MeinMMO demon Cortyn played the Persona successor Metaphor. However, why this means not only fun but also frustration can be read here.
During the holidays, I thought I should give in to my urge for JRPGs once again. One cannot currently avoid Metaphor: ReFantazio. The game from the creators of Persona has received fantastic reviews everywhere and is described as a masterpiece. Since I loved Persona 5, my confidence was quite high, so I decided to purchase it.
I was aware that Metaphor would also take quite a while to get into. The Persona games already have the reputation that the first roughly 10 hours of the game are a torment, and only afterward does everything “really get going” and you slowly lose yourself in the story while all the game systems finally interconnect. This is the case again this time – I was prepared for that.
What I was not prepared for was the multitude of small and larger flaws that I would not have expected from a new game in 2024. Because in many, very many ways, this JRPG simply feels outdated. As if it were hanging on old systems that suited a different time, which they are now desperately trying to force into modern games. Sometimes it works better – and sometimes less so.
However, in global reviews, the game is fantastic. On Metacritic, it has 94 / 100, with many reviews that give either 5/5 or 10/10. Something I simply cannot comprehend.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is by no means a bad game, despite all its flaws. It is actually quite good. But it has so many small problems and quirks that add up to diminish the fun, leaving me asking: How the hell did this get released like this? Am I the only one who finds this strange?
Small quirks everywhere
Here follows a small list of many details that, in my view, prevent the game from being a true masterpiece. Some things are surely a matter of taste and subjective, while others can objectively be categorized as “not optimal”.
A colorless, boring game world
The most notable criticism, the first thing that catches the eye for me, is the monotonous game world.
This is especially evident in large squares in the game. When standing in the royal marketplace of the capital, Metaphor feels as if it has fallen out of time. Everything appears monotonous, has only a few colors, and looks as if its graphics come from the last or even the decade before that. That despite this outdated graphics, textures still need to be loaded occasionally is simply incomprehensible to me.
If I approach a bush in the wild and it suddenly gets a better texture at a distance of about 10 meters to my character, I cannot imagine that this would have been necessary.
Equally bad are the “side quest dungeons.” They look – and I mean this without any sarcastic exaggeration – often so carelessly and outdated that I cannot explain how this came to be. Literally, the dungeons from ancient games like “Grandia 2” or “Final Fantasy X” visually look more appealing. In Metaphor, these dungeons are monotonous, visually simply boring, and often appear as if only 20 assets could be created per dungeon and then repeatedly connected in different ways. What a shame.
Difficulty levels in ping-pong mode
My next point is the difficulty level of the game. As usual, I play JRPGs in my first playthrough, if available, usually starting on “Normal” and then on a higher difficulty in my second run.
However, even on Normal, it becomes clear how far the actual difficulty level of individual battles can often diverge.
Whether you attack an enemy yourself or get surprised by the opponent has drastic effects that I usually only know from Soulslike games.
- If I start the battle, the enemies are stunned, and generally all foes are dead before they even get a turn.
- If the same enemy attacks me, however, the exact opposite can happen: You are hopelessly at a disadvantage, and if you do not have the perfect archetypes for the fight, even trivial enemies can suddenly lead to a game over.
Yes, these advantages and disadvantages have always been part of Atlus games, but never have they felt so drastic and thus so frustrating. When in a turn-based, tactical battle system the fight is decided by whether I dodged at the correct moment before the fight, like in an action game, it feels highly out of place.
Additionally, there is a certain “tipping point” after which all planning is irrelevant anyway. Because as soon as you have the archetypes “Mage” and “Merchant,” you essentially have infinite mana to heal yourself and an infinite amount of money to buy anything you want.
You can literally renew the generally limiting resource of mana points (or “Magla”) infinitely or generate infinite money. You do not even have to “exploit” or unintentionally take advantage of game mechanics – it is the absolutely logical and obvious step to take once it is possible.
This also means that due to the lack of limitations, you can farm before any boss until you are 100% replenished and significantly outlevel the boss, trivializing the fight anyway. That is simply not well balanced.
This frustration with the battle system leads me to my next point …
No “reload” option in battle – Who messed that up?
What I find utterly incomprehensible is the lack of the option to bring up the main menu during a battle to reload a save. Because very often, during a boss battle, you realize: “Ah, I have the wrong archetypes for this fight. I can’t accomplish this like this. I need to reload and prepare the team differently.”
This is simply not possible. I can rewind the battle to the beginning – but only back to the start of the battle, meaning I cannot change any preparations. And as I cannot return to the main menu (at least in the PS5 version), I am doomed to either quit the game directly via the PS5 menu and restart or click through a hopeless battle for another 1-2 minutes until all my party members have finally died.
There’s hardly anything that robs you of joy more than having to continue an obviously hopeless battle in a single-player game for several minutes when you already know after just a few seconds: I need to reload and change my setup.
The calendar system – forced and simply ridiculous
Anyone who has played the Persona series knows that in Atlus games, there is almost always a kind of time limit in the form of a calendar system. Per day, you can only perform a certain number of actions while time progresses. Do you want to spend the day with your comrades or work on your character stats like eloquence or courage? Do you visit a dungeon or spend the afternoon cooking food for the next outing?
The time limit is never really annoying; in most cases, it is even good and sensible – if you could do everything without restriction, the whole game would not function.
However, in many cases, the system seems like it is artificially overlaid on the story, making it at times ridiculous.
There’s the case of kidnapped children, who are thrown to a monster and that must be stopped as quickly as possible so no more children are sacrificed – but don’t worry, you still have 12 days. So, on day 1, you go into the dungeon, play through half of it, and at the emotional peak of the dungeon story, you can then say: “Alright, enough. Now I’m going to spend the next 10 days discussing things with my friends before we save the children here.”
Comedy at the wrong moments
Additionally, there’s what I like to affectionately refer to as “anime bullshit.” Because in exactly the wrong, really dramatic moments, the game suddenly stops taking itself seriously.
When we get lured into a trap by the villain who feeds children to a monster after just hearing a dramatic backstory about unplanned pregnancy and child murder, it is simply very poorly received when our group of heroes is lured by the villain onto a trapdoor in the best “children’s show” manner.
Even worse if our companion, a perpetually flying fairy, also falls through the trapdoor and comments: “I’m falling too, ahhh!”.
I have nothing against comedic inserts – and in many cases, they are solid – but too often I find myself thinking: Hey, how can you consciously kill the atmosphere like this?
The issue with sound
A big point that bothers me massively is the lack of voice acting. While the main story has voice acting for almost all passages (but not everything), this is not the case with the side missions. I understand that you cannot fully voice every insignificant side character in a large RPG. But the fact that even the character stories of the hero team, meaning all the quests that should bring you closer to the background of Hulkenberg, Strohl, and Co., are also not voiced is really, really uncomfortable for me.
Reading long dialogues that are completely silent felt outdated in JRPGs even 10 years ago.
However, even when there is voice acting, the mixing is simply not good. The (mostly) bombastic music is frequently so loud during dialogues that it completely drowns out the speakers. Yes, I could certainly adjust this manually by reducing the background music volume and increasing the voices. But adjusting this manually should somehow not be my task.
Additionally, the sound effects in cities become very annoying very quickly. NPCs in cities have small “sound snippets” with which they draw attention to themselves when you stand at a certain distance to them or pass them.
The problem here: Most NPCs have exactly one single sound for this. This results in having 1-2 annoying NPCs in towns constantly playing their same sound over and over:
“Hey, over here.”
“Ugh, an eldan boy …”
“Hey, over here.”
“Hey, over here.”
“Hey, over here.”
“Ugh, an eldan boy …”
Sometimes you just have to take a deep breath.
A good game, but simply not a masterpiece
I really want to love Metaphor. It is also quite good, the story is solid, and the combat system is really interesting at its best moments. But it has so many small quirks that show everywhere that the typical “Persona formula” slowly but surely feels a bit outdated.
- I don’t think I ever want to play a game with the calendar system of the Persona series again.
- I believe I expect significantly more voice acting from an extensive JRPG than Metaphor offers.
- I believe game environments of a full-price title should not look so lifeless today as they did at the turn of the millennium.
I believe once I get through the game, I will be quite satisfied. But Metaphor: ReFantazio lacks the evolution I wished for from JRPGs – and other games, like Final Fantasy XVI, have tackled much bolder.
Metaphor: ReFantazio would have been a masterpiece – if it had come out 8 years ago and not just a few months ago.
