Tokyo Game Show 2024

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

At the Tokyo Game Show 2024, I was able to spend some time playing the demo of the upcoming Atlus RPG, Metaphor: ReFantazio. This title comes from the minds behind the Persona series, including Katsura Hashino, the director, producer, and occasional writer of various games in the series. As such, the game looks and feels like a fantasy version of the Persona series. And while the adage of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” is strong in this one, some marked quality-of-life updates take away some of the grind.

For the demo I played, I was tasked with infiltrating a castle and rescuing the friend of a battered adventurer waiting at the entrance. With that mission in mind, I went inside and was confronted immediately by numerous wild canine enemies.

Just by being in the same basic area as the enemies, I had the option to push a button and start a turn-based battle. However, I used the attack button to slash the monster. I had expected that to bring me into the turn-based battle with an advantage on my side—like all my characters being able to attack first. After all, this is the standard in Persona games. What happened was the monster disappeared in a puff of black smoke with a small pop-up telling how much exp and money I got.

For the demo, my characters were level 10. This group of monsters was level 3 or 4. Because I was at a much higher level than the enemies and got a first strike on them before the battle started, the game just handed me the victory without wasting my time by making me fight them. But that wasn't all.

The game then taught me that I could scan the area around my characters—and that scanning would show me the levels of the monsters in the area. With this, I could see which monsters I could kill without going into battle. But what about the monsters near my level? With those, I had to hit them several times with my sword before I got the option to start the turn-based battle with an advantage (I went first and the enemies were stunned for a full turn).

Of course, it's not like you can pick off groups of enemies at your leisure. When you attack one weaker group to eliminate them before battle, the other groups will try to attack you—and if they succeed you end up stunned for a full turn instead. To help avoid this, you can dodge-roll outside of battle.

All this turns the out-of-battle dungeon map into a kind of mini-game. You scan groups of enemies, pick out the weaker ones, and strike them down while dodge rolling to avoid the stronger monsters. Then, once only the strong ones remain, attack them several times and enter the battle with them all stunned.

Admittedly, these are tiny changes to the status quo. Similar abilities were unlockable in Persona 5. However, in Metaphor: ReFantazio these are all handed to you early on—and in combination, they take away the useless grind and replace it with something that respects your time. The older I get, the more I appreciate such additions.

Metaphor: ReFantazio will be released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on October 11, 2024.