When this game came out I didn't hear much about it. I vaugely remember hearing it won "Best Art Direction" at the Game Awards but that was pretty much it. After playing through the modern Persona games (3-5, along with Strikers for good measure), this came up as "Persona but a traditional fantasy RPG". I decided to grab it next time it went on sale, and I'm very very happy I did.
The first couple hours of the game absolutely blew me away. The music and presentation were absolutely awe-inspiring. The moment I entered Akademia and heard its theme grace my ears I knew this game was going to be something really special.
To start, this game isn't simply "Persona but a traditional RPG" it's completely it's own thing, that includes aspects of Shin Megami Tensei and Persona. The battle system is Press Turn instead of Persona 5's One More!, which I think a lot of people prefer, as I do I by the end of playing. It includes the social links of Persona, now called "followers" with the rankings ending at 8. I actually really enjoyed that the ranks end at 8, the stories told by the follower links are always nice and compact, and I was able to finish all of them, even though I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up Neuras' link and had to spend extra days getting the items for his quest. In Persona 4 and 5, I didn't max out all of my social links, and honestly didn't manage to unlock all of them either, so this was much appreciated.
Instead of Personas, all of your party members wield "archtypes" which are basically character classes that you are able to switch out at will. Each Archtype has a path that can be followed - for example the mage class goes from mage, to wizard, and then to either elemental master or warlock. I actually really liked this mechanic; compared to the Persona games, the MC is this OP war machine that you can make really powerful due to fusion mechanics, meanwhile their teammates are stuck with only one Persona. In Metaphor, your teammates have multiple viable paths they can take - Junah for example is a great masked dancer, healer, mage, etc.
The main difference of the game, which I have good and bad to say about, is the structure of the gameplay. Overall it's a step down from Persona 5, in my opinion. It's really hard to beat palaces when it comes to dungeon crawling gameplay. Metaphor only really has about 5 actual dungeons, counting the final dungeon on the star. The rest of the combat takes place in optional areas that you encounter while doing bounties or rarely during social links. I say optional, but if you don't do all of the bounties, you will be sorely under leveled for the actual dungeons when you eventually have to do them, so in reality they are mandatory. So in that way, there's technically way more dungeons than Persona 4 and 5, but they aren't anything special by design or anything. Enemies eventually do repeat and dungeon types do as well (I think there's 3 dungeons that are just reskins of a forest). This isn't really a slight at the game or anything, Persona 5's palaces as I mentioned are really on another level. The dungeons are for sure better than Persona 3 and 4 for example, and one nice thing about them is that every time you pick up an item in a dungeon the game autosaves, which isn't present in any of the Persona games. Its a great feature in case you feel like taking a break.
As I mentioned before, the combat is press turn, which I honestly really enjoyed. For the most part, the combat system itself is based heavily off of Persona 3 Reload, with 3 different physical attacking types, and all of the elemental types present in that game. There are new abilities such as a self taunt for knights for example, along with abilities that give you dodge chance, repel chance, etc. It's all well and good, don't have any complaints, I really liked it.
Difficulty for this game wasn't too bad for me on normal. The final boss for me was a gigantic difficulty spike, I found myself having a really hard time beating it at first. However, I found a strategy online someone used that really utilized the royal masked dancer archetype, and after getting it all set up, I finally beat the 1st form and then the 2nd form on my first try. It's for sure very difficult, but you don't need to grind or get really lucky or something. Just come up with a solid strategy and you should be fine. The rest of the game is quite simple on normal, as long as you keep yourself properly leveled. I never had to grind once, just fought every enemy I came across the first time in a dungeon and I was fine. There's optional superbosses that you can fight before the final boss, one of them being a dragon that repels all damage, which I thought was pretty annoying and not the most fantastic design, but it's an optional boss so it's whatever.
Where this game really shines, especially compared to the Persona games, is how fantastic the story and characters are. Persona games have great stories and charactes, but every game has some cringe stuff in it that takes away from the experience. 3 has Junpei (first half of the game, he mellows out a lot as the game goes on), 4 has Teddie (for basically the entire game) and even 5 has that really cringe plotline about Morgana leaving the group. There are no cringe characters or plotlines in Metaphor. The entire story is about you taking down Louis, and everyone is focused and serious for the entire game toward achieving this goal. My only real gripe is that I wish the protag visited the elda hollow again in some post credits scene, considering the significance of the location to the overall story. We can assume that he visits on his expedition though, so no harm no foul.
Overall, I think is is an absolutely fantastic game, mind-blowing at times. It may even be better than Persona 5, but I will have to sit on that for a bit before I decide. Either way, this is an absolute must play. If you have a PC, it's on sale now for almost half off, as it oftentimes is. Buy it now and play it, you won't regret a thing.
