(new post - games, art meta) Metaphor: ReFantazio - ludonarrative, societal critique, and oh my god they (kindof) fixed Persona
(this post is very long and also being sent out in this newsletter a few days late, i’m so sorry lol. thanks for keeping up with my posts! view on the blog here: https://cerberus.bearblog.dev/games-art-meta-metaphor-refantazio/)
i'm on an empty stage. i walk up to the microphone, slowly, and grab the mic, gradually, suspensefully bringing it to my mouth. i say one word very closely into it: Ludonarrative. i am kicked out of the venue
Table of Contents:
1. analysis
featuring politics, Persona comparisons, some indigenous critique, and other story analysis
2. misc
talking about other stuff like favourite characters, minor complaints, and the OST
3. hard mode
going over builds and my thoughts on the gameplay!
i'm anticipating talking about my experience playing Metaphor from a couple different angles - at first i'll put on my armchair critic hat and talk about my feelings about the game in general, and then i'll end by switching to my Challenge hat to talk about my experience with the hard mode and what builds i used, what i found interesting.
if you don't know, i really like setting challenges for myself in games. unless i anticipate actually having a bad time with it, i will generally always go for a game's hard mode or otherwise neuter myself (e.g. 3 hearts only in Zelda) even on a first-time playthrough. i really like sharing about these accomplishments, so if you'd like, you can browse my #hard_mode tag in the future to see the other kinds of challenge runs i'll talk about!
analysis: Persona, politics, and utopia
i've been a modern Persona fan for a long time. my first exposure was listening to a friend i don't talk to anymore play Persona 4 over skype, and after he finished, we both promptly bought Persona 3: FES to play in calls together simultaneously. P3 blew my entire world apart and it remains one of my favourite games of all time. getting into this series led me to some very nerdy and embarrassing roleplaying online as a teen, giving rise to a group who are still among my closest friends today.
as much as i do love it, as much as Persona is important to me personally, i'm acutely aware of the writing flaws in this series - particularly in P4 and P5. P3 certainly has elements of social commentary, but 4 and 5 are where atlus really tries to aim their sights on a more individualistic target, the plight of teenagers' identities in contemporary capitalist democracy. and it doesn't always hit quite right.
very abridged overview of P4: the plot is about uncovering the secret behind a string of disappearances in the party's town. you discover that the missing are being dragged into a realm entered through a television (aptly called the "TV World"); this realm takes inspiration from their repressed fears, desires, or trauma to create a "shadow" of themself that taunts them with this information, before eventually killing them. as the protagonist, you rescue these people by clowning on their shadow in a boss fight and then having the kidnappee reconcile with this neglected part of themself. through this process, they usually awaken to a supernatural power (their "persona"), and then join your party. P4 takes the liberty of using this formula to examine some pretty cutting-edge themes for 2008, like struggles with sexuality and even gender identity. this cycle uses the standpoint of teenage insecurity to critique different ways that Society creates or exacerbates it, whether in the realm of family expectations, gender roles, or otherwise. it's a very humanistic and triumphant way to illustrate how these systemic things impact young individuals, and how they can be personally overcome, even giving way to a source of power.
this formula, however, loses its aim as you engage further with the game. oftentimes this character development is forgotten or somehow flanderized once the person joins your party: kanji, the character who is uncertain of his sexuality and opens up about his insecurities about his masculinity upon his rescue in the TV world, becomes the butt-end of a number of gay jokes; naoto, a character the game more or less canonizes as female but whose contentious relationship with gender is given a lot of attention in their own rescue arc, can be forced to wear feminine clothing in their climactic romance route despite being clearly uncomfortable. how does it make sense to have a story that critiques the effect of societal expectation and the need for a personal facade on teenagers' psyches, then turn around and enforce societal expectations on them to objectify them? or even just for a joke? both are, i think, actual ludonarrative dissonance that damage the message of the story. the latter is additionally just uninspired drivel.
P5 is hardly better. the plot is more convoluted, but it consists of a similar cycle: you stumble upon some kind of injustice or problem of which a specific character is the victim > the victim's convictions develop as you get to know them, and they decide to join forces with you to resist their oppressor > the victim awakens their persona and becomes a permanent fixture of your party. as with P3 and P4, the persona-awakening is a pivotal point in each character's story; it's where they're pushed to their absolute limit and they discover their conviction for fighting, their true power. their personality stagnates a lot after this point. after they find their purpose in your roster, they stop growing. i found ann, your second party member, to be really fiery and compelling in the beginning, which i liked because atlus's women have not been very well-treated, we'll say! and then her social link consists entirely of her concerns about her appearance as she strives to become a model. the game basically enables you to give her an eating disorder. the social links may be optional, but even outside of those, the characters tend to collapse into reaction-fodder or a bit of a stereotype once the game understands that they're here for good. this is because the priority stops being to understand their nature, and to instead be your entertainment.
and like, it's a video game. entertainment is the point. but the thing is that The Whole Theme of Persona 5 is literally: liberation from society, being a rebel, Fuck The Man, how teenagers are suffocated by adults who are attempting to hand them a broken world and who punish them for asking questions. the appeal of these modern Persona games is to indulge that feeling you had when you were a teenager, that you hated the society you were being primed to enter while being told at every turn, of course you feel that way, you're a child; it takes that feeling, and it gives you a fantasy of you being right: what if you, because of some innate talent and/or a rebel attitude, were privy to a supernatural power that adults know nothing about? what if that power enabled you to uncover the secret behind society being so fucked up - one that only you can repair? and then what if the video game took the internal struggle away from the characters and turned them into objects, further victims of societal roles and expectations, for you to laugh at or romance or to tell you how awesome you are?
even the mechanics of the game enforce this worldview: you, as the MC, are especially powerful among your teammates. your friends may have their own epic self-actualization moments, but that only goes so far - they're limited to their respective personas while you're the only one who can change yours at will. only your death triggers a game over. you can gain unquestioned access to the internal lives of all of your party members and more, and you can romance any (or all!) of the women. characters remark all the time on your personality or presence, despite a lot of joker's dialogue choices actually being kinda smarmy, and the only people who really dislike you by the end of the game are the actual antagonists. this wouldn't really trigger such a sense of dissonance, i think, if P5 weren't so heavy-handed in its aesthetics: you buildcraft in an astral prison. most of the game is about people waking up to their circumstances and actualizing themselves to resist them, and winning the political support of the masses. it recognizes oppressive structures as a problem and that those most affected are also the most equipped to understand and dismantle them - but it stops short of critiquing what makes you feel so Chosen One as the protagonist, like social structures that actually benefit the MC as a presumed straight man, or the concept of a person having innate supernatural talent and likeability. P5, in story and in mechanics, is a self-indulgent fantasy, not a game about liberation as it fashions itself.
i love P5. as a self-empowerment epic, it really hits the mark. but the inconsistency with its stated ideals is there, and it makes it feel shallow.
now: what if atlus was actually capable of addressing its mistakes?
Metaphor is a game about oppression. the world's population is spread into 9 tribes with differing physical characteristics and ways of living. most of these tribes primarily live under a central kingdom, with a very unsubtly christian church. a few of the smaller tribes experience extreme prejudice from the majority populations, and to varying degrees, their members either live as exploited underclasses within the kingdom or as separate societies altogether. this world is deeply unfair. people's positions and fates are largely predetermined by this pecking order.
in the beginning, the king dies, and with a prince who is (commonly thought to be) dead, the next-in-line is unclear. by the power of his magic, the king's spirit arises quite dramatically, declaring that whichever individual wins the people's confidence the most - no matter their royal status, religion, or tribe - will win the throne: the first democratic election in the kingdom's history. your mission in the game is to win that throne in order to forge a new, fairer world.
the MC is an elda, possibly the most reviled of all the tribes. your party goes on to represent all tribes with one individual from each. the cycle of befriending companions is less formulaic, still centered around recruiting them to your cause or somehow waking them up to their circumstances; here, the elda MC and his first companion, a fairy named gallica, are very clear that they're fighting for a better world. the focus when befriending people is less on endearing them to the MC as a personality, and more to trusting in his ideals as a political candidate. his quest is rooted very firmly in the politics and lived realities of his world; honestly, very little focus is given to his life until late in the game. his dialogue choices are mostly kind remarks, advice, and sometimes honest admissions of insecurities. while party members do praise you and center you, and the social links are mechanically similar in that you have uncontested progression into people's inner worlds, this Chosen One flavour feels less vain for the player because 1) you cannot romance anyone1, 2) the MC is actually a pretty good guy. he earnestly believes in his ideals, and 3) there are careful steps taken to separate you, the player, from the MC. you are asked to view the game as separate from you very early on, and this separation is referenced occasionally until the diegetic purpose for it becomes clear at the end. he has his own voice lines!
the vastly expanded buildcrafting system enforces this de-privileging of the MC and the player as well. through befriending people you gain "archetypes", this game's replacement for personas. archetypes are manifested from a person's lived experiences - e.g., you gain a healer archetype from a compassionate child character and a tank archetype from a knight of the royal guard. and while each party member is somewhat predisposed to fighting best with their original archetype, guess what? anyone can use any archetype2. characters are not locked into predetermined personas. the emotional self-actualization they experience in their Epic Gamer Moments, where they're pushed to their limits and choose to fight onward, is actually carried out in the mechanics of the game. you have agency in developing the characters further, playstyle-wise. writing-wise, the characters also feel much more dynamic. there are natural limitations when you have 8 entire protagonists, but they all have multiple times to shine outside of their personal arcs. they each have greater involvement in actualizing the entire party's goals, showcasing their various strengths or being vulnerable at differing times. we're talking about an anime-styled game where the most popular characters are men3, and it's because they talk and have ideas and aren't just there to harass the girls or make jokes!
there are definitely flaws, don't get me wrong. misogyny is still a problem. there's still a bit of objectification and romantic flirting with the MC that happens. the women are more complex, but a couple of the female party members tend to be reduced to a more singular event or character trait that they struggle around - junah talks a lot about singing and eupha's personality is a little eclipsed by being the literal priestess of the mustari, so she functions as a window into that cultural world moreso than anyone else for their own tribes.
the writing of the mustari is also something that i have complex feelings about, as a tsimshian. the in-universe christianity brands them as pagans. they're tan islanders. their central home island is called "virga island" which the game translates for you as meaning "uncivilized". at one point, the church forces candidates for the throne (including you) to embark on a quest to steal some of their sacred artifacts in an attempt to revision them as having origins in the church's religion, thereby erasing the mustari's history and establishing themselves as the One True Religion. it's pretty clear what they're trying to do here. i don't know if i really have a problem with them trying to do an indigenous allegory (granted it's not exactly my wheelhouse, as a non-pacific islander) - the colonialism is depicted to critique it, and it seems like they did shy away from some more blatantly appropriative visual language when designing the mustari. their clothing is honestly, fascinatingly post-modern. there's not a lot of stereotypical "tribal" aesthetics beyond like, their huts and some Mesoamerican Vibes in the dragon temple's architecture.
what gives me the most pause in this arc is how they handle their religion: the mustari's entire culture revolves around human sacrifice, and your mustari party member (eupha)'s subplot is the reckoning that this human sacrifice is unethical and only became a tradition due to a misinterpretation of their teachings. god damn was this awkward to play through. i get that Metaphor is concerned with how religion, even oppressed ethno-religions, can play a part in clouding people's understanding of the world. i think it's an interesting and important topic to tackle (not for any particular real-world reason). but human sacrifice is a charged stereotype. even though it's not a stereotype of my culture, i still have a fight response whenever its brought up because non-natives literally cannot help themselves from bringing up how awful it was when talking about cultures from central america. there's a very special scrutiny brought to not just how regrettable, but how Barbaric and Backward human sacrifice is, which in turn allows dismissal of all of that history and culture. this is also despite the fact it's been practiced in a lot of other areas in the world. naturally, a couple party members react with disgust to learning that this tradition exists. they go on to chill out a little and acknowledge its cultural context as the subplot progresses, and you find out that this tradition is based in like... a simple mistranslation. which is a complete misrepresentation of how sophisticated indigenous recordkeeping and oral tradition actually is in real life. despite how lame that is, i thought that Metaphor had a deft enough hand with humanizing the mustari themselves and ultimately respecting their national autonomy, that the overall picture doesn't feel unforgivably racist - it's just pretty unfortunate.
there are other examples i could use to poke holes in the game's attempted messaging, but as with the mustari, i think the overall picture holds up. a really interesting decision they made is that the MC still ends up being something of a Chosen One, but it's not to solidify your Right To Win. it's revealed before the final act that the MC you've been playing as the entire time was actually a magical projection of the dying prince himself, and you reunite with that body to become the prince proper once again. this projection was created unintentionally; the prince is half-elda from his mother, and half-clemar (the most privileged tribe) from his dad, the king. the prince's longing for a world free of prejudice that he could travel gave birth to the MC. the MC's rediscovered status as prince, though, doesn't entitle him to the throne. he still needs to win the confidence of the people. honestly, the only relevance him being prince has to the story is to complete the family drama that defines your relationship with the game as a player.
Metaphor is a fantasy. the MC is the fantasy of the prince; the MC carries a fantasy utopia novel written by one of the most pivotal characters, more; more is the fantasy of the king; and Metaphor is, specifically, you the player's fantasy. more is a character who helps you with the archetype system, a much more palatable replacement for igor. he's a very mysterious character who remembers nothing about his life until the end, where he's revealed to be a younger magic projection of the dead king - exactly how the MC is to the prince. more is your dad. your dad wrote the fantasy utopia novel that is constantly referred to as the MC's main political inspiration. more is also the narrator of Metaphor itself, and even addresses the player directly in select scenes... such as when you game over in battle and he muses that fantasy must be futile, then. before the final battle, the MC is critically wounded by your main antagonist, and you're whisked away to more's domain at the last second. this space is where more realizes his true identity. you are his son. around you, the real world appears (the shibuya crossing in japan, specifically); he tells you that this, the real world, is the world he wrote about in his utopian book, and the world of Metaphor isn't real. he says that Metaphor's realm is a horrible place where horrible things happen, where change isn't possible, and you don't have to go back. you can just live in the real world and forget about this hopeless situation. as the MC, you can say: no. you can have the prince argue that his friends are there, that he can't give up. more is anguished - he can't lose his son again. he tells you that fantasy is useless. after engaging a solo fight with him though, he accepts your resolve. you're choosing to hold on to hope where he, when faced with his own hopelessness after losing his wife and his son shortly before the events of Metaphor, chose to give up. the MC re-enters the world of Metaphor in the final hour, miraculously alive. after this scene, if you game over in the final boss, more's dialogue changes to say, "please. prove to me that fantasy is real."
it's a crazy fourth wall-breaking scene. more is talking to his son, but he's also talking to you. he's basically arguing with you to accept hopelessness and turn off the playstation. by refusing, in the text of the game, you literally affirm the power of fantasy to inspire you to make change. you admit that you want to see it through. a lot of fourth wall breaks in games can feel very vapid. because Metaphor's entire narrative is built around the leitmotif of the fantasy novel and this separation between the player and the prince, it feels earned. that's the only reason that the MC being the prince matters: it's for defining your connection to the story, not establishing his birthright in the eyes of the country's people. it's a really interesting decision on the part of the writers.
it also solidifies that, as more wrote about our world for his son, he is narrating the events of the game to us - therefore our world is the MC's fantasy, and Metaphor is our fantasy. we dialectically inspire each other. a funny detail that my girlfriend noted is in akademeia, the hub building where you can talk with more and craft your archetypes, there's a book that ends with the player's name (as it was entered when you started the playthrough). no one can read any of the preceding text at first, but more eventually realizes that the rest of the book also appears to be a list of names. it's never outright stated what the book actually is; after beating Metaphor, my girlfriend said that she thought it was the credits roll - maybe to imply that in the game's narrative, the story itself was manifested through the magic of everyone who worked on it.
it all ties together very well with the modern Persona power fantasy, triumph of the self over its circumstances. in Metaphor, magic energy, called "magla", is manifested from people's anxiety. if a person is overcome with anxiety, they can undergo whats called "melancholisation", where they become ill and behave erratically due to the magla that their emotions are generating. this process can eventually transform the person into a "human"4, an uncanny monster of great size. however, it's stated that this transformation can be overcome, and even make the person more powerful in the process, if they resist by choosing to risk death rather than be controlled by the fear - one NPC in particular references that he'd rather "rip his heart out" than succumb to the anxiety.5 modern Persona is famous for its grisly persona-awakening cutscenes, and Metaphor carries that blood: when characters awaken an archetype, they plunge their hand into their chest to tear out their heart, revealing a kind of mechanism that seems to be the source of their archetypes. so the very process by which people come by archetypes in the first place isn't due to some innate ability. in case it wasn't obvious enough, it's very plainly stated at the end when more's wife literally says that anyone is capable of producing an archetype. this scales nicely to a societal level, too. when discussing the irrationality of people's racism, it's often remarked upon by characters that it arises from anxiety of the unknown. in the final act, when people are flocking to support your antagonist for the throne, who minces no words about his intent to create a cruel world of "survival of the fittest", this baffling support is attributed to people's anxiety about the future, too, and how the magla created by that discontent causes people to become even less rational. Metaphor presents a flawed society, diagnoses its problems, and instead of saying that the responsibility must naturally rest on those who are powerful by pure chance, it says that those most capable of revolution are the ones who choose to make it happen. just as the MC himself was formed not because the prince can magically split himself into two, but because the magla gave his intense dreams a physical form6; just as no one is totally pigeonholed into their inherent strengths via the buildcrafting system; just as archetypes, magla, the protagonist's inspirational utopia, and yes, the game itself is fantasy given physical form.
i'm not saying that atlus has the perfect game on their hands. but it's pretty clear that Persona by the time of P5 was, ironically, straining against its cell - a story with a meaningful kernel is imprisoned by the fact that its trying to market to people seeking a specific kind of self-aggrandizing escapism. i just didn't see it coming that atlus would care enough to see that as an actual problem, and then build an entirely new game from the ground-up to paint a more compelling, earnest picture. a very politically-, socially-concerned picture. it's a monumental feat of game design that such a massive RPG was given so much thematic cohesion between its mechanics and its story, something i feel only smaller titles (such as Undertale) tend to accomplish. everything in the game is carefully designed so that you know it is the way it is, because of people's agency; because of fantasy given form.
misc: character thoughts and such
the characters: god i can't help it, strohl is amazing. his voice acting might be the literal best i've ever heard in a video game - so much personality and emotion and nuance. i'm also a huge sucker for RPG characters that have a strong moral compass, and he gets tons of time to shine with it since he's so frequently stepping up as a sort of spokesman for the party. louis is definitely the best Persona-Metaphor antagonist by far. i thought maruki in P5R was really interesting, but louis is so compelling and his voicework is amazing, too. there's something very fascinating about a villain who is so honest about his intentions - he (mostly) doesn't care for good or evil. he only cares about his own moral consistency, and ensuring that the world conforms to that.
beyond that, it's really difficult to name favourites. as a furry, heismay and basilio are easy next picks. i did love the female characters, but like i said, i felt that their writing suffered a little particularly in junah's case - she talks a lot about singing. hulkenberg is amazing though, and she had my favourite voice line in the game: when she takes damage in battle and says very dogmatically, and that i can only describe as being with extreme cope, "only a flesh wound". like. you just got crushed by a giant sandworm. i don't know if i disliked anyone in particular - gallica is a bit of a nothingburger to me unfortunately. one thing i'll give P5 is that i liked how its equivalent, morgana, had his story more intricately woven in with the overall world. it felt unsatisfying that gallica's story basically just amounts to, like, she had amnesia or outright incorrect memories of her earlier life? they kinda just shrug it off. she's not a very strong character at all
favourite characters: strohl, basilio, heismay
the soundtrack: the music is amazing!! admittedly, i had to warm up to it. i'm very used to the iconic nature of Persona's other music, and i tend to be a little biased against orchestral music in games. but Metaphor really stands out with the way percussion and vocals are utilized - it almost sounds like in a couple of tracks (like in the skyrunner), the vocalist is yodelling? i thought that was so cool. the diversity of the music definitely dries up by the end (and the diversity of fight music overall is lacking), which is such a shame because for the first two-thirds of the game, a unique area will come up with a theme that stops me in my tracks for a solid couple of minutes while i take it in.
favourite tracks: Shinjuku, Kriegante Castle, Destroyer Charadrius (final boss), Regalith Grand Cathedral (my gf pointed out that this one has a neat time signature too? no idea what it is though, i can't count in music lmao), Formidable Foe
other thoughts: i really wish the reveal of the world's history and how humans came to be was handled differently. it's way too exposition-heavy, and i know it's atlus, but i just found myself very eager to get it overwith. i also didn't like how more's wife, the disembodied female voice you hear throughout the game, is kind of enacting her will on the story at times? it feels like it takes away from the agency of the characters themselves. also catherina's follower bond is a whole ass mess. they made her a democrat
i'll close out this section by saying something positive, and i can't believe i haven't commented on this yet, which is, oh my god, the fucking artstyle! jesus christ! the sheer visual polish on this game could clean my dishes if i held them up to the screen. the watercolour, my god. okay that's all
hard mode: gameplay & builds
i'll start by saying that the turn icon system is utter genius. in Metaphor, they completely refresh turn-based combat by making turns a fluctuating resource you can handle via a few different mechanics. this is so much better than the stale ass system that's been endemic to RPGs for a long time, where you are always allotted 1 non-transferable turn per party member. i was just saying before Metaphor dropped that i felt like i was done with turn-based, and wanted to get more into action RPGs or perhaps even shooters - Metaphor proved me so, so wrong. it's just so fresh! the way that this enables hard mode to be more than just adjusting damage multipliers is really cool, too. in hard mode, enemies get double turn icons, which adds a lot more complexity to your approach. i loved the hard mode and even found it not too challenging, so i may have to come back to try the new game plus difficulty at some point.
another way i made this harder on myself is, for the final boss, you can weaken him significantly by defeating a number of minibosses scattered around the end area. the game strongly implores you to do this. my girlfriend, knowing who i am, let me know that i could skip those fights if i wanted to fight the most difficult version of louis possible on a first playthrough. here's what changes when you Don't Weaken Louis:
instead of 4 turn icons (which is a lot, but not uncommon in hard mode) he has 8, and can have up to 12 sometimes
expanded attack repertoire that inflict debuffs or status
he's level 90 instead of 85
so. pretty bad!
here's where my character's builds ended up by the time of this fight:
MC: Warlock, with Ninja, Soul Hacker, and Masked Dancer inherited skills. status-inflicter and dark damage dealer, + wind coverage.
it was so over when i realized that inflicting hex makes dark attacks do seemingly triple damage. my strat was to use hex chant from ninja to try to put the status on enemies (which the status-boosting passive from masked dancer helped with), use hyper which warlock learns naturally to charge my attack, and if i could help it, i'd do a synthesis with hulkenberg to inflict dark weakness, and then again to do the actual dark attack. i could get anywhere from 4k-10k damage this way when i was able to pull everything off!Strohl: Royal Warrior, with General and Cleric inherited skills. damage dealer and buff management, i guess? i loved strohl, but got confused on how to use him by the end of the game. royal warrior didn't seem too strong especially compared to berserker, though i guess i just wasn't looking hard enough at the synthesis because most people seem to feel the opposite, and can wipe the floor with the final boss by abusing strohl's synthesis skills. oh well.
Hulkenberg: Persona Master, with Faker and Saviour inherited skills. synthesis support and weakness-inflicting.
by the end of the game on hard mode, inflicting weakness to get more turns becomes extremely necessary. i opted for hulkenberg over junah because i thought heismay made for a better tank than hulkenberg, she's a lot spongier than junah thanks to naturally high endurance, and having some redundancy was actually nice at a couple points. if another persona master or strohl were out at the same time, i could also use them to inflict a dark weakness rather than needing the protagonist to do it.Heismay: Paladin, with Ninja and Warlord inherited skills. dodge tank and buff support.
heismay as a dodge tank is so goated its satanic, and he was the only reason i was able to beat the final boss. i had to inherit the basic knight's proclamation which felt silly, and i realize most people make him a dodge tank with royal thief rather than paladin, but in my defense 1) i strongly dislike the royal archetypes from a conceptual standpoint, and 2) i liked the additional chance for a counter from the paladin passive plus the countering lance. on his downtime, i had formation of vigor and shelter formation on him to keep the party buffed or pull people to the back, if necessary.Basilio: Royal Berserker, with Destroyer and Tycoon inherited skills. damage dealer and critical hit farmer.
i got a bit silly with basilio - destroyer has a passive that increases damage when the character is low on HP, and it's by a lot. it was risky, but i typically used him by keeping him low HP, healing with mediline with heismay or hulkenberg so it wouldn't affect him being in the front, and just set him loose with gold rush and his strike skills. gold rush was because his royal archetype has a passive that allows him not to consume a turn icon if he crits, which gold rush has a very high chance of doing.Junah: Persona Master, with Elemental Master inherited skills. magic damage dealer and type coverage.
junah was useful in a few different points, but she didn't end up playing into my party as much. i dunno.Eupha: Summoner. magic damage? god i'm sorry eupha idk. i really wanted to use her more, but i didn't get the appeal of summoner too much and it felt kinda pointless to have another high-magic stat character this late in the game.
as far as louis's fight goes, i ended up figuring out that on his first free turn, louis's AI will prioritize removing debuffs from himself, then clearing your buffs, and then buffing himself, in that order. so, i would keep up buffs with heismay, have other party members keep him debuffed, and then use remaining turns to deal damage, heal, or inflict weakness. other than heismay's dodging/countering plus the dodger ring, this ended up being the insight that won me the game. this is because the extra turn icons seemed to work by giving him another "cycle" of turns; so if i depleted his turn icons with heismay before he hit the next cycle, i would retain my boosts and keep him from raising his own stats. i had two strategies for Harming Him: the first priority was using basilio's royal skill that deals strike damage and inflicts strike weakness, so each consecutive turn i'd use only half a turn icon with him, and i would secondarily set up a dark weakness plus buffs on my protagonist so i could get off a dark synthesis. it took me probably between 30-50 attempts to beat him, and my winning attempt was maybe over an hour of straight gameplay.
ok. so, i have 4 main critiques of the gameplay progression and the battle mechanics in Metaphor:
you might be wondering why the hell i didn't use more royal archetypes, especially if the final boss gave me so much trouble, and the reason is that i really don't like them. they defeat the appeal of the buildcraft system, which is to give all builds their own strengths and have fluidity in how strategies and skills can be combined so that you know there's countless ways to win fights. the strength of this system is that you make your own strategies, even if you could've also just won by spamming crazy synthesis attacks. royal archetypes are super-powerful archetypes that are locked to specific characters, so it really feels like they're pigeonholing you back into using a specific playstyle, especially if you're on a harder difficulty where many of the higher-tier skills are gatekept within these archetypes. to make matters worse, skills from royal archetypes can't be inherited either! this felt very lazy and i would've liked for a more thoughtful, freeform way of incorporating the super powerful royal skills and synthesis moves. like, it is objectively better to have heismay on royal thief instead if you're doing a dodge tank with him, but i just couldn't do it. the thought of it made me so grumpy, i wanted to have fun and be silly with it
magic users feel like they get kindof shafted by the progression of the game. this is because the early playthrough strongly encourages you to build your MC (whose stats you can freely allocate) into magic - your next 3 party members (strohl, hulkenberg, and heismay) are all biased towards strength-using, and in order to level up hulkenberg's default archetype, you also need to train her into a magic-using class. so you don't get any decent magic users until junah which is maybe halfway through the game, and by then you probably already have the MC using magic or have had the role filled haphazardly. and the resources needed to change your builds are hard to come by. junah's archetype also introduces the ability to inflict weakness, which is very helpful and gives her an edge, but then eupha comes along who's an absolute MP guzzler with not much else going on. i really struggled to find a specific use for her. it's not like the intent of the game is necessarily to try to use all 8 party members equally, but maybe the progression could've been balanced better by less-strongly biasing a couple of the early party members/archetypes toward strength.
the dungeon crawling gameplay loop gets a little old by the end. i would've liked more locations with different gimmicks, or maybe more unique story dungeons as opposed to little fuck-off places? i think it's because the music and enemy diversity dries up a lot by the last couple months of the game; i'm not sure. i heard some speculation that the mage academy was meant to be an entire dungeon before they axed it to keep the story at a reasonable length. i was definitely disappointed that you don't ever explore it properly, despite it being introduced as a major location. in general, the map felt like it was overpromising a bit - actually, maybe that's true for the game in general. things felt a tiny bit anticlimactic in a way i struggle to articulate, for how expansive it felt in the early game. but i also don't know if adding another 10-15 hours to the game to allow for more character exploration or old building spelunking would've been a good idea for most players.
battle mechanics can be obscure in a way that's very frustrating. to name a few: a) it's generally unclear how easy it is to inflict statuses, and what enemies are immune or weak to which. most bosses seem unaffected by status whatsoever, and honestly it kinda sucks to pacify an entire battle mechanic for the most pivotal fights b) the actual potency of skills is poorly explained. the hierarchy of language used to describe how strong attacks are goes weak > medium > heavy > extreme > severe. doesn't... extreme sound stronger than severe? and as it turns out, the actual attack values of skills aren't uniform across each tier, so one heavy skill will be much stronger than another. just do what pokemon does and give us numbers c) there's a couple things that are unclear if they're bugs...? i noticed a couple times that if a boss uses a full-party attack, if anyone is in the front row, it'll do more damage across the entire roster rather than only to the frontliner. shrug
overall i'm insane about the combat, though, and i really hope that Metaphor becomes a flagship that they can keep iterating on - if for no other reason than to keep fine-tuning the gameplay.
okay, ła sabaat (that's it). i really really doubt all my review posts will be this long, but this game really spoiled both the artist and the Gamer parts of my brain so i had. A lot of Thoughts. thanks for reading if you got this far
footnotes
i should say, you can't choose who you romance. despite the flirting, there is arguably only a single character who you can unambiguously reciprocate romantic love for, and it's eupha. my girlfriend thought this was a really interesting choice, to take the agency of romance away from the player.↩
this is almost true - i address this in the gameplay section further down, in the "minor complaints" bullet list↩
according to an atlus poll ran in japan, shared by one of my friends: [https://gamerant.com/metaphor-refantazio-most-popular-characters-fan-poll-list-results/] granted results seem to be different in other regions, but even then heismay and strohl both cracked the top 3 which would be unheard of in Persona polls so i think my point still stands↩
god i barely have room to get into this, either, but the first moment that these kinds of demons are referred to as "humans" is nuts too. it's given a lot of gravitas. it really instills a very uncomfortable feeling in you. there are worldbuilding reasons this vocabulary exists, but i think this verbiage was chosen to further establish that de-centering of the player's perspective by casting our species as the scourge of this realm.↩
if you want a source, because this technically isn't confirmed canon that archetype awakening is the flipside of human melancholisation, batlin says this sometime during the final month of the game - i'm pretty sure it's after you've gone to confront louis in the castle, and before you fight him again in the actual final dungeon of the game.↩
something i really wanted to note and didn't get a chance to: i think that the MC having heterochromia and blue hair before he returns to his true body is very much indicative of him being an idealized persona of an imaginative child. it's very deviantart OC and i think that was intentional!↩
(leave a comment on the blog post if you like - t’oyaxsut ‘nüüsm! 🧡)