Katsura Hashino is what you’d call a nervous guy.
“It is every day for me,” he says. “I'm completely filled with anxiety.”
A longtime designer of the role-playing video game series Persona, he has good reason to be. After moving away from the series in 2016, he eventually took the helm of a new game, Metaphor: ReFantazio, which aims to not just be the culmination of developer Atlus’ most-beloved RPG series, but also an introduction to a brand-new fantasy world that he hopes players will respond to as well as they have with his past games. No pressure.
Atlus is currently at the forefront of a golden era for role-playing games, setting records with games like 2016’s breakout success Persona 5 and this year’s Persona 3 Reload, which became the fastest-selling game in the developer’s history within its first week. With each new game in the Persona series, the studio refines its vision to create engaging role-playing games that marry social sim elements with dungeon crawling.
Without Persona 5, there is no Persona 3 Reload, itself a remake of a PlayStation 2 title. And without Persona 5, there is no Metaphor: ReFantazio—the product of Studio Zero, a new company within Atlus comprised of Hashino and several other Persona veterans charged with creating something new.
Achieving that meant moving into a new genre, a game that takes the best of Persona but ditches its high school setting for a high-fantasy world. It couples the oddly sticky appeal of everyday tasks like cooking, reading, and cleaning with challenges like building your imagination and tolerance and improving your leadership. Set amid a struggle for the throne of the United Kingdom of Euchronia, you must build relationships with “followers,” comrades that offer support, over the course of the game’s day-by-day calendar. Your quest is to save a prince that the kingdom thinks is dead, but the methods by which you do this play like a reinvention of the fantasy RPG.
Actions cost time in Metaphor: ReFantazio, whether you want to hang out in hot springs, get to know followers, or travel the world. Each new major development in the game comes with a deadline, a task you need to accomplish before time’s up, like finishing a dungeon or defeating an enemy. It’s the mundanity of punching a clock mixed with magic, specifically Royal Magic.
Hashino says that when presented with the chance to make a new game, the overwhelming response from the team was to make it a fantasy title. But when pressed, no one could give a clear reason on why they liked fantasy, just that they did. “Because of that, we really thought that this was a really interesting thing to explore,” Hashino says. After digging into the more traditional elements of the genre, the team strongly felt that they wanted to “make our own fantasy game, our own fantasy world.”
Metaphor plays with this idea in a few ways, but perhaps the most obvious subversion is to make humans the mythological, monstrous creatures of Euchronia and everyone else the everyday citizens. The game’s world has eight tribes, from the horned Clemar to the doglike Paripus, and the most traditionally human-looking of them all—the Elda tribe—is the most derided. In-game, “humans” are terrifying abominations bloated into barely recognizable features: walking heads with teeth-filled gashes, sandworm-like tubes, creatures with limbs more like a spider’s. When the player encounters a human, it means they’re in for a long and arduous fight.
“Anxiety is a remnant of the primordial humans,” Hashino says, pointing to its purpose as a sensor for danger or the unknown. “But in the modern world, we're surrounded by unknown and strange things.” That constant, building anxiety, he says, “can kind of grow to these monstrous proportions of anxiety within you.” Thus, the game’s human monsters.
But everyone in the world, the real world, has at least a little anxiety, Hashino says. When it gets out of control, it can keep you from moving forward or enjoying your life. When given the means to overcome—or literally fight—that anxiety, people can move on. “We thought that was something people would resonate with,” he adds.
Hashino means this literally. In Metaphor, anxiety hangs in the air. In battle, players can take on roles—they’re called “archetypes”—like a knight or a cleric. “When you transform into one of these archetypes, you actually absorb all these anxiety particles, then you kind of transform them into shining armor that surrounds you.” By absorbing anxiety, you become more powerful.
Class and equality are major themes throughout the game, as races like the Paripus are consistently abused and discriminated against, while the Clemar are considered high society. Hashino also says that every tribe in the game is based on different personality types he sees in Japan—older people trying to push their views on the youth, for example, or someone who needs public attention. Metaphor makes politics a literal popularity contest, where candidates compete against each other to become the new king by winning the favor of the people. Completing bounties, helping citizens through side-quests, besting other candidates—all of these actions help the game’s hero in a quantifiable way, where his number inches further up a magical scoreboard.
The cast’s reigning mantra is to help everyone in need, while the main character frequently consults a novel that describes a fantasy utopia where everyone is equal. Metaphor is hardly subtle in its views, but it benefits from an earnest cast fighting to uphold their ideals for a better world. After losing his son, one character is searching for salves for his grief and how to best honor his child’s memory. Another explores how religion has twisted her life’s purpose and how to live with a new understanding of the world.
Make no mistake, Metaphor is a good game. From its outlandish score and smart battle systems, to its gorgeous, meticulously crafted menus, to its lovable cast and fascinating world, it’s poised to complete the mission its creators were tasked with. Despite its anxiety-riddled story, it’s executed with a confidence befitting the veterans who made it. It’s ready for the RPG throne.
