I am a big fan of Persona. The atmosphere, the music, the social interactions, the weirdness. All of it. The Persona series has always played pretty close to real-life scenarios of gym teachers thinking they rule the school and corrupt people of power poisoning the minds of their peers. Even if you don't have the time to play a 100+ hour campaign like Persona 5 Royal, just a few hours is enough to appreciate the world it has created and the similarities to our own.
Metaphor: ReFantazio had a lengthy demo/prologue release and let me tell you. It's all of these things. It has the atmosphere. It has the music (although different than your typical poppy-Persona), the social aspects AND the weirdness. My gosh the weirdness. When I say that this game is strange, I mean it. It's not a bad thing at all since it is what I have come to expect from Atlus. The reality link has been sort of a controversial one involving politics and race and it is gripping and emotional from the start.
I have heard many times that this is NOT Persona and while that is a fair assumption, the heart of this game is absolutely Persona. It is about the corrupt needing to be taught a very valuable lesson through the awesome transformation of the mental and physical kind. No longer are your personas personas. They are now Archetypes and they are just as badass. Now you don't capture them anymore like in P5. Instead, you study them in a library. You basically use magic currency found by completing battles to "study" an Archetype to be able to switch it on a specific character who took the time to study up. The system reminds me of jobs or classes from Final Fantasy and honestly, there is nothing wrong with that. I personally felt overwhelmed trying to say the right things to the right personas in P5 and this makes that process a lot easier for me.
.png "the weird") |
| The weird. Image via my stream |
The demo/prologue gives you about 4-5 hours of gameplay and story where we learn that our protagonist (Will) has a very special mission. I won't spoil that mission but it's pretty heavy. You wander through a world as an Elda, who seems to be a race the entire world seems to frown upon or consider lower than everyone else. The tones here are very loud and in your face and I cannot wait to see the payoff in the full release. The monsters are as creepy as ever and offer a fun mix of action. One thing I loved that separates this in more of a quality of life change is the ability to fight enemies on the overworld. If you are stronger than an enemy type you have encountered before, you can walk up and slash them to their doom without having to enter a full fledged turn based battle. It's a nice change of pace when you consider the amount of time spent in battles in other games Atlus has created. The bosses still have their gimmicks and are a lot of fun to fight. You get to go against a few in this demo and I never had that "ugh" feeling you may get in an RPG. You know, the one where you are just mashing one button to get it over with.
Your save also transfers to the full game once it is released and I can always appreciate that. More games should have demos that tie into the main release so people actually get a chance to experience your game and be rewarded for their time. If you haven't played an Atlus or Persona game in the past and have been thinking of checking one out, I say to give Metaphor: ReFantazio a shot. The demo is free and gives you a huge chunk to play around in. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the demo and I am already hooked on the battle music and the environments in which you roam around.
Metaphore: ReFantazio releases on October 11th on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Microsoft Windows.
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