Metaphor: ReFantazio Mythologizes a Better World but is Afraid to Abandon the Status Quo
Broad spoilers for Metaphor Re:Fantazio ahead. I reference later party members, Followers, and the thematic thrust of the ending, but I try to avoid specific details about plot points.
Loose thoughts while in the middle of playing the game here
Also crossposted to The Glorio Blog
Metaphor: ReFantazio opens by asking the player whether fantasy has the power to affect reality. The game posits that when confronted with the injustice and crushing inertia of reality, fantasy and belief are how we can hone our anxieties into conviction to enact real change. "Fantasy" is aspirational, a manifestation of hopes and dreams that serves as a guide towards a brighter future.
The hope after nearly eight years was that the core dev crew, having reached the limits of what they could accomplish in Persona, would break new ground and challenge perceptions of what could be accomplished in a "traditional" fantasy RPG. In the earliest interviews about Metaphor, when it was merely "Project Re:Fantasy", they said they wanted to "aim even higher" and "challenge the traditional genre".
Why, then, is everything about it so conservative? It's undeniably a fun, highly polished game built upon decades of Atlus's previous work, but Metaphor stumbles not only into the same pitfalls as Persona, but also peers like Tales of Arise or Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. The "fantasy" offered by Metaphor offers nominally iterative changes to established genre formulas as if afraid to be perceived as too radical.
Metaphor uses the same format as the modern Persona games (3-4-5). Each major leg of the story has a deadline on the in-game calendar, and you choose how best to make use of that block of time (your number of turns, one might say). You have three broad choices that interweave with each other:
- Participate in various activities that raise your "Royal Virtues", social stats that gate which characters are available to spend time with.
- Spend time with other characters, gaining insight on the cast's motives and anxieties. Certain thresholds reward you with various gameplay benefits such as new classes or the ability to cook without spending a turn.
- Venture into dungeons and battle monsters, gaining power to tackle the mandated story dungeon. You're also likely trying to complete quests to kill specific monsters or accomplish certain tasks, most of which reward you with useful items and increased Royal Virtues.
This works wonderfully for Persona, which features teenage protagonists in modern-day Japan. High school is already a regimented institution, meshing nicely with social stats and the calendar system. Studying, hanging out with friends after school, or working a part-time job in the evenings are natural extensions of the setting. It's the supernatural battles that feel out of place, shaking up the relative monotony of daily life with the fantasy of using hidden powers to assert your agency.
I felt Metaphor's social mechanics chafe against its presentation as an epic quest to claim the throne. Spending time with most of your Followers lacks a sense of camaraderie or hangout-i-tude. Your relationships are even more transactional than in P5 because you're explicitly lobbying for support towards the Tournament for the Throne. You always rank up with each Bond meeting, a quality of life change I'm ambivalent towards because it tacitly acknowledges that you wouldn't simply hang out with most of them. It's in the name; they are not your "Social Links" or "Confidants", they are your Followers. You are canvassing.
As far as I could tell, only Followers are gated by Royal Virtues. There are no midterms you need Knowledge for, no giant beef bowls that test your Diligence, no dialogue options that check if your Courage is high enough to ask for a girl's phone number. Building up supposed qualities of kingship rings a bit hollow when you know in your soul the contest is gonna come down to a boss fight at the end of the game. There's something darkly farcical about repeatedly donating to an activist not to actually gain a greater understanding of other cultures but to boost my quantified Tolerance level so I can Rank Up with Cuculus and get a discount at the magic shop.
It's frustrating, because I genuinely like the Persona loop and I'd love to see something like it applied to different scenarios, with the proviso that it's adjusted accordingly. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a solid point of comparison (despite, or perhaps because of, the shoehorned school setting), with a similar Anime Fantasy aesthetic but a greater focus on geopolitics and combat. FE3H has its own series spin on social mechanics, where your units rank up and bond not only with the protagonist but between themselves, exploring the narrative from multiple angles.
In general, Persona's (and by extension, Shin Megami Tensei's) presence looms. Metaphor plays it "safe" via as many vectors as possible, to the point of dissonance. The menus and UI are as bombastic and glitzy as you'd expect from something with "from the creative minds behind Persona 3, 4, and 5" on its Steam copy. Much ado was made about the Human designs (inspired by and occasionally directly lifted from Hieronymous Bosch works) and they're appropriately grotesque and visually exciting, but also largely limited to major boss fights or late-game elites. The rest of the game's aesthetics default to Standard Fantasy Tropes and it all comes off as a bit toothless.
Besides the Humans, enemy types are incredibly dull. What do we have? Wolves. Goblins. Skeletons. Minotaurs. Ghosts. When they're feeling really fancy, we might get a (oooOOOhhh) Dragon. A major draw of P5 was that it brought out the entire Shin Megami Tensei demon catalogue to play instead of limiting itself to the generic Persona monster standbys like Hulk Hogan, Master Hand, or Table For One. For every "Just A Dog" demon/Persona, there's something else like Mothman or Mara that's weird and memorable. There's a reason Kaneko's designs have lasted so long.
The dungeons in P4 and P5 are known for being varied and unconventional. What other series would feature dungeon crawls in a strip club, a bathhouse, or a cruise ship? Metaphor is satisfied deploying dungeon tilesets I was tired of dealing with on the Super Nintendo: cathedrals, mines, forests, sewers, castles, towers. The most interesting dungeon on offer is an extended reference to a previous Atlus game. I don't think I'd call that aiming higher.
The setting as a whole is familiar to pretty much anyone who's got a few anime, RPGs, or anime RPGs under their belt. It's got it all: there's an implausible walled capital in the center of a monster-infested wasteland, a blatantly shady Church hiding ancient secrets, and various Tribes who mostly look like Regular People With Bits On Them to facilitate the ever-popular Fantasy Racism. Boy is there fantasy racism.
There's a post from around the launch of Baldur's Gate 3 that posits fantasy settings so often include comically-blatant-yet-materially-ineffectual racism to allow the audience's insert character to demonstrate how good of a person they are. The party can easily fight for a better world because the current world is Racist! And we all know Racism is Bad. Therefore, the heroes - being Not Racist - are Good! We can now all pat ourselves on the back, for we are also Good by virtue of supporting the Not Racist heroes. Now we can ignore the complexities of actual racism guilt-free!
I don't feel quite that frustrated about Metaphor's take on things, and others are surely better equipped than I to get into the weeds. But considering how the tensions between the Tribes of Euchronia are framed as perhaps the most important element of Metaphor's setting, you'd think they'd do a bit more than just have passersby call you a "stinky el-dah" a bunch. Most of the time (not all) it's just uninteresting lip service.
Do something meaningful with the racism if you want me to see it all as more than an elaborate backdrop for the usual underdog story. Make me commute through a paripus ghetto in Grand Trad (and no, Sunshade Row doesn't count). Deal actual HP damage from people throwing trash at me. Ban me from shops. Give me a Follower Bond who actively hates my guts. Once the populace at large starts to transparently change their tune as I climb the rankings, have people complain that everything has to be so woke these days. "In my day you people knew your place," et cetera. Or would that be too real?
Persona, among all the series' fortes and faults, is at its strongest when it taps into everyday anxieties. There's a reason Kamoshida's the hardest hitting villain in P5; pretty much anyone who went to high school knew that teacher. We all either have rough relationships with our parents or know people who do. Studying for finals is always a pain in the ass. Whenever Persona gets overblown or histrionic, it still has this connection to reality grounding its fantasy.
Without the milieu of modern society grounding the characters' problems, Metaphor chooses violence. Most Follower arcs involve several people - often entire towns - dying horribly. It's wild to have one rank where the characters are discussing how to con a landlord, and then the next time you talk to that character (perhaps even the next day) they're weeping over their mother's corpse. It is certainly memorable, a roller coaster of emotions one might say.
It is narrative by way of extremes. Of course we can fight for a better world, because this world is one where innocent mothers are burned alive and the gallows are working 80 hour weeks. I can't deny that it works, but I find this to be an unadventurous approach in the context of a fantasy story. My expectations were already pretty low, and Metaphor rarely exceeds them.
Yet, what was I expecting? We are well within the wheelhouse of Heroic Fantasy here. I imagine someone reading this is already frantically searching for that tweet, and I wouldn't even blame them. The party literally fights with the power of Archetypes, the aggregated magical will of Standard RPG Character Classes. It's melodrama, and I don't say that as an insult. I love melodrama. I'll hoot and holler about tokusatsu any day of the week.
To be clear: I want things to be good, want to give them the benefit of the doubt. There's a fine line between criticizing media for not living up to what it purports itself to be versus criticizing something for not being what I want it to be. It wouldn't be too off-base to say I might've had unrealistic expectations for Metaphor. But I also can't help but feel frustrated, because the game does get better as it progresses and occasionally clears that bar.
The fourth playable character, Heismay, sometimes feels like a glimpse into what Metaphor could have been. He's the only party member who both experiences prejudice and expresses it himself. As a eugief (miniature bat person) Heismay was ostracized from the knighthood and forced to take on the country's wetwork, kept out of public eye despite his skills. But he also disfavors the paripus (anime beastfolk) tribe after his son was killed during a paripus-led riot.
When the villain of his introductory arc goes on their obligatory pre-boss unhinged rant, Heismay offers sympathy. He sees how they have the resolve to look at the world and declare that it is wrong, regardless of their crimes. Compare the boss of the first dungeon, whose justified grievances are dismissed with Hulkenberg's canned line about how "these atrocities make you no better than your oppressors!"
In an otherwise unnotable scene, Heismay's casual put-down of the Magnus brothers prompts another to defend their "kind hearts' despite their "horrible upbringings". He fires back, saying, "Is this a joke to you? You think an outcast eugief is in no position to speak ill of the paripus?" and then the matter immediately drops because the party is attacked by a big monster. As you do.
Only towards the end of the game does the text itself start to bring up what I consider to be basic questions of the premise. What is the point of the Tournament for the Throne if the party just intends to reinstate the same royal line? If the existing structures of society are built upon discrimination and oppression of a lower class, then doesn't maintaining said structures enforce a fundamentally corrupt status quo? What use is idealism against the world's continuous injustice? What if (-gasp-) the world in More's book actually isn't a utopia?!
I wish Metaphor considered these angles from the beginning, devoted time to unpacking and addressing them. Instead it spends 70 hours working up to it, only to largely shove them aside for a Standard Happy Ending. Those are problems that sure, I guess we might have to work on eventually, but have you considered that we beat the big bad and so everything's a-okay forever? Reality's just so slow to change is all. If you're frustrated with any (alleged) lack of progress, then that just means you don't believe in dreams! And you definitely believe in dreams, right? Roll credits.
There's a great post by Harper Jay about modern Persona games and how they're fundamentally small-c conservative, among other things. I quote:
"Although these games acknowledge the social structures that lead to particularly vicious kinds of abuse, there is tendency for our protagonist to then fold themselves into those power structures. In games that focus less on real-life political allegory, there's still pattern of protagonists eventually accepting the societal roles that they're initial chafing against. It's a very common occurrence in the series. Clockwork!
[...]
You kill the collective gestalt representative of the status quo! okay sure but the metaphorical battle falters as the game ultimately imagines many of our heroes (for instance Makoto, who also decides to become a cop even after her sister leaves the profession to become a defense attorney) are content to slide into the power structures as they exist. they've simply become 'good apples' in the same basket that held the bad ones What does it matter if you kill the metaphor when you don't carry through elsewhere?"
I arguably didn't even need to write this piece because that's just it right there. These games are all of a piece. Their anxiety won out. Metaphor truly is a ReFantasy, playing all the hits. But I've heard the hits plenty of times. Any wonder they once provided is fading fast as reality asserts itself.
Fantasy has unlimited possibilities, constrained only by the limits of human creativity. I do believe in the power of "Fantasy" to help us process and endure reality. I wouldn't read fiction or play video games in the first place if I didn't. But fantasy has no power by itself; pretending otherwise is just posturing. It sucks (it really sucks and I hate it), but inspiration cannot manifest without action. If my action right now is complaining that others don't take action in the ways I want, so be it.
Metaphor: ReFantazio entreats the player to believe in the unknown and march onward into a new world. I wish it tried to do the same.
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