Metaphor: ReFantazio

Full spoilers ahead

       2010: The Social Network comes to theaters. Great movie, incisive, foreboding. Occasionally met with the criticism that Mark Zuckerberg can’t really be that bad, can he? This must be a hyper-dramatized version of the story for film that needs Zuck to bring about his own tragic downfall.
      2013: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance releases, featuring a climactic sword fight with a roided-out American super senator. This is seen as over the top, camp, an observation of American politics from a famously idiosyncratic outsider auteur.
      2013, later: The Purge releases. Reasonably successful, but surely way too heavy handed to take seriously. The Romney-like Young Republican bad guy puts on a mask and does snarling monologues about how much he loves killing poor people? Come on.
      Here in 2025, these and more have gotten their due as ahead of their time. The powerful are more venal, more image-conscious, more theatrical, and more stupid than ever imagined a decade ago. Metaphor: ReFantazio is the latest in this lineage of heart-on-its-sleeve broadly allegorical stories. In the fantasy kingdom Euchronia, young upstart general Louis assassinates the king and unwittingly starts a democratic election powered by magic unleashed from the king’s death. Our nameless protagonist is an agent attempting to reseat the king’s presumed-dead and magically cursed son, stop Louis, and overthrow the brutal fantasy racial caste system enforced on the nine Tribes that dominates the entire kingdom.
      Metaphor struggles to be as direct as things like The Purge because, plot-wise, there are a lot of moving parts. The “election” is called the Tournament of Kings, and decides the next king by magically reading and tallying the desires in the hearts of all the people in Euchronia. The rules are policed by the ghost of the old king, who also prevents prominent candidates from being assassinated. No cheating. It is immediately co-opted by the corrupt fantasy pope analogue of the dominant religion of Sanctism, turning it into a contest of multiple stages decided by the church, but even he is threatened by the secular and popular Louis. The game goes to some lengths to not cast our heroes as explicit monarchists, with mixed results. Louis attempted and failed to assassinate the prince many years ago, cursing him and driving him into hiding. A party member was there when it happened and explicitly seeks to set right her previous failure. This helps everyone not dwell on the implication that driving the prince away from the throne is a grave injustice only if our heroes agree that the prince deserves the throne innately in the first place. The protagonist carries with him a mysterious fantasy novel that details an aspirational version of the modern world, and hopes to create that world for Euchronia, not merely revive the old monarchy. He received this book from the prince, who also believes strongly in it, but it holds the moral center of what the party wants away from the monarchy a bit. More on this later.
      In terms of the actual game, Metaphor is in the family of Atlus’s recent and extremely successful Persona games. It’s a dungeon-crawling JRPG with an emphasis on story, the relationships between our hero and the characters, and a semi-open world with a time management system that lets me choose from among various activities to further their quest. The iteration on the Persona formula makes the dungeons and combat the best they’ve ever been, but loyalty to the story structure required of that formula holds the whole thing back.
      Being beholden to a strict schedule causes a lot of people in the world to behave... strangely. Louis and his cronies are always making dramatic declarations about when they will make their big moves and never deviate from them, even in open competition with other candidates willing to employ subterfuge and sabotage. This mostly gets a pass from me because everyone is melodramatic enough for it to be credible. The real worst offenders on this front are the party members and how they talk to the protagonist. Because it’s technically possible to fritter away all of my time doing nothing and then softlock the game terribly, everyone is constantly reminding me that I only have a limited time to accomplish my objective and I better make the most of it. And did I hear about this bounty and this sidequest and the colosseum, by the way? It feels like they’re all the nerd kid reminding me to do my homework. I Played more than one session long enough to reveal the modular nature of these little connective tissue scenes such that the party is literally word-for-word repeating themselves at me. This is clearly a holdover habit from Persona, where the characters are literal teenagers with real life authority figures to mind them, and maintaining an unsuspicious teenage existence is key to leading their double lives as supernatural crime fighters, etc. A section in the mid-game of Metaphor where the party infiltrates Louis’s ship is especially baffling. The party beats up and steals the keys of three faceless miniboss lieutenants, but does not kill them.. They shame or intimidate the lieutenants into not tattling, somehow, about an operation that may last multiple days and constitute them coming and going freely from different parts of the ship.
      I should, however, be completing even the long dungeons in a single day, because it is the most efficient expenditure of my limited time. The structure has stuck around because I always have several things I want to do next even if I haven’t sketched out an overarching plan for the entire time period offered. Breaking it up into discrete chunks enables Civilization One More Turn Syndrome. The dungeons reward me with money and gear and the quests boost my out of combat stats that enable other story beats and getting to know the characters better, which in turn gives me more quests and Archetypes (the job system granting magic) to take on stronger dungeons in a feedback loop.
    

      Metaphor also features beautiful, expressive menus that are even snappier than Persona 5’s, and a Heironymus Bosch inspired style that really pushes this kind of game into new visual territory and works incredibly well. It still comes with some presentational baggage, though, like the formulation of almost every interaction in the game outside of the menus as a conversation between characters. I would say there is no “narrator voice” to smooth things over but there’s functionally two diegetic ones, mysterious extradimensional observer/fantasy author More, and fairy companion of the resistance Gallica. Consequently, these characters literally repeat themselves way more than any of the others and turn a lot of actions in the game into choosing the thing I want plus two more dialogue screens of mashing.

      Another problem endemic to this format is that Metaphor is an ensemble cast that struggles to utilize its ensemble. The protagonist hangs out one-on-one with the supporting party members to upgrade their abilities, which is only telling me about that one party member in isolation. During the dungeons, where you fight in parties of four, or everyone hanging out afterwards back at the base, characters will trade their quips but not much more. There are brief glimpses of a more compelling episodic experience in the main story missions and cutscenes, but it has to stay focused on Louis or the twists and turns of the Tournament to hold it all together. For instance, an early party member Heismay is the tribe Eugief, generally shunned by dominant society but low in number and isolated to their own insular communities. Heismay is a disgraced knight whom the protagonist teaches to overcome his despair and fight for a better world, but he still shows some disdain for the lowest, poorest, least respected tribe, Paripus. When a Paripus joins our rainbow coalition of heroes later in the game, I wish they had more scenes together to hash out that painful tension! But we get only a few lines here and there, because Heismay’s side-story is about conquering his despair and leading his insulated community and the Paripus party member Basilio’s side-story is about reconnecting with a long lost sibling. There’s no screentime left in this 90 hour game to see how the characters bounce off each other.
      Metaphor does its best to take seriously its conceit of forging a pluralistic, democratic society from nothing. One thing which I initially thought of as a bizarre translation choice was the frequent discussion of “anxiety,” and its use seemingly interchangeably with “fear.” The heroes “forge their anxiety into strength” to summon Archetypes, which in the context of a high fantasy RPG adventure felt to me more appropriate as “fear.” They’re being brave to fight grotesque monsters, surely what would keep someone from that is fear, not anxiety, right? But it is revealed later that anxiety is the source of all magic, and the collective anxiety of all governed people projected onto the king powers the Royal Magic that triggered the Tournament for the Throne. The act of summoning magic heroes to slay monsters is directly linked to the quotidian act of social trust. They’re equally difficult. The game’s title (roughly) and many lyrical tracks (more literally) are also Esperanto, emphasizing the themes of international cooperation.
      Unfortunately not everything comes together as well as these turns of phrase. Atlus’s games in this vein have a noticeable pattern of attempting to grapple with Big Themes and not always being up to the task. The missed opportunity between Heismay and Basilio is just one symptom of their problems when it comes to Big Themes. The game does not intentionally snub or ignore the idea that a diverse group of freedom fighters might face internal friction, racially motivated or otherwise, but it is only able to address it in a perfunctory, unsatisfying way. The characters go through many circular conversations about Louis’s motives, even with Louis himself, but without fail arrive at the conclusion that they have to continue their elaborate plan to kill him. By the end of the game, a party member seems to have the recurring bit of bringing up that Louis is right to be angry at the world but he cannot abide by his actions the same way another party member has the recurring bit of always being hungry and willing to eat anything. In the same way, roughly 90% of the way through the game does it occur to the party what challenges will lie ahead of them even if they do successfully win the tournament and become king. The loyal protagonist realizes that many may still support Louis sincerely and not be tricked by his schemes or brainwashed by magic, and resolves to steer the kingdom towards such incredible peace and prosperity that even the haters cannot deny his rule. Euchronia’s very own deliverism but this time it works.
      What does work is the book. The protagonist and Louis both have a copy and are enamored with it, but Louis only sees brutality and opportunity while the protagonist strives for liberty and equality. When the party’s elaborate schemes to stop Louis go awry, the protagonist is forced to confront Louis alone and Louis kills him. More comes to the hero’s aid and pulls our hero into a pocket dimension to save him, where we also learn through plotty soul-splitting magic nonsense, More was always the old king and the protagonist always the sleeping prince. More literally drops the walls of reality away to reveal that the real world is in fact, real, and Euchronia is fiction, and they should simply retreat from fighting with Louis and live out their days in comfort in, uh, the middle of Shibuya Crossing.
      When the hero rejects him, It’s essential that he does. More interpreting his own story through cowardice is just as bad as Louis interpreting through viciousness. Even when the protagonist’s fictional vision of the future is clunky or hackneyed, refusing to carry it out into the world is worse than dying. The novel isn’t a balm for someone experiencing the suffering of real Euchronia, it’s fuel to actualize change in it. This is compelling! For all the game’s faults, its center is aligned with something real. Not only that, there are scenes for every major character where the protagonist shares the novel with them. Between those and the climax, it does a lot more to develop an interiority for the characters than all of them rolling up and loudly explaining what their deal is.
      If it isn’t clear that the game is talking about itself here in relation to the player, it does indeed spell it out for you at the end. I could have gone without that, but this theme is what makes the whole thing not come off as masturbatory “message music.” Metaphor’s straightforward allegory isn’t here to teach me for the first time that racism, authoritarianism, etc, is really bad. It’s here to make a point that knowing and thinking about that stuff only, resonating with its bad vibes emotionally, doesn’t do anything. Video games are constantly swirling in arguments about their power or legitimacy as a medium, whether they are real art or capable of things other artistic mediums can’t do, etc. And here comes this huge, earnest game about the things video games cannot do. It leaves the rest to us.