The newest game from the team behind several of the Persona games, Metaphor: ReFantazio, has been released, and it’s brought with it a whole host of quality-of-life changes that could (and indeed, should) be incorporated in future ATLUS titles. There are some very obvious ones (which we’ll get into), but there are also some cool smaller gameplay changes that serve to make the game even more engaging than previous titles from the developer.
The first and most obvious change, and one that everybody is likely talking about right now, is the fact that there’s actual voice acting for the player character, something that just doesn’t happen in previous games. Previously, in ATLUS titles such as Persona 5 Royal and Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, only the companions had voice lines (and not for everything, just for key contextual moments).
Here, the player character also has voice lines (again, not for everything, but for enough that it feels natural), and it enamors the player to their character even more than previous player characters. It’s nice to know that your character is reflecting what you’re actually telling them to communicate to other characters. It also lends a whole host of credence and weight to emotional moments in the game: while previously the way ATLUS got players to feel for characters was through using the companions to voice questions that the player likely had, now the player character can do that instead.
There’s also a very cool change in the way that combat works. Instead of how it worked in both the Persona and the Shin Megami Tensei series, where you’d have to immediately enter turn-based combat on making contact with enemies, players now have access to melee weapons outside of the combat. The way this works is thus: if you’re fighting an enemy of a lower level than you, then it’s possible to defeat them while not even entering turn-based combat. If, however, that enemy is of a higher level, then what basically happens is that you weaken the enemy enough to get a surprise attack in on the opponent. It’s really cool, and a necessary change to make the combat more engaging.
A small detail I love in the title is that players don’t just have to run around the world. They’re given access to what is essentially a skateboard (actually a sword you’re riding on, which can’t be safe, surely) to make travel more fun. Instead of just fast-traveling everywhere, which I found myself doing often in other ATLUS RPGs, I was happy to just skate from place to place. As previously mentioned, it’s a small detail, for sure, but it’s one that I love in making everything feel more fun and interconnected. It also makes traveling to one of the main aspects of the game a lot more fun, which is the social element of the game.
The social element of the game is pretty similar to how every ATLUS game of this nature works. You travel to members of your team, and you hang out with them while learning more about their backgrounds. Important to note, however, that there are no romance options here. It’s something that I fondly missed, but the replacement and quality of life improvements really helped to assuage that gap. Now, you as the player are told by the game exactly when somebody in your party wants to talk.
Previously, the only way this came up was if you used the fast-travel option to see where they were and then spoke to them, but now the game outright tells you exactly when you need to talk to somebody, and why it’s important to do so (because it’ll help improve your Archetypes, this games version of Persona’s). It’s just nice to have these small quality-of-life improvements, something that really tweaks a game with an already great base.
Everything here feels like a natural evolution of the formula, while even the small issues with the evolutions (the real-time combat can feel a tad underwhelming since the game is focused otherwise entirely on turn-based combat) could be hashed out with some small changes. Metaphor: ReFantazio is the very best of ATLUS then, a game that looks at the flaws of previous games and suggests ideas to fix them.
