Its new IP from Atlus meant to be their new third pillar among Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series, developed by Studio Zero, a new team gathering veterans from the previous franchises founded by Katsura Hashino, producer of Persona3,4 and 5.
The studio was interested in exploring new genres and mechanics while keeping focus on storytelling and narrative, being “project refantasy” its first big work.
Metaphor was announced in 2017 as a draft and fantasy idea. After years in the dark is officially announced for October 11th 2024 as release date.
It counts with Shoji Meguro and other Persona veterans collaborating with them, cooking a very interesting gig.
The contest for the throne has begun, after the king´s passing the Kingdom of Euchronia needs a new ruler.
As the king don’t have any heir the holy church will manage the whole process to find the new monarch.
Everyone can participate to reach the power above all the other tribes, you only need to get enough followers to back you up.
Highlights for Metaphor Re Fantazio
Story
The contest for the throne has begun and the king´s passing is not clear at all. The prince disappearance years ago is suspicious and we have to find out how these events are connected.
The mission, to lift the curse afflicting the prince for years. However, the task at hand isn’t easy to pull out. The Count Louis is the main suspicious about the regicide and the killing attempt to the prince years ago.
An eldan boy from low tier tribes arrives to the capital Grand Trad to contact the infiltered agent in the army. Despite the excessive racism to the tribes with less influence is trying to uncover the truth.
In the barracks we meet Sthrol, a fallen aristocrat after a human swept their house and territory from the map. After the first assignment a “human” attacks the fort where we were supposed to contact another agent from our cause.
Gameplay
The battle system keeps the strategic action in turn-based combats, adding to the mix big cities to explore. We can run and slide in our old sword with magic to reach higher speeds around the maps.
Exploring dungeons will be a little different from other turn-based RPGs due to the action on the field. The monsters are noticeable over the map, so we don’t have random sudden encounters.
The protagonist can attack and stun the monsters in action combat previously to start the classic encounter for turns. In other words, we can start the battle with a big gap in advantage.
The enemy group will suffer a health points reduction and may be stunned at the beginning of the battle. Furthermore, the advantage isn’t exclusive for the player, the enemy can attack and start the encounter with the same conditions.
Besides the battle system, we encounter the timeline for story objectives, using the calendar as main engine to progress. It’s almost impossible to not mention the Persona series due to the high number of similar features.
The Persona formula is taken into a fantasy world could be a rough concept to describe Metaphor and isn’t incorrect but it feels short at the same time.
The maps are sectioned in big areas connected by loading screens just like any Atlus game. The difference here is the freedom granted to the player to explore and interact with the NPCs.
Royal Virtues
What any governor needs to rule a nation, these qualities are required to express correctly through any conversation in the whole story, we have five in total:
- Courage, lets you take high challenge quests and missions.
- Wisdom, unlock smarter conversations and certain quests.
- Tolerance, determines how well you treat the people of the kingdom and your followers.
- Eloquence, allows you to express your ideas in more reasonable way.
- Imagination, helps you to explain how to deal with problems from the citizens.
These serve as the social stats in Persona series, nothing new for people familiarized with the feature. Rank up your followers’ bonds rising the proper royal virtues on time, this is key to progress in certain points.
The Follower Bonds
It’s a friendship relation between the protagonist and a follower, unlocking them will grant you access to a new archetype, will be explained in the next section.
Every important battle companion and not playable character that help you in the story will trigger an event where you unlock a follower bond, allowing the player to deepen a relation and form true partnership from both parts.
Rising bonds will unlock helpful gadgets to help your candidature to the throne, merchant for example get you discounts in the stores, most of the others will reduce the magla cost to learn and inherit skills.
The advanced archetypes are available after reaching certain level or maximizing bonds, these new classes will have higher costs to learn skills but with powerful moves.
Teambuilding
The team is able to use magic without detonators, which is not usual in this world, this is the influence of the protagonist power, Ancient Kings magic, which is every archetype, basically jobs or classes in any other RPG.
We can teach every archetype to all party members and maximize their job experience with certain items, however, the magla cost is massive which means we will have to grind experience, magla and money to progress smoothly in every chapter, at least is recommended to learn various skills for every party member.
Basic archetypes:
Seeker, Warrior, Mage, Healer, Knight, Brawler, Merchant, Gunner, Thief, Faker, Commander, Masked Dancer, Summoner, Berserker.
Every archetype counts with middle and advanced class, but we won’t enter in details to prevent spoiling the fun customizing the team.
Akademia
There is a certain place where we can manage and change the party customization to learn archetypes and skills, this is the Akademia, where More inhabits with a cat, more or less what you know as the Velvet Room from Persona.
For those who don’t know, it’s a place in dreams or mind where we can talk and customize the party, usually we have access to it before any dungeon and every map.
As long as you progress through the story you will be increasing your royal virtues and bonds, this means certain tweaks are unlocked as more slots to inherit more skills from another archetypes.
You can sort the equipment as recommended for the equipped archetype but if you prefer to try and check what can you get, easily you can equip any party member with a very different weapon and see how you pull your strategy.
Graphics
The art style is different from the classic Atlus modern RPGs, Shigenori Soejima is the character designer for this new game. Seeing a mix of tribes and races as its described on the lore of this fantasy world, we can see some similar colors to classic characters of the Persona series as the protagonists or certain cast in specific.
Taking a cartoonish art to present menus and most of the options where the player interacts, the screens look gorgeous and the menus features an amazing art that updates with the current party composition.
The menus creation has been really difficult to reach the quality they have, the studio said in a Metaphor stream previous to launch, that they needed to run a totally different program to display these menus that has been beautiful for the last Atlus releases.
The bosses design its really outstanding using art pieces as inspiration and these philosophical and politic vibes over the place.
Sound
The main composer for Metaphor is Shoji Meguro, known for the great work in the Persona series and its last successful entries that made shine the SMT subseries. It said that the battle original soundtrack has been a total hit for the players.
It sounds like a Buddhist chant with Esperanto vibes, truly an outstanding piece, its sophisticated, elegant, catchy and epic at the same time.
It matches perfectly with the topic in hand that the game tries to bring to the table. The dedication and attention to every detail has been marvelous since the very beginning, and lets you feel the political conflict, racism, philosophic approach and brutality from these ages, where the aristocracy and church were over the law and system.
Performance
Tested on Steam deck LCD original model 512GB, after 50 and more hours playing the game feels a little heavy or needs optimization on the PC version, patched once already and fixed the stability a little but isn’t enough.
The battery life lasts over 3 hours with default settings, it doesn’t suffer overheat but the game is fully playable and enjoyable with certain and minor issues.
The crowded spaces and big maps present a few drops in framerate, usually runs between 32 and 45 fps after the patch, in crowded spaces it may fall up to 19 and oscillates between 24 and 29 in combat.
Personally, it doesn’t have a any problem to fully enjoy this new RPG, despite the framerate and optimization needed in the PC version the general limit would be 30fps in handheld mode.
Conclusions
- A total masterpiece from the Persona/SMT series, taking some classic features, improving the customization and possible strategies.
- Addign action to start the encounters to jump into the classic turn-based combats has been a good combination to keep fresh the battle system.
- Adding archetypes to the possible equipment and changing the power of every member to perform any role in the party lets you try infinity possibilities to tackle the bosses’ fights.
- The story takes a heavy plot amid politics, racism, power abuse, war consequences, and very controversial topics.
