Metaphor: ReFantazio

Cree en la fantasía, gracias Atlus.

If you enjoyed the Persona or Shin Megami Tensei series, you’ll feel right at home with Metaphor: ReFantazio. In many ways it is the same game Atlus has been refining for years—calendar system, social bonds, dungeon crawling, turn-based combat with a stylish presentation—but it still manages to feel like a confident proof of concept. It’s as if one team inside the company finally got to say, “Look, we can take the formula somewhere new.” The characters are strong and well-acted, exactly what you’d expect from an Atlus title. Where the game really improves on its siblings is the Archetype system. It’s more fun and flexible than the classic Persona system and carries clear old-school Final Fantasy job-system vibes. Metaphor also has more action overall. You can spend a lot of time interacting with the combat system itself, which feels like a welcome change of pace. If you ever felt Persona was too slow or padded between its big dungeon stretches, this game definitely picks things up. The familiar Atlus rhythm is still present: strict deadlines and limited content available in any given window of free time. That structure works, but it also highlights the game’s biggest weakness. Metaphor feels condensed. I kept wishing it were longer or simply gave more breathing room to explore the world Atlus built. The lore is excellent when you get it, yet I often found myself more curious about how the world became what it is than about the future our protagonist is fighting for—a future the game never quite lets us inhabit. Story-wise it’s solid, but the way the narrative and party progression are gated creates a steep cost for replays. You have to push through a large amount of repeated content before the roster is big enough that meaningful divergence becomes possible. By the time the game “opens up” enough that you can miss companion content on a single run, you’re already in the late stages. I put roughly 80 hours into one thorough playthrough with no guides, and while I enjoyed it, I have no real desire to start a new game just to see what I missed. I’ll probably just watch the rest on YouTube. Overall, Metaphor: ReFantazio is a strong, stylish Atlus RPG that successfully evolves the formula in a few key areas (especially Archetypes and combat feel). It just never quite gives itself enough space to fully capitalize on the world and systems it introduces. Overall I'd give this game a 7.5/10.

im still extremely early into this game but goddd its so funnnn

Positives: - Voice acting is phenomenal in this one - diverse OVERWORLD music - diverse cast and actually interesting "bonds" to explore - picking the wrong choices in bonds doesn't inhibit you from getting to the next stage - game is rather long and story has a few turning points I didn't see coming Negatives: - it's quite obvious who's gonna die and who's gonna make a return later on - the battle themes are VERY limited, even SMT 3 had more than that and that game is over 2 decades old - always hated the concept of these games having limited days to achieve everything you want - no real replay value this time around as your choices don't matter except for maybe the ending which I haven't gotten to yet. but if in 100 hours of game time only the last choice matters and you've been playing the game thoroughly, there's no real value in replaying it except for using another build - some people are not gonna be happy there's no romance option here like in almost every other ATLUS game Overall 8/10 game for me. Yeah I've named many negatives but these games are kinda built on a "limited time concept" so there's no changing that. Only thing really dragging it down for me is the lack of battle themes and the fact your choices virtually don't matter - than again when a game gives you 100 hours of content on your playthrough, I'd imagine it'd be hard to make choices truly matter, just - don't give me the illusion of choice. I don't like being lied to.

holy UI and character design, now this is gaming

IMO the GOTY of 2024.

游戏体验算不上差评，但是给好评也不值得，就卡在真女和女神异闻录之间，不硬又不软，二周目更是只有一个新难度和一个新怪物，剩下全是一周目的东西，我觉得steam该出一个中评

Great Game, at release some huge performance issues. But after some updates it got resolved

这个美术风格我可是太爱了

metaphor is really fantastic