malvasia bianca

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a Persona offshoot; not directly in terms of plot, but the game is made by many of the same people and with many of the same mechanics. And, as such, it’s very good; it’s actually probably only my fourth-favorite game meeting those criteria (or third-favorite, maybe?), but I like all of them quite a lot! Interesting to see what the team decided to change with the opening that the move away from the Persona brand provided, and to see what they kept.

In terms of mechanical differences, Personas are replaced with Archetypes; it’s a very similar mechanic, but any of your party members can potentially take on any of the archetypes. There is still one linkage between party member and archetype: party members all start with an archetype, so you’ll probably end up gravitating to some extent towards having those party members take on evolutions of that archetype. But there are also archetypes available that don’t originally show up in association with some of your party members, and you’ll want to explore those archetypes as well, so your party members (as well as the main character) will end up going down those paths as well.

You probably won’t explore alternate archetypes at random: if a party member starts with, say, a sword-based archetype, then proabably their physical attack stats are better than their magical attack stats, so it will both feel right thematically and work well mechanically for them to try out other physical combat archetypes. But the game doesn’t force that, it lets you mix and match however you want. (Including giving multiple characters the same architype; I didn’t do that but I could have and maybe I should have, the game has skills that actively reward doubling up!)

And the game encourages archetype exploration in a few more subtle ways as well. The first is that the game gives you advice when entering a dungeon as to what some of the key enemies in that dungeon are like, and it translates that advice into a specific recommendation that archetypes A, B, and C would probably be useful in that dungeon. You don’t have to follow that advice, and even if you do, that advice usually gives you three recommended archetypes whereas (after the first couple of acts) your party has four members, so there’s some room for experimentation. But it’s a helpful nudge to encourage you to explore different archetypes and party compositions instead of staying in a rut.

The second is that, when you select an archetype, you can bring along a few abilities from other archetypes that that character has previously unlocked. (You have to pay a per-character fee to unlock archetypes and bring over abilities, and also you have to level up archetypes individually for each character to get access to most of the abilities from that archetype, but that’s all entirely manageable.) This makes it easier to experiment with different archetypes, because your workhorse abilities can remain available; also, in a Persona-like, it’s useful to have access to attacks of most of the different damage types, so this helps fill in the gaps: if you run into a monster in a dungeon that isn’t vulnerable to any of your damage types, you don’t have to react by swapping in one specific character or one specific archetype into your party, you can instead tweak your ability inheritance so you’ll have access to an appropriate skill going forward. So that’s great; but also, this means that party building is surprisingly flexible not just compared to other Persona-likes but compared to other RPGs in general.

In particular, you don’t need to make sure you’ve always got a character with a healer-style class in your party; instead, you have to make sure that you’ve got a character who has inherited an appropriate healer skill and has inherited that skill. That might sound like a distinction without a difference, because one of your characters is still acting as a healer, but in practice it actually doesn’t play out that way: I ended up making sure that about half of the characters (including the main character) could act as a healer if necessary, and then, depending on the details of how a specific fight went, maybe one character would be a healer or maybe another character would be the healer. (For example, if the battle was one where my main character’s other abilities were strong against the enemies then they wouldn’t do much healing, but if the enemies in the next fight were ones where my main character couldn’t attack well, then they’d spend more time healing.) And even within the flow of a single battle, there would be turns where it made more sense for one character to do the healing and turns where it made more sense for a different character to do the healing.

And the third way that the game encouranges exploration among archetypes is the archetype leveling system. Each archetype caps out at level 20; you can still leave an archetype equipped at that point and the game banks up archetype experience for you to use later, but generally when you hit level 20 you’ll use that as an excuse to try out a different archetype. There’s actually a (very small, two- or three-level) tree of related archetypes (e.g. Mage -> Wizard -> Elemental Master and/or Warlock), but frequently when you reach level 20 at one step you won’t have progressed far enough in your character bonds to have unlocked the ability to access the next step, so you’ll want to try out a different tree. Also, while it’s usually the case that, at the second level, the only archetype prerequisite for unlocking it is reaching level 20 in the first level, it’s quite common for the third level to require having spent some time on an unrelated archetype (e.g. to unlock Warlock you need to have reached level 20 in Wizard and also level 10 in Assassin, as well as raising a certain character bond to its max level). So that both puts in place a requirement to explore more archetypes and gives you a suggestion as to other archetypes that you might want to explore. And for the archetypes for the party characters, there’s a special fourth level that earch of you can access, which also adds in another level of extra archetype requirements.

So that’s the main difference in how the core combat / class archetypes play out compared to regular Persona games. Otherwise, it’s pretty familiar: dungeon crawling (with premade dungeons rather than the random dungeons that earlier games in the series had), attacks come with damage types that monsters and party members may be vulnerable to or may resist and where attacking a weakness gives access to extra attacks, a pool of magic points that’s decently large but is small enough that it’s a limiting factor in how much dungeon you can explore on a given day, and with the game broken up into chapters each of which requires you to make it to the end of one dungeon so you can fight the boss of that dungeon on a certain date.

And, when you’re not dungeon crawling, you can also do other activities, one in the afternoon and one in the evening; the main ones involve leveling up bonds (with your party members and with other people that you’ve met), but you can also do things like level up your non-combat-related character atributes. (Things like Courage, Wisdom, Tolerance, etc.; these mostly serve as gates for leveling up bonds.) There are also side quests; unlike in standard Persona games, these require you to spend time going through small (easily completable in a single day) custom-crafted side dungeons.

As with standard Persona games, the bond leveling up scenes are where some of the most important emotional interactions are. But, unlike Persona games, you can actually max out all of these bonds: it took me until quite close to the end of the game, but I made it, and I didn’t have to do any heroics to achieve that. Mechanically, I think this is reflected in the fact that there are only 14 companions to level up (instead of 22 different major arcana), that you only have to raise them to level 8 instead of level 10, and that, whenever you spend time with a companion, you’re guaranteed to level up with them; though of course that balancing also exists against a background of how many opportunities the game provides to level up at all and what alternate activities there are during those days.

I think I mostly like this design choice? There is something to be said for having to make tradeoffs that reflect your priorities, so I’m actually not particularly against the approach that the standard Persona games took. But it’s very rare for me to replay games, and I really do like the companion stories, so I appreciate being able to see them all.

Furthermore, in Metaphor: ReFantazio, there’s a mechanical reason why it’s useful to be able to max out all of the companion bonds. In standard Persona games, your persona levels are gated by what monsters you’ve been fighting, so you’ll naturally get access to a complete range of personas at an appropriate level to equip as you progress through the dungeons. (With the exception of special personas that unlock at max level with companions, but those are quite optional.) Metaphor, however, gates your archetype access through companion bond levels: you don’t even have access to a given archetype tree until you’ve met the associated companion, and you won’t get access to the second tier of the archetype tree until you’ve ranked up that bond a few times and you won’t get access to the final tier until you’ve either maxed it out or almost maxed it out. And so, given that the game nudges you to explore the various archetypes, it’s helpeful to be able to max out all the bonds in order to enable that.

So that’s the mechanics. Largely familiar mechanics, but mechanics that I like, so that’s fine. I don’t like dungeon crawling as much as the game wants me to, admittedly — I played Metaphor soon after Veilguard, and it wasn’t great going from a game where I always had plot mixed it with my combat during an evening to a game where I might spend all evening just dungeon crawling. But I liked the game’s dungeon crawling more than enough to keep going.

As far as the plot and thematics goes, Metaphor was fine compared to a normal RPG. But one of the things that I like about mainline Persona games is how local they are. In Persona 4, for example, you’re trying to set things right in a town, and the emotional heart revolves around trying to save one small child in particular; whereas Metaphor has you fighting for kingship of a country, with a goal of having the next king be the son of the prior king. Beside this backdrop of the chosen one on a grand scale, there is admittedly a theme of the importance of teamwork, friendship, and helping, and Metaphor presented that theme much more strongly than most RPGs do; but Metaphor also didn’t carry that theme off as well as Tokyo Mirage Sessions did.

And I liked Metaphor’s UI and character art. But also, compared to Persona 5, the environments (e.g. the initial city) were a bit drab? Nothing bad by normal standards, that’s more Persona 5 being amazingly stylish (as was Tokyo Mirage Sessions, albeit in a different way) than a knock against Metaphor.

Anyways: very good game, I quite enjoyed my time with it. The format still has legs, the changes to the format were well thought out and a pleasant change of pace. I wish it hadn’t lost the local spirit that distinguished its predecessors, but such is the fate of role playing games, I suppose.