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Not the Genre Defining JRPG for me.

I think Metaphor: Refantazio is not a life changing JRPG nor is it best in class or even a ‘Magnum Opus’ for Developer Atlas. From what I read, this game has been in development for quite some time and you can tell the final game went through quite the ringer.

What I mean by this, is that the game feels like a mixture of ideas and gameplay elements that on the surface look promising, but falls flat when under inspection. The Dungeons are so boring and at times feel like padding to stretch the runtime of the playthrough, the ‘puzzles’ and Dungeons itself feel so outdated and barebones. Atlas can be praised for the dynamic U.I Screen, but again on the surface it looks great- but the more you use the menu to me there are some aspects of the options inside the menu being at times distracting with ‘visual noise’ and unintuitive to use for practical use.

I really did not find the setting nor characters that engaging or memorable that would make me go to great lengths to really sit back and take note of what they were saying. Also, this became a bit of a gripe but the actual graphics for the game looks rather PS3 era. The 3D Character Models in game are so poorly rendered and washed out and this contrasts with the illustrated character face cards you see when they are having dialogue with you. I could not unsee this as I would also get distracted with the character face cards, alongside the 3D rendered character on screen which just made character dialogue rather nauseating. You have such a well illustrated character face card contrasted with in-game rendered 3D model looking like a Temu knockoff. I understand there is differences from adjusting 2D to 3D designs- but then at that point I’d rather commit to the former than the later with how much of an abomination it looks. I am not a stickler when it comes to graphics but it stood out more like a sore thumb when the overall narrative of the game felt rather uninspiring.

There is a lot of style, but lacking in real meaningful substance. The story and characters and world-building failed to really grab me besides sprinkling in philosophical ideas, there is not any real hard hitting moments that made me feel truly compelled or engrossed into this overarching story and despite the game tackling many deep themes such as racism, prejudice and totalitarian ideals versus free speech. All of what is represented to me feels rather tedious and not carefully embedded and intertwined and seems hastily included as a means of playing through ‘political’ mindsets, but not really having that level of nuance and care to elevate these thematic ideas into something greater than surface level readings.

The gameplay is great which is what kept me going, the restart feature in battles is one of the best quality of life features ever and should be a staple moving forward in turn based RPGs and RPGs in general. I spent hours playing through this game and it was partly motivated by me wishing to see what all the praise was about and the personal desire to simply see out this game for what it was on my own terms.

I personally see this as a solid ‘good’ video game, that is approaching ‘great’, but is not amazing and certainly not a Generation Worthy JRPG or Masterpiece that it may be labelled as. I was somewhat disappointed in that I really hope Atlas can improve its game design and work towards better fine tunning the narrative elements, than being a bit of a convoluted mess.