Metaphor: ReFantazio – a sublime game let down by bizarre technical choices
A fantasy Persona game – that’s the back of a napkin pitch for Metaphor: ReFantazio, the upcoming Atlus RPG that blends the key mechanics from the Persona games with a novel fantasy setting. But Metaphor marries this with an expanded scope, situating its lengthy story campaign within a semi-open world game structure. That could spell trouble for Atlus, who haven’t necessarily been known for technical prowess over recent years – and it’s fair to say that for all of the brilliance in the game design, Metaphor: ReFantazio has some profound technical issues at odds with the relative modesty of the visuals.
I think it’s best to start with what Metaphor: ReFantazio does well, because its visual presentation can be striking at times. In signature Atlus fashion, its UI design is an absolute highlight. Menus combine carefully illustrated 2D character art with bold splashes of paint texture, and iconography that recalls the Renaissance era of human scientific exploration. This is best appreciated in the game’s main menu, which highlights shifting paintings of the main character sandwiched between background and foreground paint splash elements, which are used to highlight text.
The main font is an Industrial Revolution era serif typeface, that emphasises visual contrast between thick and thin lines. Text is intersected with ragged straight and circular sketch marks that suggest a kind of older scientific or engineering illustration. Plus, the game has a small obsession with clocks and the passage of time – perhaps fitting for a game that revolves around a calendar. I think the ultimate effect evokes something quite visually striking that fits with the game’s themes. And the menus are generally pretty easy to read and navigate, despite all this apparent visual complexity. The transitions between menu panels are well-executed too and have a nice sense of motion.
It’s somewhat reminiscent of the recent Persona games, but it takes visual inspiration from very different places and uses a lot more texture and colour variety. Plus, it makes much more minimal use of real-time 3D elements than Persona 3 Reload or the recent Persona 5 spin-offs, so it’s more in line with Persona 5 itself in that respect. It’s definitely more similar to those titles than other recent Atlus fare, like Soul Hackers 2 or Shin Megami Tensei 5, which had appealing UI designs but look much more basic in comparison.
Like the Persona games, Metaphor tells a long and detailed story, which is presented quite effectively. A roughly 80 hour runtime obviously doesn’t lend itself to the kind of per-scene production values that you might be used to seeing in some other RPGs, so there are a lot of relatively basic dialogue scenes, which are often voiced. These scenes have effective framing, decent looped animations, and striking animated portraits to convey emotional states. However, Metaphor features a lot of higher production budget scenes too, including lengthy fully-animated 3D cutscenes, which often depict pivotal action moments that wouldn’t really work as little dialogue dioramas. Additionally, the game has quite a lot of 2D anime cutscenes as well, which are sprinkled liberally throughout the story for key plot developments. This is a big improvement over other recent Atlus fare like Persona 3 Reload, where these more demanding animated sequences were used more sparingly. Judging from my play so far, I’d say Metaphor has a high density of these sequences compared to other lengthy Atlus RPGs, which helps to propel the story and keeps things interesting for players.
