‘Metaphor ReFantazio’ Is a Surprisingly Political and Very Timely JRPG

A sleeping prince. A wicked wizard. A kingdom not worth saving. These are the foundation of Atlus’ ambitious new RPG Metaphor ReFantazio (out today). It’s a project nearly 10 years in the making and a chance for Atlus, known for the popular Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series, to experiment with fresh ideas — and what an experiment it is. 

Metaphor ReFantazio adroitly blends fantasy storytelling with political commentary, while evolving Atlus’ familiar social and combat mechanics in important ways. It’s an impressive achievement for a Japanese RPG, a genre that’s often narratively or thematically ambitious in execution, but too frequently falls short of saying anything deeper about our real world.

Yet, almost entirely by chance, Metaphor ReFantazio brings with it a potent voice at a particularly tumultuous point in modern politics, making it one of the timeliest video games ever.

A rotten realm

Metaphor ReFantazio takes place in Euchronia, a kingdom characterized by wealth, technological progress, intense division, and increasing attacks from monstrous creatures called Humans. Metaphor ReFantazio is a metaphor by name and by nature. These Humans — some drawn from famous artwork, including Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights — represent sin and excess in its many forms and feed on people’s anxieties to gain strength. The more anxious people are, the more Human monsters are about, which makes creating instability an advantageous tactic for unscrupulous political actors. 

Eight tribes call Euchronia home, ranging from the religious Mustari whose unorthodox beliefs make them outcasts to the feisty and emotional Paripus, fox-like people shunned for daring to show their feelings so openly. Only two tribes enjoy privileged status, including the one that happens to run the country.

The protagonist is an Elda, a race the state church declares is anathema on account of their magical abilities, on a mission to awaken the crown prince by murdering the mage who cast a curse on him years ago. The mission’s urgency only increases when the king himself is murdered, and it seems the mage in question, Louis Guilabern, will seize the throne for himself. 

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The only path to Louis, and the prince’s salvation, involves winning the hearts of the people by means fair or foul, so the group joins the competition for the crown and sets off around the kingdom on the world’s most convoluted assassination mission. Their biggest advantage? A banned book that teaches them about themselves and, as a result, about the people around them.

Books give you power

A single, simple concept underlies everything Metaphor ReFantazio tries to achieve: People read a book, get ideas, and act them out. The people in question live on society’s margins for reasons of birth or belief, and the book tells a fantasy tale of an ideal city where all are equal, written by a man named More. Just reading it is an act of rebellion, and it stirs within those who read it a passion for change and a belief that perhaps the terrible world they live in doesn’t have to stay terrible forever.

Metaphor ReFantazio is a story about a revolution and philosophy. It isn’t shy about wearing its references and inspirations openly — for example a book about a utopia by an author called More that mirrors Thomas More’s work Utopia, a blunt, but missable, reference — but it experiments with ideas from well beyond the Renaissance as well. There’s more than a touch of utilitarian theory, a bit of commentary on the Enlightenment question about the relationship between body and soul, and even some pointed remarks about the spectator sport nature of electoral politics and how easily it lends itself to personality worship. It’s impressive just how many ideas Atlus managed to cram into Metaphor ReFantazio and even more so that they almost all work without feeling forced or underdeveloped.     

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Most of all, it has plenty to say about corrupt institutions and how they remain intact by dividing communities and fostering environments of fear and discrimination. Metaphor ReFantazio is not subtle in these moments, and while the quest for the crown is ostensibly the party’s main goal, the intellectual quest toward creating a just and equal society is what really drives the story forward. Atlus worked on Metaphor ReFantazio for nearly a decade, but the timing of its release could hardly feel more relevant, coming as it does 30 days before one of the most critical elections in American history.

An unfamiliar reflection

Ideas without action are just noise, and Metaphor ReFantazio sidesteps the issue by rooting each of its major themes in at least one character’s development and sometimes a villain’s as well. The characters, or Followers, are a properly ragtag bunch. There’s a merchant who loves profits, but hates capitalism almost as much as her enemies hate her — an unexpected combination that makes for one of the game’s best moments of character development; a lonely young girl who asks for stories from outside the slums, who the party essentially adopts after being responsible for her father’s death; and a brawler who wants to execute the rich after a lifetime of racial oppression, to name just a very few. 

Their views on life and government typically tie in with the main story at some point, such as Heismay, a knight from one of the most mistreated tribes of Euchronia, being a central figure in a narrative segment about discrimination and justice. However, Metaphor ReFantazio makes the effort to deepen them further in side quests and other conversations. Strohl, for example, could easily have remained a two-dimensional caricature about nobles with good intentions, but completing his Follower quests and conversations shows him learning how to put his ideals into practice.

 A handful of characters even develop stances that seem almost like concessions, as if Atlus were concerned about seeming too radical. That brawler who wants to hurt the rich eventually decides she should try being less aggressive and more harmonious, a bizarre change considering passivity never worked for her in the past. Like More’s book for the protagonists, though, it’s all meant to make you feel and think, to hear the whispers of possibility about a better world and consider the actions it might take to make that fantasy a reality — and the ones that should be tossed out.  

Allegories such as these are often tedious, but Atlus handles it with elegance and weaves its messages and manifestos into one of the most interesting fantasy worlds in years. Part of Metaphor ReFantazio’s distinct identity comes from its eagerness to invert traditional fantasy tropes. The hero’s mission is to save a prince, not a princess. The prince’s most capable and loyal knights are a woman and an old man. Elves — well, the Rouissante tribe — are common and earthy, nothing like the usual ethereal interpretations that J.R.R. Tolkien popularized. Unusual for Atlus and video games in general, Black people exist and occupy prominent roles, and the stylish, glamorous antagonist Louis Guilabern isn’t some offensive play on effeminate stereotypes, like such characters often are in other RPGs, including Atlus’ own. He’s a powerful and charismatic villain, a case study in Machiavellian principles, and a thinly veiled indictment against modern demagoguery.

In short, it’s a fascinating world and approach to storytelling in itself, which makes the narrative Atlus wants to tell stand out as more thoughtfully considered than one might expect after seeing its occasionally heavy-handed approach to important topics. 

Job improvement training

Metaphor Refantazio is a turn-based party-centric RPG like classic Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, and it’s a smart blend of ideas from Atlus’ other RPGs. Its foundation is the press-turn system from Shin Megami Tensei and Persona, where exploiting weaknesses grants allies — or enemies, if they get your weak spot — an additional turn and missing takes a turn away. It also adds front and back row physical placement for party members, just like in Etrian Odyssey. Characters in the front row deal and take more damage, while those in the back take and dish out less. Swapping doesn’t use up a turn, and figuring out the best time and place to move each ally plays an important role in the toughest fights.

What makes Metaphor Refantazio’s battles so inventive and rewarding is Atlus’ take on an RPG staple: a job system. Metaphor ReFantazio calls its jobs “Archetypes,” manifestations of heroic ideals from ages past, but they’re recognizable classes despite the fancy name. Classics such as Warrior and Thief sit alongside the defensive Knight and Mage, whose elemental attacks are essential for exploiting weak points

Any party member can study any Archetype and swap between them any time outside of battle. Each Archetype also has slots for inherited skills, abilities a character learned under another Archetype they can unlock for use elsewhere, and while the available inheritance slots are limited to begin with, characters eventually gain extra slots and can mix and match an impressive array of skills. The flexibility this affords is similar to Final Fantasy V’s open job system, but it allows even more creative planning thanks to advanced Archetypes and the general variety of skills.

It also implements hard mode better than most RPGs. Rather than giving enemies more health points, switching to the higher difficulty gives them additional turns, a seemingly simple alteration on the surface, but one that demands better strategizing and resource use even in battles against normal enemies. Metaphor Refantazio’s difficulty toggle is available any time the party is outside a dungeon, so there’s no fear of having to reload to an earlier file and losing substantial progress. Even getting a game over — or “Fantasy is Dead” as it appears here — just involves starting from a few minutes prior to the fatal encounter.

It feels designed for convenience and enjoyment, which makes its few unforgiving systems stand out as particularly odd choices. Currency spent on unlocking new skills is non refundable, which makes picking an unwise skill for inheritance feel unnecessarily punishing. It’s also easy to start a mandatory boss fight with the wrong setup and struggle needlessly. The setup is sensible for structural reasons, as informants naturally would have no information about secret, unheard of threats, though having to reload before the encounter and alter party formations still feels forced and clunky.

Frequent save points make this somewhat frustrating choice less annoying than it might sound. However, it’s still a confusing decision for a game that encourages experimental job and skill combinations to suddenly restrict that freedom and force a very specific approach. Thankfully, the narrative context around these encounters makes putting up with these odd decisions worthwhile, and Metaphor Refantazio soon shifts back to a more open style anyway.

On the road again, in a boat with feet

Outside of combat, Metaphor ReFantazio requires careful time management. The party travels on strict deadlines, and moving from one location to another takes as much as three days or longer. Atlus adapts the calendar system from Persona and improves it by making time spent integral to some of the story’s themes. Instead of waiting around, doing menial tasks to pass the time like in Persona 5, the protagonist can take on interesting side quests, improve their relationship with Followers, or refine their Royal Virtues, Metaphor ReFantazio’s version of Persona’s social stats. 

Follower quests are the highlight here, often multi-part tasks that take the team to new locations and deepen some of the themes, but the protagonist can also learn more about Euchronia and its people by speaking with some of them. One Mustari in the capital city, for example, offers a lesson in their belief system in the hopes that spreading knowledge might reduce the intense discrimination his people face.

The Gauntlet Runner is what carts the party to and fro on these journeys, a Ghibli-esque contraption that also has the convenient power to teleport the team to locations they’ve already visited without taking up time These travel parts of the game are like a road trip story, only without the road, with a car that’s actually a yacht on legs, and with a chance that someone else’s legged boat might show up with heavy weapons aimed uncomfortably close.

The protagonist can pass time on the Runner by speaking with other party members, helping them complete chores, reading a book, or cooking, and they can even boost their own stats by doing laundry. If only real life were the same. Stat boosts and camaraderie aside, these activities also make the Runner feel homely, partly from the routines established as it travels from place to place and partly from the relationship building that happens along the way. Bonds in RPGs are a familiar concept, but they’re real and earned in Metaphor ReFantazio. 

Managing time efficiently sounds stressful, but Metaphor ReFantazio is generous with most of its deadlines. It usually allots an in-game week or longer for most main dungeons, while limited side quests can stick around for up to a month. Important quests, such as Follower quests or bounties, have no deadline at all, which is helpful, seeing as they typically force the party into bland dungeons with tough challenges at the end. 

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Boring dungeon design aside, Metaphor ReFantazio is a stellar achievement. Atlus has refined and improved its design philosophies in meaningful ways here, and it’s one of the most creative pieces of video game storytelling in the last decade or more. 

Its ideas and stances aren’t particularly unique, and perhaps could be subtler, but in a time when oppression and injustice are sanctioned at the highest levels and speaking truth to power is a novelty reserved for a handful of late-night comedy sketches, the fact that a video game is bold enough to say anything at all makes Metaphor ReFantazio noteworthy in itself.