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Metaphor: ReFantazio Respects Your Time By Turning Dungeon Traversal into a Fun Little Mini-Game

Yeah, Hashino has done a lot to popularize Persona, but there are a ton of valid criticisms to be made about the Persona games under his direction and how they handle stuff like relationships (from a guy who's "never been friends with a woman") or handle queer characters without making them gay-panic jokes. Lots of other RPGs (especially ones that have taken cues from Persona) have done way better with all of this, and it's been long overdue for Persona to adapt to the times. I'm really looking forward to what Persona 6 will look like without Hashino.

Given reactions to the demo, I'm betting that Atlus is in for a sore awakening - they're pushing this with Sega like it's their next big major release, but I'm betting that the shift in tone and the weird "Do you like my Persona OC!??" design of some of the party characters is going to bump this down to the sort of audience niche that Catherine tends to sit at.

Persona 3 had a an Android as player character specifically the kind without feet, Persona 4 had a Shadow in a derpy bear costume that later becomes human with a weird swoop hairstyle, 5 had another shadow as a playable character this time an anthropomorphic cat with a cartoonishly large head.

I can go on with Shin Megami Tensei 4/F & 5’s quirky character designs. Point being I don’t think the character designs is going to hurt this game as much as you think. Nor even the tone.

The biggest complaint I'm seeing now is the lack of romance mechanics because people want to be able to date the girls. Hulkenberg and Catherina especially. Personally I just appreciate hard mode isn't just a % modifier to damage numbers and enemies seem to actually get more press turns so it's actually an interesting difference for a change.

Yeah, Hashino has done a lot to popularize Persona, but there are a ton of valid criticisms to be made about the Persona games under his direction and how they handle stuff like relationships (from a guy who's "never been friends with a woman") or handle queer characters without making them gay-panic jokes. Lots of other RPGs (especially ones that have taken cues from Persona) have done way better with all of this, and it's been long overdue for Persona to adapt to the times. I'm really looking forward to what Persona 6 will look like without Hashino.

Hashino being involved in Metaphor massively deflates my interest in playing, and I'm getting Nomura vibes with how the main character looks like someone wanted their Persona 3 OC to headline the game.

Some of the feedback I've been catching from the demo players, is that they were apparently expecting more Persona and social stuff, and the violence and darker SMT lean caught them offguard.

I'm of the belief that the superior Persona gameplay is in Persona 5 Strikers - you get full party control, your Persona has all of its abilities and spells, you have to control everything in realtime, and combat and navigating is pretty smooth & seamless without needing to halt & battle-UI every time a combat starts up. It's the one area where Metaphor actually caught my interest - I'd rather be spending my time playing SMT4 and enjoy roughly the same sort of aesthetic, however Metaphor allowing that Paper Mario-esque "wipe them out before battle" mechanic might actually be enough to make me at least try the demo.

Given reactions to the demo, I'm betting that Atlus is in for a sore awakening - they're pushing this with Sega like it's their next big major release, but I'm betting that the shift in tone and the weird "Do you like my Persona OC!??" design of some of the party characters is going to bump this down to the sort of audience niche that Catherine tends to sit at.

Also the lack of physical PS4 copies in North America specifically, won't help. I'm their Day 1 audience, but now I'm Day-when I get a PS5 someday in 2025, probably.

Persona has it's audience and the "adapt to the times" demand is largely a western liberal cultural demand.

P4's cast could be found hanging out with each other without the player being around, so that helped sell the idea that the cast were more than just strictly friends with you, which was missing from P5.

Sometimes an entire audience shift happens as companies try to rebrand entirely like how a lot of western female characters used to be sold on their sex appeal and cool factor

That's because people are expecting too much out of a relationship sim that is not vital or impactful by design to the main story progression, where there are always joke dialogue options and you can go full harem in a game aimed at a young teen Japanese male audience.

I agree with the eventual change that in battle, you should be able to direct your party's moves (QoL/game-wise) because wrangling them on P3 on PS2 was sometimes idiotic, but the Reverse/Cheating system and lack of party control was directly removed after P3 FES because the players were whiny little losers that wanted Persona to "adapt with the times" and didn't like being told they could only pursue one route easily, & that they'd get locked out of another.

Atlus explicitly stated it as the reasoning, explaining in the Double Jump interview that each character within the game & its development direction was intended to exist as their own individual entity or person, and that they were only meant to be influenced and not directly controlled due to their individuality. Having gotten a credits roll of the main FES scenario on Hard for my original blind run of the game, P4 immediately felt watered down with all of those consequences missing, even if it was made much more playable with the intent of QoL.

My personal pet gripe with Persona 5 was the reliance on group chatting via phone too much. I liked how the gang met up at Junes or on the roof of the school in Persona 4 all the time. The P5 cast still hang out in Le Blanc as well but so much of the character inaction is done through text messaging now so it feels less personal. That's one case of "adapting to the times" I feel was a detriment.

But to be fair it also made some elements of Persona 4 a bit awkward. Persona 4 heavily pushes Kanji and Naoto together, and Rise onto the player. So if you're dating Naoto then you still get scenes of Naoto and Kanji flirting or if you're not dating Rise then Rise still hits on you even if you're dating someone else. Even funnier if it's another main cast member and they see it unfold and don't bring it up or react at all. Or no option to beat up Teddie/Kuma when he cops a feel on your girlfriend.

For Metaphor specifically I enjoyed the demo and it feels like a more "mature" Persona. I can certainly see people missing the romance and social aspect and this being a case where Persona fans tried out SMTV and said it was "Persona without the soul"

[That's actually not true - Persona 3 on the PS2 (the first in the series to measure character relationships for gameplay benefits) actively penalised any sort of harem behaviour. If you were dating someone and they saw you on another date, they would get angry and their Social Link would go into "reverse". If you said something that offended someone, or you neglected someone for a long period of time, their Link would also reverse on you. The original design intent by the P3 devs was that the characters would feel "alive" similar to how PS2's .hack//INFECT characters might be real players out on the internet, somewhere else from you.

I agree with the eventual change that in battle, you should be able to direct your party's moves (QoL/game-wise) because wrangling them on P3 on PS2 was sometimes idiotic, but the Reverse/Cheating system and lack of party control was directly removed after P3 FES because the players were whiny little losers that wanted Persona to "adapt with the times" and didn't like being told they could only pursue one route easily, & that they'd get locked out of another.

Atlus explicitly stated it as the reasoning, explaining in the Double Jump interview that each character within the game & its development direction was intended to exist as their own individual entity or person, and that they were only meant to be influenced and not directly controlled due to their individuality. Having gotten a credits roll of the main FES scenario on Hard for my original blind run of the game, P4 immediately felt watered down with all of those consequences missing, even if it was made much more playable with the intent of QoL. In the same way FromSoft felt like they stuck to their guns between Demon's Souls & Dark Souls, I'd have liked Persona 4 and 5 to have maintained its original trajectory instead of removing things or censoring itself.

I'm never going to forget the devs capitulating to that sort of dumbing down of their original vision for Persona 3. It's interesting watching players try to work out charts about which day each girl cant discover themself getting cheated on - the folks doing it are actively participating in an activity that is meant to make their main character in that save file look like a sociopath bastard in-game.

When things like Harvest Moon: Mineral Town re-releases with no Rival Relationships or Mahjong Soul devs have to apologise to the Blue Archive audience because including a guest character means that talking to them outside of their originating title is like participating in NTR (I'm not shitting you, they're legit stating they're never running that character event EVER again because of that), losing whole game features and cutscenes because the playerbase cant handle being told that "picking one excludes you from the other" sucks. And it's the same when Yosuke's voiced romance event which was recorded in both Japanese and English, were intended-yet-get-removed prior to release for the same lazy reasoning that Harvest Moon is missing whole Rival Romance moments and scenes that would have taken no effort to implement since they already existed.

Megami Tensei/Persona isn't some flimsy little Kemco RPG release meant to be turned out for fast money. I want the fullest, most challenging version of whatever the devs can throw at me, and I do not want options/consequences like drawbacks for cheating or Yosuke romance being pulled or censored last-second when it is clear that they paid staff to implement these features originally as the intended game design. Whoever it is at Atlus that is making changes to these games by subtracting features from them, be it Hashino or someone else in the company, it's gonna get really obvious really fast if Metaphor and Persona 6 wind up feeling excessively different from each other in hindsight, once both games are out. And it's really fascinating seeing which features or implements in Metaphor are already turning off players that jumped in expecting a bloodless-Persona experience.

I too was okay with the fact you couldn't directly control party members, but only issue commands. I didn't have any problems playing the game. Although, for me, that was somewhat my first time playing a turn based RPG, so I can see why it would be easier having full party control, and why anyone used to it would feel hindered.