I’ve been playing a lot of Metaphor: Refantazio recently. The game was released earlier this month and has pretty much consumed my attention whenever I have a few spare minutes to turn the PS5 on. With Atlus and Hashino behind this latest adventure, a lot of people were expecting a Persona game with a fantasy veneer – and whilst it’s a bit more unique than that, I was hoping that this might be a return to glory after I was left a little disappointed with Persona 5. Metaphor drops the player into a network of hub towns and explorable mini-dungeons, where shopping, fighting, sidequesting and dating (there is an equivalent to Persona’s Confidants and Social Links here) are all present and correct as your journey progresses through the weeks and months of an in-game calendar. Fighting is streamlined slightly with a hybrid of real-time and turn based combat, enemies have tiers of difficulty if you scan them (based on their level in relation to yours – enemies three levels below yours die in one swing), and the turn-based combat is given extra flavour through systems such as Synthesis (spend multiple actions on team attacks) and formations (you can move allies to the front or back row à la classic Final Fantasy.) In theory, it’s compelling, engaging and smart – ensuring that the player is always spending their time wisely. However, it’s the way in which Metaphor handles its climactic boss battles which has led me to consider the notion of engaging in backwards dungeon crawling.
Preparation vs completion
Whilst I don’t like comparing Metaphor to Persona – when a studio announces a brand new series I try to avoid lazy parallels – it’s an interesting examination in the individual designs and how they lead me to play the games “wrong”. Your objectives for a calendar deadline in Metaphor may vary, but they often involve preparation rather than completion. You’re not necessarily completing a particular area or encounter before a deadline, but you’ll often be expected to prepare for a future encounter. This is comparable to Persona 3 and 5 – where you improve your party before a full moon or a calling card heralds an unavoidable boss battle. A structure that depends on completion is comparable to Persona 4 – where its calendar deadlines assess whether or not you’ve completed the latest dungeon. In P3, P5 and Metaphor, you’re preparing for an unknown threat that you won’t face until a defined date – and in the Persona games you could often measure your preparedness based on your progress in the game-spanning dungeons, Tartarus (P3) and Mementos (P5).
Metaphor has no definitive game-spanning dungeon. You might discover new dungeons through sidequests or story beats, but you kind of have to figure out the best way to develop your party by yourself. It’s why I went into each zone I could still warp to (without the fairy ally Gallica telling me “we don’t need to go there now”) and looked at the levels of the enemies to see where I could maximise experience gains in-between these unknown threats. On the other hand, maybe I was wasting my time with experience gains because the unknown threats were unknown. More often than not, I’d race through the in-game calendar with menial tasks that would push time forward just so that I could see what I’d be up against when the next deadline rolls around – and then I would reload my previous save and prepare accordingly. This is what made me consider the idea of backwards dungeon crawling: sprinting to a future boss battle with no preparation, and then building a strategy around what you found there. I can totally appreciate anyone writing in to call me insane for doing this, but the point is that I was permanently afraid of saving at a point where I would be underlevelled – because I had no metric for how prepared I should be. So what’s the solution?
How to dissuade backwards dungeon crawling
This isn’t an issue of difficulty – it’s a question of how soon a challenge could be presented to a player. Maybe an RPG could allow people to walk up to the front door of a dungeon and face an extraordinarily strong foe that represents the power of the dungeon’s guardian – just so that they have an idea of how to prepare. Maybe an RPG could, in the objective text, include the range of levels of the enemies within the next mandatory sequence. Maybe they could just make familiar areas more dangerous. One of my biggest question marks about Metaphor’s design is why you have (for example) open desert and forest areas where you can fight at any time, but the range of enemies stays the same forever – when instead the game could mix in stronger enemies as you pass certain milestones. Meanwhile, an extreme approach to the idea of open-ended challenges can be seen in Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, where each district has a defined “threat level”, and there are some areas of the map that you have to steer clear of for a while. At the same time, there will be districts in Infinite Wealth where enemies are so weak that you can win a battle with a single button press. It feels like the whole gamut of difficulty is presented to you at once, and it’s brilliant.
The backwards dungeon crawling continues
For what it’s worth, I am genuinely enjoying my time with Metaphor – it’s caused a lot of lost sleep, the battle system is excellent and the party members are generally likeable. According to the internet I’m closing in on the end of the penultimate dungeon, so I still have more to do, but I’ve been having fun. (I would finish the game a week after publishing this – the final boss was a resource drain, but being able to switch party members in the middle of a battle helps a lot if your current party is out of resources. Also, Bardon’s bond path has a perk where switching members costs fewer turns, which makes this more viable.) That said, I don’t know if my backwards dungeon crawling habits will change any time soon, at least when playing this game.
Metaphor ReFantazio is out now for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series and PC.
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