Forum - View topicMetaphor: ReFantazio Respects Your Time By Turning Dungeon Traversal into a Fun Little Mini-Game
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Kiwi93
Posts: 368 |
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This is looking really fun but I’m already planning to buy Ys X Nordics next month so will have to put this one on hold for now.
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Amuro1X
Posts: 194 |
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There is one mechanic that might entice you to still fight weak enemies in squad battles, though. Your archetypes Rank up not by experience earned, but by being actively used in battle. It's an interesting trade off.
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smurky turkey
Posts: 2458 |
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I kind of want to try the game but knowing it is as long as Persona 5... that is too much for me in several ways.
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 497 Location: PA / USA |
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FinalVentCard mentioned in the This Week in Games thread last time that Hashino was off of Persona 6.
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. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6225 |
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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. |
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FeelMyBlade
Posts: 149 |
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Wild to see someone acting like this is some Concord-levels of character designs and not absolute peak by Shigenori Soejima. 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. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 497 Location: PA / USA |
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To be more direct, I see a lot more cherry-picking of feature enjoyment with Metaphor. Like, the whole package isn't just an instant buy this time, some people are finding the setting or tone polarising, for me it's specifically the character designs (the outlandish ones look very SMT, the "safer" ones look too Persona). It's blasphemous to me to play Persona or SMT on anything lower than hard since the enemy HP bump means you usually have obligation to squeeze everything possible out of your remaining time or inventory/fusion resources. That they potentially gave hard mode greater depth in Metaphor is another big mark for me in the positives column. |
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jdnation
Posts: 2082 |
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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. Also, NONE of the characters are queer, expecting NPCs in P5 one would expect to find in the area who are played for a joke, but at a supporting male character's expense, for which they could easily be read as simply screwing with him because he's someplace where he is not supposed to be at that hour. As for the criticisms aimed at P4, Neither Kanji nor Naoto were queer, that was simply how the shadow world cartoonishly overexaggerated their insecurities to drive them mad so that the shadow could replace them. Kanji had hobbies that were stereotypically girly. He also felt weird because he was attracted to Naoto, whom everyone mistook for a boy. Naoto felt disrespected and inferior because she was a girl aiming at a male dominated profession. She tried to look and behave more masculine to compensate, but she never actually felt she was a guy. Kanji is well aware he is attracted to girls, only Naoto threw him off, leading to natural confusion, and the two of them do share a similar issue of other people's perceptions of them being off and growing to be comfortable of who they are despite what other people think. Kanji therefore continues to remain more attached to Naoto, even though that relationship is never committed to, because the player can also pursue Naoto as a romantic interest. To that end, even the supporting cast of Yosuke and Kanji trying to get along has it's conflicts that are played for laughs and behave like typical teenage boys. Persona has it's audience and the "adapt to the times" demand is largely a western liberal cultural demand. Much the same for other calls to change the IP and gameplay into something else entirely. If "lots of other RPGs" are already serving that market, then people can happily settle for those. That said, I would be interested in seeing Hashimoto do new stuff, like he did with Catherine, and now Metaphor. So a new team behind Persona 6 will be interesting, and I personally wouldn't mind changes like dual male and female protagonists, multiple protagonists, and even supporting characters who have their own fixed romantic interests with other characters that aren't just tied to the player, or at the very least has a more involved way to get them to like you instead. 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.
I prefer P5's turn based to Striker's style which lacked any tactical substance and felt more like chaotic auto battle than actually feeling in control. Thankfully Metaphor is not that or at least makes it optional for weaker enemies. Anyway, this is obvious a new franchise that's not Persona, despite similarities. Sega hopes this will be as big as Persona. Catherine was an adult story puzzle game. I'm guessing this will do pretty well with sequel potential. Probably it's biggest divisive issue is it's art style which many may find more garish compared to the hip urban aesthetics of Persona. I can see the idea of what they were aiming for, but I don't feel they achieved it. 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. |
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DRWii
 Posts: 639 |
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FWIW when I downloaded the PS5 demo from the Japanese PSN it had options for English text and audio, so if the PS4 version is the same you can import that. |
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King Chicken
 Posts: 123 |
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That is a problem a lot of media suffers from if we're being honest. The idea that something is not for everyone is a declining concept in the west because so much media has been altered in recent times to appeal to as many people as possible. 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 but in modern times they're aimed specifically at female audiences now and written more empowering like Lara Croft or certain superhero comics. I'd like to think even without Hashino in charge Atlus would have the sense to not alienate their entire fanbase given they've done right so far in the games Hashino has not been in charge of. The only hang ups would be the localization team feeling more bold to remove things or SEGA themselves who might mandate stuff upon them as they tend to focus on the western market now themselves if the way they handle the Yakuza/Like a Dragon Series is anything to go by.
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" |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6225 |
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Maybe I need to go back and look but many female characters back in the day were sold exclusively on their sex appeal and rarely ever had anything cool about them. It also doesn’t help when much of the discourse among modern gamers/movie/tv viewers is grown men whining about female characters that don’t show enough skin or don’t look like Sydney Sweeney clearly demonstrating they prefer sex appeal in their female characters over good writing involving them. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 497 Location: PA / USA |
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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. |
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