Atlus’s Big Year: Metaphor ReFantazio and P3R

With the tenth annual Game Awards having come to a close, the internet is currently filled with people saying it was rigged because their favorite game didn’t win Game of The Year. While I understand the disappointment some people have, I’m pretty satisfied with the way things turned out. The reason for this is because Metaphor: ReFantazio came out with three awards on its shelf, which is a testament to just how much it made an impact on gamers this year. Best RPG, Best Narrative, and Best Art Direction (just look at that pause menu, man) are all the awards it took home, despite being unable to clinch the Game of the Year award. But that’s okay. Even though it was my personal pick, Astro Bot is just as deserving of the award for what it offered gamers this year. Though with Metaphor’s success, I keep thinking about just how big of a year it was for Atlus, and I think it’s worth talking about.

In 2024, two massive titles developed by Atlus came out at opposing ends of the year. Persona 3 Reload came out on February 1st, and Metaphor ReFantazio released on October 11th after nearly eight years in development. Both games offer vastly different atmospheres, stories, and characters, and yet are very similar in style, presentation, and gameplay. These games are fairly long, around 80 to 100 hours each, something that forced me to complete the games over relatively long periods of time. However, despite their length, both games mean something huge to the medium and to their respective genres. 

P3R, a remake, was a huge release for fans of the original game, which was released back in July of 2006. The third installment in the Persona series is often praised for its great characters, divergent gameplay from its predecessors, and its dark story surrounding life and death. It’s no exaggeration to say that fans would’ve been super disappointed if Reload ended up being a flop, and general consensus is that it wasn’t. It’s very similar to previous games in the series, but it also excludes many things that make those games great. However, discussion about the franchise is very much oversaturated, and I think it’s much more worthwhile to discuss the brand new game that Atlus put out earlier this year. 

Metaphor is vastly different from Persona 3 Reload and all the games before it in that it’s an entirely original, wholly separate game from anything Atlus has made before. For one, instead of having an urban fantasy setting in Japan, it steps into full-on fantasy by taking place in a fictional kingdom called Euchronia. It also differs in a lot of other ways, most notably in that it doesn’t have a mute protagonist. While you can still name him anything you want, Metaphor’s main character does have actual voice lines and he talks in more than just cutscenes. The game also offers a much bigger world than any Persona game, even having a teleportation ability that allows you to go anywhere you were before across the whole continent. Metaphor’s soundtrack is also vastly different from anything in Atlus’s catalog. They utilize chanting, humming, and drums to fit with the fantastical theme, instead of the more funky, jazz tracks present in P5R and the pop/rock music in P3R. 

While the story of Metaphor could not be more different from Persona, it still has a lot of similarities in its gameplay. Both games start with a younger male protagonist, a navigator that explains the game mechanics, and a male and female companion that assist you in the game’s first act. The Persona series is also well-known for using, well, Personas in its turn-based combat, and Metaphor uses a similar yet different system called Archetypes. Personas and Archetypes are basically ghosts that give you abilities and spells. Based on literary tropes and character trends, Archetypes can only be equipped one at a time and there aren’t nearly as many of them as you would think. Using in-game items, you can max out your proficiency with them quickly to move on to the next, but some are locked behind Metaphor’s equivalent of Social Links (events that require you to chat with an NPC to get to know them better). All of these similarities are fine, as I think it takes what it needs to from the Persona franchise while still keeping things fresh and engaging. Also, there’s no romance options for the protagonist this time. Those games are known for their lackluster, often poorly written romantic interactions between the protagonist and characters of your choice. Thank you for sparing us this time, Atlus.

If you’re the type of person who likes combat in video games, you’ll probably prefer the combat in Metaphor a lot more than in the Persona games. Once you level up high enough, you can easily defeat enemies just by attacking them in the overworld, so then you don’t have to enter turn-based combat. A lot of the locations and dungeons are different too, which is something that hinders Persona 3 Reload, because you’re really just running around Tartarus (a maze of randomly-generated environments) the whole time with some different colors here and there. The game makes it really easy to find items and level up as well, allowing you to manage your time and progress your friendships with the NPCs. This is definitely a complaint a lot of people have about Persona 5 in particular, because there’s a lot of specific things you have to do in order to rank up with everyone in that game. It’s very easy to miss a character or two, leaving you feeling incomplete. Metaphor not only has less characters, but also more time to let you fight and rank up. It’s very refreshing, and you never feel like you’re pressed for time. It doesn’t hold your hand at all, and some of the fights can be overwhelming, but that just adds to the challenge. Some would even say Persona games are too easy, and I think those people would very much like Metaphor for its generally harder battles.

Overall, both games are similar, yet different. They have entirely different settings and stories and can appeal to different types of people. If you’re like me, and you love Persona, you might want to check out Metaphor for a different story with similar gameplay. It works both ways, and I think that’s why both games were so successful. People who were on the fence about Persona due to its awkward romance options and corny dialogue might gravitate towards Metaphor more, and people just now checking out Metaphor because of its setting might move to Persona 5 Royal, Atlus’s magnum opus in terms of writing (objective fact by the way).

It’s no surprise Metaphor dominated in the Game Awards this year, and that Persona 3 Reload has “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam (despite the controversy with its awful DLC pricing). Both titles offer different stories but similar gameplay, and you can see just how much heart went into each game. I mean, just look at the UI, there’s a reason Metaphor won Best Art Direction. Even something as simple as a pause menu looks amazing, and it really helps to build the worlds that Atlus wants to depict for the players. The dedication they had for producing amazing releases this year is inspiring, and while both games are not perfect, they have left an impact on Atlus’s fans and the gaming community as a whole for what they were able to depict with their art, music, and notable styles. I’ll definitely be replaying Metaphor sometime soon to get what I missed and try out new Archetype combos in the future.

I’ll probably never finish The Answer, though. I can’t go back to Tartarus. Shoot me.