Metaphor: ReFantazio

Note, I beat the game on hard. I think anything positive I have to say about the gameplay applies to the appreciated high amount of difficulty. This might just be the worst written game ATLUS has ever made. This is coming from someone who thinks Persona 5 is an extremely poorly written product, and also criticizes Persona 3 harshly even though I mostly like it. The game is severely bloated, with almost zero depth to the story. Plot points happen rapidly with no time to establish tone. Characters are all one note with no depth, being driven by a single very basic core character concept and nothing else. Meanwhile the second half of the game feels severely unfinished. The plot suddenly moves so fast that it feels like what writers call the 'turning points' or 'setpiece moments' of a story mindlessly strung along each other with no attempt to make a rational plot connecting everything. The game does have a point. Spoiler alert, it is criticizing people who angrily rage at specific demographics due to their own legitimate poor experiences and do nothing but spread hate. It is not specifically about racism. It is not really about Trump or any other right wing figure. It's a very deep criticism of Gen Z and Millenial political rhetoric, both left and right. It's about anti immigration. it's about incels and feminism. It's about anti semitism and virtue signalling. It is about realizing that the anger and fear over what distresses you IS harmful to indulge with and letting that drive how you interact with the world both harms yourself and increasingly drags society to hell as we all normalize hate. But acknowledging things objectively, letting them drive you to be a better person and allowing that to drive you to actually help people idealistically, is how you actually become someone worthy of respect. Basically hold onto your fantasy (idealism, hope, morals) and try and make it reality, regardless how flawed the idealism feels. The fact people miss this is only a little bit because they are illiterate (when you get an archtype, it literally gives a giant speech saying something like "Thou art one who would temper anxiety into strength" like ffs it's spelling it out for you) but because the game is seemingly terrified of expressing this clearly. When you get to the big plot twist of the game, there's a few lines that take this entire concept and spell it out as clearly as it can to you. Generally in this kind of fiction, you stop trying to word around the concept. But suddenly everyone starts ranting on about making fantasy a reality. The game just doesn't want to make a political statement in a game that is fundamentally about winning an election. This means when you finally go to face the big bad, and he finally explains his motives. He just seems wildly more intelligent than the entire main cast combined. Because he has views, he has ideology. It's insane, but it's not literal 3yo buzz words on loop. This leaves the game feeling like a 20 hour game that takes 80 hours to finish and has absolutely no literary value. The entire cast sucks so it's not character driven. The big thematic moral of the game isn't even explored and is barely stated. And the big plot turns are rushed and messy. The gameplay is pretty good on hard. It's probably the best balanced game ATLUS has made in decades and an enormous upgrade over Persona 5. The follower buff system is drastically better concieved than Persona 5 and the game does a great job of making you feel always rushed but not pressured. Dungeons are the best they've ever been, and it feels like someone on the dev team saw the same criticisms I had with Persona 5's god awful dungeons and made it their job to fix them all with this game. The side dungeons are copy pasted but mechanically are better than the best Persona 5 dungeons. The main dungeons are all full of unique mechanics and the new Dark Souls inspired encounter system, while easy, allows much more engaging and interesting than Persona 5s pretty looking hallways and auto ambush free win button. I hope they reuse this system for Perona 6 because it's just such an upgrade. The OST is incredible, but feels too small. Many cutscenes feel like the wrong track is playing. If it was a bigger soundtrack, I'd probably call it the best soundtrack Meguro has ever made, and that man is a legend. Basically, the game is a really hard sell. You either hate it because the story is unbelievable garbage, or you like it because the gameplay and soundtrack is great.