Metaphor: ReFantazio

The gameplay of Metaphor is an interesting evolution of the Persona formula. I'd wager the fantasy setting was justified to recontextualize the series' time management premise into making side quests and travel be a part of the formula in a way that wouldn't be possible within a typical Persona game. But on that part, I think it hurts the game because structurally, how you spend your free time is going to be defined by every act giving you a bunch of side quests, and you have no reason not to engage with this. That, on top of the fact that you can boost your social stats while engaging on these quests, deters you from ever bothering much with town activities, especially as social links can be levelled up the second you meet requirements. The only decision to make is whether or not to do social links first before dungeon crawling which can reap benefits but it's never so valuable you can't do dungeons without it nor are the time constraints punishing as the game is lenient in that assuming you're consistently able to complete each dungeon within a day you should be fine, and typically doing so is not that difficult beyond possibly the boss fights themselves. Even then, there's still plenty of wiggle room in a few cases where you may have reason not to be able to complete it within a day. Honestly, you'd have to try to be unable to get every social link by the game's end. Persona was just better here because it offers bigger barriers to completing social links and also was structured for you to make more decisions on the "downtime" comparatively.

On the other hand, I feel the game's combat is better than Persona's. There's both more complexity and depth insofar that the game doesn't have the one note checkmate scenarios of Persona (all-out attack) and allows for turn manipulation in various ways. I also think that the game is good at making you respect its mechanics early on, considering that as early as the first main dungeon you'll come across enemies who'll make you reconsider your setup and strategy, forcing you to make use of specialized setups. I also like that MP is a resource you have to be considerate of over the course of dungeon crawling especially as restorative MP items are scarce and virtually everything in battle requires mp, granted it's not too hard to avoid enemies and run straight to the boss there's still a loss in terms of exp and items if you do this so there's still a conscionable decision to make here. Persona had this too, but unlike Persona, Metaphor uses this to make it so items are valuable due to how much utility and value they provide in any fight as they can provide this utility without spending MP. This never breaks the game's balance either as they've limited the particularly strong items and your biggest damage source comes from spells. There's also a lot of unique utility across archetypes that make their value uniquely interesting and can create a variety of strategies, far more than the conventional Persona game where Persona's were more ubiquitous in function. What this game does well is give you a ton of mechanics to work with and maintains a decent enough balance between them where people can approach the same boss in a multitude of different ways and win.

Actual encounters, on the other hand, are not consistently good. I think once you learn to respect the game's mechanics, most of them are easy to trivialize and by late game it was too easy to just blow up every encounter by either nuking them with AOE or with buffs and enemies don't actually push you beyond draining your MP. The Brilehaven chapter has a lot of solid gimmick bosses but It's not until the dragon bosses that you're truly challenged and I think they went a little too far on making bosses be absolute bullshit here, but I think the bullshit is necessary to really force players to think about their builds and play into funny exploits, so I appreciate it for that. I just wish the bosses were at least more consistently interesting because so many are just boring and easily stomped through stat checks and exploits.

The structure in which you engage battles in is overly snowbally. The Persona games have had this issue as well but at least those games gave you an incentive to tough it out and try to play out the encounter if you get caught. Here you have two optimal solutions - either let yourself die and go back to the very lenient checkpoint or just run. The bonus you get from not being hit in battles is massive and there's no reason to stick to a fight given that reason on top of the fact that the snowball pre-emptive strike gives you such a huge advantage that it makes doing this in most encounters easy. It's easy to alleviate whatever loss you got from this through items and by late game you'll usually have little lost anyway. Hell, if you choose the route of just letting the enemy kill you then you lose nothing but your own time and chances are that's so minimal to be worth it. Even if you don't get the right combination for the full team wipe when you get the pre-emptive strike, you can easily salvage this by using the reset fight feature to turn everything in your favour conveniently. The end result is that every encounter outside of boss fights ends up with you either getting wiped quickly or you do that to the enemy, which makes most encounters feel cookie cutter even if you're using different skills to achieve this end.

The level scaling is also problematic. I get the sense that none of the dungeons were scaled in such a way to take into account for you doing other quests, so there are a lot of cases where you'll just completely stomp the dungeon or enemy. It's too easy to get to the point where you'll just beat everyone too easily through raw stats and this gets particularly egregious in the late game that it becomes boring.

Narratively, its conceit is complex but not dense. It's political but from the perspective of a 12 year old filtered by a 60 year old CEO. What I mean by this is that a lot of things are conveyed but it falls short of being meaningful due to how laughable its framing is and not bothering to justify its worldbuilding. Why does a single person care about the Elda, given that the protag is pretty much the only one who even appears in the cities? Where's the inequality in this world since they harp on this constantly? It's implied the Paripus are low class but we don't really get their perspective on that or get a sense of why they're in these conditions. There are plenty of glimpses that imply how the various tribes are individually perceived but the extent the racism ever reaches is some random guy being a douchebag and it never seems to establish anything coherently systematic despite implying it exists. It takes a stance about inequality and racism being bad but also has no framework or understanding for why that exists and superficially condemns the issue without addressing its actual cause. It views the systematic aspects of racism as an afterthought. It only wants to engage with individual racism and even then it barely even does that, ultimately coming off as toothless and thinking of "equality" more as a driving force to move the plot forward than a conflict to engage with.

This gets worse when you consider how farcical its presentation of ideology is. All the adversaries have the most cartoonish ideologies imaginable, including Louise himself, whose politics are so laughable and absurd that it's impossible to buy into the idea that people give him overwhelming support in spite of his charisma. We do live in a reality where demagogues can assert absurdities and get away with it due to their persona, but they always have to rely on certain anxieties and uncertainties. Louise does this but I think the issue comes in that the "Human" threat is not properly contextualized and there's no ideological bent to him for the public that isn't based on that, even for someone as shallow as Trump I think people care a lot more about a variety of things than national security. It's not so dire that Louise protection is all-encompassing and it just feels cowardly that they don't have Louise take advantage of other anxieties, like why not play the tribes against each other or fear monger over the threat of "progression" that a real demagogue would? It gets worse when they want us to think Louise has a point on the barest premise that he, too, thinks equality is good but this attempt comes across as so shallow and laughable given the unreasonable conclusion he comes to in which he wants to achieve this. It doesn't help that the plot has to sacrifice a lot to paint him as a genius mastermind, which is near impossible to take seriously.

The player's party is hardly much better. There's no specific ideology they have other than "be nice :D" and "equality is good," which is so non-specific to be meaningless. It does so under the pretense of a representational democracy deciding upon a monarch, but it never questions the validity of either and assumes both are inherently good. It views politics as a factor of individual good rather than something systemic, which, if you know anything about politics, is such a myopic way to understand things. It's idealistic but not in a way that's grounded in any sort of real pragmatic understanding of politics or is challenged in any interesting way. I think it's telling that it ends on the note that it treats the process of engaging with actual politics as boring and unfulfilling opposed to the adventuring aspect this game is built around and I think that says a lot about how much it wants to engage with real politics.

The social links fare a bit better because it does tackle broader topics. But I feel all of them just end up rounding themselves into convenient optimism that's hard to find believable. The only one where I thought the resolution was strong was Brigitta but even that has the awkward bit where they just drop the missing dog conflict entirely and handwave the problem in the epilogue. However, it does at least land on a solid point about finding hope within a dour situation and trying to make the best out of tragedy while also self-reflecting on your own position in the world at a moral level. The other social links do tie into the narratives core about diversity and the conflicts of a tribalistic society but I feel they all end up on the same juvenile optimism that defines the core game's narrative where its resolutions are always so conveniently glossy it's hard to take them seriously.

If we're looking at the game beyond its thematic and narrative conceit, I do think that it does at least nail a personality. I typically find myself incapable of taking anything it says seriously but the chemistry between Neuras and Hulkenberg is endearing and I do think it does succeed in creating a strong sense of camaraderie within the party. I just wish there was stronger characterization for the player character. Despite how they've given him more voice dialog than the conventional SMT lead, they still functionally write him like an empty self-insert whose political ideals has no meat to it whatsoever other than bland optimistic platitudes. The whole twist regarding the prince also just feels like a copout on the potential simmering conflict on who his allegiances lie with and his position as a monarch. It just feels like it doesn't want to make him anything more than safe, heroic avatar the player can self-insert into.

I do think it establishes a solid interrogation on how we have fantasy inform our real-world beliefs. The narrative ends with the question of what a fantasy like this means for us in the real world and what its conflicts can say about us comes with the conceit of hoping the player absorbed something meaningful from the game's narrative, that even if, from our perspective, this is fiction, there's still value to be found in it. It reads to me that the writer wanted the fantasy to be something inspiring or at least personally meaningful and that's the weight they want fantasy to hold. But I think it runs into the issue that it never ties this conceit to anything tangible in the real world. Throughout the game the modern world is given this glossy idealism that makes it seem like a utopia compared to the dourness of the fantasy world but at no point is it ever hitting on anything specific. There are a lot of implications given that the modern world we live in was not truly as perfect as the book idealizes it to be, but beyond a very JRPG exposition about some vague conflict that lead to the fall of humankind it never tries to connect its fibers to what we could meaningfully attach ourselves to within the context of the story. There was such a missed opportunity at the end to give an exploration of the modern world in contrast to the fantasy that they copped out on. What it envisions the modern world to be is never given a proper contrast to make this connection meaningful. I think this was done to imply that we should not let real life dissolve value away from fantasy and the good that comes of that in practice, but when the fantasy is just so one-dimensional, and we're told constantly the modern world is a better contrast it's hard to make that connection. There could have been an amazing narrative here about how we perceive reality and where fantasy fits in but it just never wants to commit to this. There's an interesting hook to play into that fantasy is more desirable than the real world in spite of the fantasy in question being worse to live in, but it just feels so empty in how it contextualizes and concludes this.

I came out of Metaphor numbed by how blandly it concluded its conceit but thinking on it one thing I appreciate about it is its optimism. Unlike the Persona games the protag never ends up separating from the main party and the ending implies a happily found family is the outcome of its adventure. Despite how shallow it is narratively, I do find its naïve optimism at least endearing. I think largely the problem with this game's politics is that it seemingly does want to engage with real world issues and anxieties with an optimistic resolution against it but also wants it to be universal enough as to not alienate anyone to achieve those ends and I feel that's fundamentally the game's issue. I can at least find some common ground with its sentiments but I understand politics enough to feel that this is coming from a place of not wanting to engage with anything other than a bland platitude. The 12 year old may be radical and naive who can convey some wisdom in spite of that, but the 60 year old boomer still wants them to be functionally conformed in society and man... there's something so disappointing about that if you think about the basis in which it's trying to be broadly appealing.