Preview I played Metaphor ReFantazio in Los Angeles! It’s as crazy as the Persona video games, but something bothers me…

Preview I played Metaphor ReFantazio in Los Angeles! It’s as crazy as the Persona video games, but something bothers me…

In recent days, we have had the chance to wander for many hours in the aisles of the Play Days event, linked to the Summer Game Fest, to have a series of meetings and, of course, to discover the next major games for the months to come. . After an appearance during the show orchestrated by Geoff Keighley, revealing among other things the immense quantity of Archetypes available in the game, we were surprised to see a stand for the next hit from the Atlus teams – the developers of Persona And Shin Megami Tensei -, Metaphor: ReFantazio. It is therefore a bit of a trickster and very curious to get our hands on this title in preview that we managed to negotiate a slot of one hour (and even a little more!) to try not one, nor even two but three portions of one of the most anticipated J-RPGs of this end of the year.

Atlus masters the art and style like no other J-RPG studio

In the space of a few years, the company Atlus has increasingly found itself on the lips of fans of Japanese role-playing games. Today, Atlus is not just a single franchise, it’s a nice handful of licenses that make a little noise with each release. But, as surprising as it may seem, there is no longer only Shin Megami Tensei Or Persona to make society shine! Recently, we found Metaphor: ReFantazio. While its release is scheduled for October 11, we were able to play it for an hour from three different sections. To allow everyone to get an idea of ​​what Metaphor: ReFantazio, SEGA and Atlus had divided this demo into three segments: Scenario, dungeon and boss, the perfect triad to discover the basics of the game, if there really is a need!

Let’s not beat around the bush: no franchise player Persona will feel like you’re discovering a whole new game when you get your hands on it for the first time. Metaphor: ReFantazio. Except, of course, the devil is in the details. Here, no students seeking justice or high school students leading a double life, no catchy music inspired by the jazz movement, no contemporary settings or colorful aura as if to better match the theme of the game. In the end, this Metaphor: ReFantazio to the tune of Persona without completely being. Said another way, this new IP would be a kind of very distant cousin, a little punk around the edges who doesn’t want to be like everyone else, preferring to let his slightly tortured side and his influences speak. somewhat opposite to those of others.

Certainly, we find what makes the charm of Atlus productionsnamely the use of animation sequences, a visual design that gives a stamp to almost all current productions and a large gallery of characters and other mystical entities, but Metaphor: ReFantazio decided to accept this difference. In a way, it seems that this project now sports this form because it did not really fit, due to its aesthetic ideas, into the straitjacket of the license Personanor in that of Shin Megami Tensei Besides. After this hour of play, we really understood that there was a grandiose dimension – the direction taken by the soundtrack proves it well – behind this Metaphor: ReFantaziothat the alliance between the medieval, the renaissance and the fantastic took up too much space and, finally, that the numerous references – we saw Berserk or even Hieronymus Bosch, coupled with the “best-of” aspect of this new franchise, did not stick to what the studio was doing previously.

The very archetype of generous role-playing games: this cousin of Persona is a monster!

That being said, this did not prevent the members of Studio Zéro from repeating some of the clichés of Shin Megami Tensei and of Persona. Despite this, it would be bad language to say that this Metaphor: ReFantazio is content to be an ersatz since there are indeed multiple changes which mean that this title already has a magnetic charm. If we discovered the simplest basics in the Scenario mode of our test, it was in the Dungeon portion that we learned more. As the name suggests so well and in the tradition of Atlus games, the hero and the members of the team will enter a type of dungeon, broken down into rooms containing both treasures… but also enemies. In the license Personathese are often expeditions that take (a lot) of time, so the developers have found an alternative to make everything a little less tedious!

In detail, this idea consists of allowing you to take down enemies with lower levels in a single hit. To do this, simply scan the surroundings, which will also have the effect of revealing the enemies’ power color code (blue, yellow, red) and to see things a little more clearly. If you can triumph without fighting in the company of the whole team, you can also be caught off guard. We must therefore be vigilant and strike the first blows! For slightly stronger enemies (yellow and red), there is a way to gain the advantage by hitting your enemy one or more times. It will then be destabilized and we can start the fight with an advantage: that of carrying out a burst of damage and preventing it from acting for a turn.. This functionality is, for example, one of the secrets to triumphing in a fight without taking damage and obtaining a bonus at the end of the encounter (more gold, more experience, better loot).

If only that were all there was, but Metaphor: ReFantazio has more than one string to his bow so that we can enjoy mastering his combat system. While we mentioned the somewhat “action” side, this new title from Atlus bases its experience on turn-based combat and a very particular mechanic, that of the Archetypes. In this case, a character has access to a tree of archetypes where there are the forty variants included in this experience. Depending on whether or not you discover them during the adventure, you must nevertheless spend Magla points to integrate them. Following this, we can, little by little, give free rein to the hybridization of the profiles of our companions. In short, we have carte blanche and nothing prevents us from capitalizing on a team that specializes in inflicting enormous physical damage.

Despite the persona system set aside, we still have something that strongly resembles it, even if it perhaps allows a little more experimentation. If you liked this mechanic, rest assured, Metaphor: ReFantazio still shares a lot of clichés inherited from Atlus’ cousin franchises. So, to drown out the fish, the title of Studio Zéro sets up variations of the system that we know well. During this one-hour trial, we were able to highlight techniques like Symbiosis where two members can combine their attack and their Archetype (in exchange for two turn points) to wreak real carnage – there is also a story of lineage which also allows positioning changes (forward, backward) at the press of a button to adjust the placement of a hero to better protect him (damage reduction) or task him with protecting the rest of the gang and, finally , the exploitation of opponents’ weaknesses to regain turn points.