Well, it took about a month, but I’ve finally reached the end of Metaphor ReFantazio. While I didn’t like absolutely everything about it, I still have to say that this absolutely was a blast of an experience. I’ve already logged some detailed thoughts in previous posts, but, for a game like this, I feel a like I need to take one last look back before putting it on the shelf for a while.

At first, I found myself a little bit worried that this was just going to be Persona by another name. The turn-based combat was there, the calendar and time management were there, and so were the familiar damage types and levels. However, this turned out to not be the case. After spending a little time with the combat and time systems, it became very clear that Atlus had actually departed somewhat from the usual Persona formula.

No longer were there “wrong” answers during support conversations, just different levels of reward. This was so freeing, and it really helped me to actually take an interest in each character rather than just try to analyze what they said in hopes of figuring out what exactly they wanted to hear. In other words, you could just enjoy talking to them.

As for the battle system, I wasn’t sure about it at first, but after spending dozens of hours with it, I have to say that I prefer it over that of Persona 5. I enjoy the much greater degree of flexibility that the turn crystal system allows over the “once more” system. Also, having all members of the party being able to fill different roles instead of only Joker makes a huge difference too.

Not being able to switch roles (or Archetypes) mid-fight turned out to not be all that much of a loss either thanks to being able to swap party members AND set out-of-arche- type abilities via inheritance. It was just an overall more enjoyable way to fight, I think. I especially loved that the game gave me the power to choose whether or not to trigger the turn-based mode most of the time. Being able to just clear out low-level enemies instead of having to waste both time and magic on them was huge too.

As great as most of the experience was, I do have a few minor complaints. For one, the game can become a bit grindy at the tail-end of the story. This only applies if you want to obtain and max out each party member’s final archetype, but still. I felt like making them prohibitively expensive was unnecessary. There are ways to farm what you need, of course, but it is ultimately more a matter of wasting time than it is doing anything special to obtain them.

I also felt that both boss encounters and dungeon design were underwhelming. Almost none of the bosses save for the final few had any real mechanics to them, and dungeons weren’t really all that memorable as locations in the same way that many of the palaces were in Persona 5. Bosses weren’t all that memorable either. Like, they were interesting to look at, but many of them wound up looking and fighting similar to one another, so I really couldn’t pick many out as interesting here at the end.

Truly, the real star qualities of Metaphor ReFantazio are its story, artwork, characters and music. I enjoyed all of these thoroughly throughout, and these would be the primary reason that I would do a replay in the future. I’ll likely need to wait for a while though, since I now know the stories and how all these characters develop. Spending time getting to know them was fun, but, well there’s only so much story and character interactions to be had, you know? It’s the same with all these sorts of games, I think.

Metaphor ReFantazio was still a great deal of fun despite my minor gripes with it, and I’m already confident that it’s going to rank in my top 5 for the year. Really, if you like Atlus games or even just JRPGs in general, then this one is most likely going to be a slam dunk of an experience for you too!

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What are your thoughts on Metaphor ReFantazio? How about Atlus games or JRPGs over- all?

Image is Metaphor ReFantazio Steam page splash art