—this world would be a better place with more people like that,” the woman tells you.

After defeating the first proper boss in the game, the party is feeling anything but victorious. The realization that the plan won’t be as easy as expected is met with a catastrophe caused by the enemy, which revives the corpse of a human (yes, in Metaphor, bosses are called humans, in case the bluntness hadn’t hit you yet), and they just lost one of theirs. But then, a civilian shows up unexpectedly to thank them—despite the bittersweet outcome, they still helped people. The characters show surprise over the fact that people were paying attention to their actions. As the follower Strohl succinctly puts it, it’s a semblance of sometime that’s hard to come by: hope. Metaphor: ReFantazio captures the same feeling of hope in the first few dozen hours that it takes Persona 5 about 80, and with greater effect.

Metaphor is a great RPG, and an excellent wake up call. The message within it doesn’t feel tacked on. The developers aren’t giving themselves a pat on the back with a not so subtle wish for the story they crafted to be the fantasy that inspires the player without the required foundation. Different structural framings (“use your time wisely and strive to be the best version of yourself”) make a difference. When some people still consider games like Final Fantasy VII to be apolitical in 2024, perhaps the bluntness is justified.

In reality, we can rely on a metaphor, a fantasy story inside a book, for escapism purposes. But its message needs not to cause make-believe scenarios in which to get wrapped up in, but inspire a willingness to enact change. Even when performing actions that seem small, the impact is noticeable. When enough people do it, the impact solely increases. Until then, only some will continue to enjoy rich societary statuses, while the rest continue to see things from their respective perspectives.

Playing Metaphor feels poignant in ways that the later entries of the Persona series don’t quite achieve. It’s led me to think of my own perspective over the years in situations where I felt like I was the only one like me. In a 2019 event, I was white passing enough to be deemed worthy of being spoken to by a certain person. But they immediately started ignoring me once they heard me speak in English, my second language, and mocking me behind my back. Years ago, an editor said they were only interested in hearing local stories from me, being placed as a diversity token rather than a writer able to tackle other pitches. Every time I visit the US, I have a 50/50 chance of the customs officer making deliberately confusing questions and reactions to my answers to see if I fall for them and mistakenly say that I have intentions to, I don’t know, stay illegally in the country or suddenly mention a family member that doesn’t exist.

As Metaphor: ReFantazio constantly reminds us, both micro and macro problems are intertwined. What’s the perspective of somebody looking for an abortion in a red state, a family separated by the border, a kid in Gaza? The examples are everywhere, and they’re visibly blunt, too. They’re there while we scroll down on the timeline or in three-second-long attention span cycles while we swipe reels. If only more people made the effort to see things through somebody else’s eyes, perhaps we could regain some semblance of hope that change might stop being a fantasy.

Metaphor: ReFantazio was developed by Studio Zero and published by Sega. Our review is based on the Xbox Series X|S version. It is also available for PC, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4.

Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more, and he’s usually procrastinating on Twitter @diegoarguello66.