izigame.me

This is going to be a long one.

I play a lot of JRPGs. In my heart, they are quite possibly my favorite genre of video games. Like many others, they can condense into a variety of tropes and trappings, but most of the titles that have hit me the most keenly have been RPGs of one form or another, and JRPGs in the highest fraction. From Final Fantasy to the newest Like a Dragon titles, there is something simply comforting in turn-based combat combined with a feel-good narrative; it's a combination that stokes the soul. Mine, at least.

I also read. Not as often as I used to, but regularly. And in all the faces of literature, there are none that hold my heart as fondly as fantasy. Understanding exactly why took me until well into my adult years, but it was something of a solitary realization. A combination of nostalgia and a rudimentary style of self-importance, I guess, but I never thought the genre would hold such a singular key to anyone else.

Metaphor Re:Fantazio rid me of that thought. It is, to borrow a tagline from another game, "A Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers," in the truest and gentlest sense. Short of the more arthouse and esoteric titles I love, I've never played a game that knew with such confidence both what it was and wanted to be. It is unabashedly proud of its heritage, delivering both proper turn-based combat and a narrative that is so surprisingly poignant and richly told that it moved me to tears twice; I'm not so stoic as to say that this last is a singularly remarkable achievement, but it is rare, especially as I have grown more jaded with time.

The gameplay front is, at first, a mix on Shin Megami Tensei's combat and Persona's calendar-based social sim structure, but very quickly iterates and improves on them. The result, in regards to battles, is the singular best system I've ever played in a JRPG. I want to call special attention to the balancing. In so many titles of this genre, a harder difficulty is reflected in tuning up numbers- enemies' HP, damage, etc.- and calling it a day. You are rarely given the means and flexibility to adequately surmount a challenge outside of grinding and/or cheesing. Metaphor radically challenges this norm; I played it on Hard, and it was an absolute joy. The game was brutal, but instead of relying on getting bigger numbers in order to proceed, I had to well and truly utilize every mechanic available to get by. The eventual plateaus where your strength exceeds enemy scaling did come, only to be upjumped by the next major arc. This continued all the way into the endgame, with superbosses that challenged party composition down to their minutia, forcing me to stay engaged with the game on a mechanical front up until the very end.

But the story is where this game truly pulls at my heart. It is far too easy for a societal critique to come off as holier-than-thou at best, or plain delusional at worst. In this manner, Metaphor doesn't so much as try to be a judge or a mirror, but rather a push: an encouragement for you to embrace your own strength, staking its risk on your very interest in playing it. There were moments that pulled at childhood wonder, not in a veiled grasp for nostalgia's sake, but in stoking something we all share; the capacity for imagination, or, for a more tired word, hope. My words don't do it justice, and I don't encourage you to go in seeking an elite giant among storytelling, but what is there brims with sincerity and ingenuity, twisting the tropes it pays homage to just enough for them to be interesting. The entire narrative reads as a genuine love letter to fantasy, both modern and antiquated.

I spent a very long time playing this game. Well over a hundred hours, spaced across three months of my life. For much of it, I worried Metaphor wouldn't have the emotional hold Persona 4 wrangled me into; it wasn't until the closing hours that I felt the true and lasting sign of its success: that I was absolutely gutted to let it go. The party is incredible, with each member feeling distinct yet coming together wonderfully, as all the genre's best do. The art direction is vivid and colorful, truly doing the genre justice in its depiction of an otherworldly yet familiar nation, with floating castles and everred fields. The soundtrack is a master of tempo and pacing, pulling at the heart strings when necessary, and giving you the windfall of victory at others. The pacing- if you like JRPGs as they are, long winded and all- is airtight, with only the very end feeling a bit long in the tooth if you go after the superbosses.

There are two more points I'd like to highlight before stopping the parade of praise. As I said, I play a lot of JRPGs, and I play them in a very frustrating way; I read everything, stopping to talk to everyone- oftentimes twice, just to make sure they don't have additional dialogue. It's maddening to watch, I'm told, fueled by OCD, and I'm sure only a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase are like that, and yet Studio Zero poured an unbelievable amount of dialogue into this game. From arc to major arc, entire cities' NPCs would have new lines to read through. I was floored at the attention to detail shown in practically every crevice, and it really went the extra mile in making the game's world feel all the more tangible.

Finally, and most indulgently, it was Metaphor's love and understanding of fantasy that resonated with me on the most emotional level. It's easy for a fantasy author to become lost in a genre that promises endless possibility without reason; it's for these very reasons that readers can be drawn to it, to lose themselves in a world that is both more exciting and less oppressing than the very real one in which we live. But the best fantasy reminds us that all fantasy is born in this reality; the concept of magic is indelible from our own hearts and minds. We are more than walking sacks of blood and bone, despite how often we can fool ourselves into thinking as much. Metaphor never pretends it has all the answers, but it reminds us of the virtue in asking questions, and words cannot express how much I adore it for that.