Persona is a series that is by many people beloved, I did not try the games until five, I dabbled a bit with four but I became a convert at Five. By all accounts, it sucked me in with its surprising depth of teenage characters and the traumas of life manifest in an alternate world beside areas like a weird upside-down parallel universe...where have I heard this before?
Anyway, a few years ago at the Winter Games preview (oh wait I mean THE GAME AWARDS.) A new game was announced by Atlus the publishers of the Persona series. The game is directed by Katsura Hashino, who directed Personas 3, 4, and 5 but wanted to do something different after 5. What we’re going to talk about today is that project: Metaphor: Refantazio. It’s pretty much a fantasy persona, how this differs from normal Persona is I guess the setting, but it also adds some things to shake it up just enough on the gameplay side to make it worth at least checking out the demo.
This is what I did, so don’t take my word for it, if you like what you read here, go get it and try it yourself. I will be upfront and say this is in my mind a LENGTHY demo, a lot of it is more or less setting up the plot and explaining the game system and other things. I’ll avoid as much of the plot as I can as I feel games like this are best experienced without an explanation of what you’re getting into. However, some plot points have to be talked about and some of the pictures are from major points. So, if you do not want to be spoiled at all, just check the stats and go play the demo yourself. Come back when you’re done.
The Stats:
Played: The demo up until I had the 3 days left option (five hours per PSN)
Platform: PlayStation 5
TL:DR: There is a lot here that is familiar but also different in a good way, this feels like it may be something special but the demo only lets you peak, but it’s enough to get your attention
Gameplay:
So, if you have played a Persona game you kind of know what you will be getting into already, this is going to be turned-based, but you have access to magic and all that good stuff. You also get access to your personas err...lineage? Anyway, they function the same as your OG personas, but that’s kind of where we begin to see divergence.
Unlike Persona where your main character can change things up with personas. Your other characters can also swap out to different lineages like a class or job system. So let’s say you want a healer but your party doesn’t have one, that can be changed easily. While a currency/skill tree is locking this, it does open up a lot of options on how to build your team. The demo gives you access to three of them and introduces a fourth near the end of it. It’s your usual type of warrior, healer, mage, etc. But I like the idea of being able to build your team up.
The other thing is the items the people use in the class also change their weapons and armor and all that. So if you want to keep one person as X for example. They will keep the class and weapon set and naturally grow. Skills will carry over to other lines as you go I’ve learned. However, if you are one of those “This person needs to be in this class cause it makes sense” types you can do that I guess. If you decide to change it up every so often you’ll find formations and variations and slowly develop your party as you wish. Also introduced is a front row, back row where if you go to the back you get better defense but less offense and vice versa. Enemies will also take advantage of this as they may target in a row and moving them back or forward will make whole attacks miss. Making you pay attention to little nuances of the combat so you don’t get blindsided.
The social links and other things are not too expanded upon in the demo, but if you played one of the games you know they will come into play. I have to be honest the way it is presented in this is interesting, most of the time spending social stuff is going to be building followers so you can gain popularity for plot reasons. Still, the game makes you social, so it’s like a popular contest/Facebook thing. It works for what it is and if you played a Persona you kind of know how to do this, but the social links seem more involved and nuanced but again this is a demo. The demo will give you 3 days to experiment with this and then end. For purposes of disclosure, I stopped here as I am gonna get the game anyway.
Another thing that I find amazing is the use of outside battle combat stuff. In many RPGs, you have to grind, and face every target in your path or you don’t build your EXP to face the eventual boss. Someone finally got a good idea and included a scanner-type option that functions like a difficulty scouter. If the enemy is blue or yellow you can probably go up to them and slash them with an attack, if blue they pretty much instant die, yellow would give you an advantage in the battle. So grinding doesn’t feel nearly as bad as it normally does. Oh and for those wondering, yes red is bad don’t hit red…
I love this feature as it felt like the game picked up pace and respected the work put into the battles. Also, you are not penalized, you still get EXP and you get items you would have if you went into battle. So yeah, love that I can just mow through a lot of small fry and just keep grinding the dungeon but not feel like a grind for once.
Story/world:
I won’t go too deep into this, but I just wanted to comment a bit about the world you get into. They start by explaining it is a mirror of our world, and you get hints of that through the story. The place the plot concept begins to lose me is when people in this world hear ours and go “Oh no looking down on us anymore, we would be equals.” That...kind of...doesn’t work for me, I mean I get it, it’s supposed to be a metaphor (see what I did here?) But, it comes off a bit naive from the writer’s standpoint as it’s like they are telling us our world is better, but by these people talking about classist ideals and race politics the concept of our world being a utopia is...just kind of hollow, again this is a demo. So, we may get those shades of gray to make it a better picture but I just had to point out how the story seems to want us to believe our world is this wondrous place compared to the world our characters are in.
So, this is a meaty demo, and I am going to get the game to continue this, I like a lot of the ideas and while the plot beats come off somewhat predictable, they also felt earned. We’re also early into this game so the bigger reveal twists may be coming. Again my only real complaint about the story so far is it the empty feeling message about how our world is better. This may be a me thing, in all honesty, I’m hoping my opinion changes on this. Look forward to more on this coming soon from me, I will say that even playing the demo it felt like I was playing something special here, and that alone is enough for me to invest my time into it. Which I will be doing in a bit...
-The Chaos Director
For someone whos never played any of the persona games, this appeals to me more and might start with this game