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Wooow where do I begin. Well I’ll begin with the fact that I’m sorry to say, this game just sucked. Before all the Metaphor fanboys throw their tomatoes at me, I want to state my expectations were pretty high after Persona 5 and this felt like a huge flop in comparison. After finishing it, and looking at steam, I can see most people got sick of this shit early on and even though 90% of people started playing it, only 34% actually got to the final ending. So now I will just go down the list of why I thought this game sucked and you can agree or disagree but it is what it is. 😎
My Grand Unifying Theory of why Metaphor is so underwhelming is that the Persona team didn’t realize just how much work the modern day Japan setting was doing for them. You don’t need to do any world-building when the world is already built, and then you can furthermore piggyback off of all the typical anime and JRPG stock characters (or as they typically do, just reuse the exact same characters in every modern Persona game.) Meanwhile with Metaphor it doesn’t really feel like they did much to flesh out the world and make it feel real and lived-in, which then compounds the issue in other areas like the characters, the writing, the level design, and so on. If there isn’t really much to the setting, then there isn’t much for the characters to say, little to make their backgrounds feel unique & special, and so on.
The UI is dogshit
Yea so the biggest reason I hated this game is the UI was absolute hot garbage. The Persona UI was so much better and easier to navigate so I’m generally just confused on why the hell the Metaphor one was SO BAD. I feel like the first 3 hours of the game I spent fighting the UI trying to figure out where anything is. For example I’d go into my quest log, check what’s open, click on the quest and the map just showed me a bunch of ???s. Why not just show me on the map where it is? Why not simply just click on the quest – the marker now blinks on the map on where I should go? The UI felt like it was something out of a game that came out in 2005 and you had to just kinda figure out based on the quest description. Sometimes things that looked like I should click on them, were in fact not clickable. Redundant clicking was also a thing for example going into the archetype tree, I assumed since Will was highlighted I by default went to his profile. NOPE I was on NOBODY’S PROFILE despite him being highlighted and had to click on him again. Also say I wanted to level up archetype skills in this menu, I had to leave this menu, go into my ITEM LIST, find the ITEM that does this and then spam it multiple times before going back to this screen again to see what to unlock next. Just such stupid UI and don’t even get me started on these ugly ass colors.
Sorry Atlus but you learned all the wrong lessons from the UI in Persona 5. The point wasn’t that it “looks cool”, the point was also that it was extremely functional and easy to read and made intuitive sense to navigate. And again, tons of these problems flow from the fact that they needed to actually create a unique new setting and didn’t realize all the issues that come with this. Like look at that archetype tree! First of all there’s constant glowing and animating stuff, which draws your eye to the wrong places. Then there were so many times where a character unlocked a new class and we first had to dig around the chart to find that job, then it would show the requirements, then we’d have to dig around again to find THOSE jobs. Meanwhile gacha games like P5X figured out ages ago how to handle this kind of XP system (the “auto add XP generating items” button!)
The quest menu was even worse because to go to a quest area you had to first go to your airship (Gaunlet Runner), go to the fucking table, click the table, go to your requests, click on the request and then click on the map. But hey if you didn’t talk to Joe Shmoe at the bar and pay him money you didn’t have information to go to the area of the QUEST YOU HAVE so the map just showed you ??? and you were unable to go anywhere. Multiply this by like 50 and I was like (╯°益°)╯︵ ~ ┻━┻ then stop playing the game for 3 months before begrudgingly going back to try again because “I paid money for it so I should finish it” dumbass mentality I have.🤪 So because of this, I would constantly take breaks, come back to the game, and have to relearn the dumbass UI again. It only became slightly less painful when we got fast travel, which was like halfway through the game so you are screwed in the first half. Anyway I haven’t seen a UI this bad since those old FF games (and shit like FF8’s stupid GF system) but for a game that came out in modern day this is just straight up trash especially when you have such easy to read UIs in Persona 5 and Persona 3 Reload.
They are so wedded to the Persona calendar system and again, it just doesn’t translate over well into this kind of setting. the modern Japan setting and stock character types (in this case, Your Average Japanese Teenager) are an integral part of what makes the calendar system work. There’s the specific rhthms of the school year (vacation for Golden Week! time for the Sport Festival!) and then on top of that the kinds of activities that you would do make sense for a timescale of a few hours. Yeah, you’ll spend a few hours in the afternoon after school at a club meeting, then a couple hours after that at a part-time job a few subway stations away. With Metaphor it definitely feels like they realized that this doesn’t quite work and keep trying to apply band-aids to this. The scale of the game is enormously larger than a Persona game (where even the largest of them is Persona 5 which is still just a huge city), so the game needs to include the (sporadic) ability to teleport as a way to handwave doing a social link on one side of the continent in the morning and then another social link on the other side of the continent in the evening. There’s also the fact that when you can’t teleport, you can do a limited set of activities on board the ship while you travel to your destination, because again because I suspect it would play really badly if needing to spend time traveling mattered (and on that note, other than scripted MSQ events that revolve around traveling everywhere you go just-so-happens to be only a short trip away from somewhere that you can easily teleport to.)
Confusing Battle System
I’m sorry but I just did not understand the Archetype system at all. Luckily, I played on story mode and once I unlocked mage which let me blast AOE damage around me and 1 hit KO enemies I literally could not care less about anything else. I just wanted to get dungeons over with and with story mode for the most part that was good enough. By the end, even at level 99 the difficulty randomly spiked and I couldn’t just faceroll my way through the story. Fortunately this is not a problem a few mods can’t fix. 🤪 In the end I only focused on Will, Eupha, Hulk and Strohl and the rest just kinda got exp as I did dungeon quests and random boss fights. I don’t know why they made the final fight so long and difficult (because you were so mad at the game that you beelined to the endboss to get this shit over with rather than going through the entire dungeon killing all the minibosses first to weaken him like the game told you to do) for story mode when if I wanted a challenge I’d play on a higher difficulty.
Since this is Not Persona, they needed to come up with a different character build system for Metaphor and well, it isn’t great. At first it seems kind of interesting where you can continually switch classes or unlock cross-class skills, but you quickly learn that most of the jobs are at best variants and at worst strictly worse versions of other jobs. Then on top of that this system incentivizes grinding when you learn that “oops, the class you were trying out actually kinda sucks” or “oops, the class you were trying out is actually a dead-end” or finally “oops, all that really matters in the end is that each character uses their personal prestige class”. Like honestly they could’ve stripped that whole system out and simply had each character unlock their subsequent higher level classes as the story and their social links progressed and saved all that busywork.
Music Sucked
After bangers from all the Persona games, the music here felt like “Generic RPG BGMs Volume 1” but also combined with old men chanting like in some medieval movie. Every town bgm was forgettable, every battle BGM was old men chanting. Dungeons were painful because I already hate maze dungeons and now I have some guy chanting HUBANAH HUBANAH in my ear over and over. 🥴
The 3D Graphics are Ugly
I don’t know if they were trying to go for some kind of dark/fantasy effect or what but the models in the game just look hideous. They have completely weird and goofy outfits that are a mix of JRPG and Saturday Night Fever. I would have forgiven it if the models weren’t so CRAPPY looking. I didn’t mind the 2D portraits as those clearly had a quality artist draw them but the models….wtf. And oh boy don’t get me started on the monsters. This stuff looked on par with the Toilet Oneechan from Scarlet Nexus. I genuinely thought they just hired the same guy to draw them monsters for this game too. Seeing random fish with legs, cannibalistic babies and bouncing human ears on a skewer was really gross.I think the cartoon filter worked fine for more cartoonish models in Persona, but it just looked cheap and crappy in this game. Also on the topic of graphics holy copy pasta batman. Several dungeons in this game looked like identical copy pastes of each other – which I guess worked for Mementos in Persona 5, but it just doesn’t work here. At some point I kept thinking “didn’t we go to this place before” but then the map was unmapped so..nope we definitely did not. (Also I HATE MAZE DUNGEONS – FUCK YOU ESPECIALLY TO THE MULTIPLE STAIR/ELEVATORS ONES I RAGE QUIT THAT SHIT SO FAST SORRY NEROCID YOU WILL NEVER GET YOUR SOCIAL LINK DONE.(# ﾟДﾟ))
I’m not necessarily a hater when it comes to reused assets, but this time it did actually grate on me. Again, part of this is because this is a fantasy world, which comes with expectations of well, fantastical settings and striking environments. In comparison, yeah it doesn’t really matter if you keep reusing the same layouts and monsters when you’re simply trying to fill out a hundreds floors of Japanese subway stations. It even goes so far that it becomes genuinely confusing, where we would think that we’d already cleared out a dungeon but it turns out that this really is a new one, just that it looks identical to the one that we had completed in an earlier quest. And while “subway station under Shinjuku” and “subway station under Shibuya” would look more or less the same, I’d assume that “dungeon in Fantasy Forest” would look different from “dungeon in Fantasy Mountains” and “Dungeon in Fantasy Desert”!
Cut Scenes not Fully Voiced
Yea I know in Persona not all cut scenes were voiced – and I get it. However, the final few cut scenes had only “ahh’s” and “uns”. Like ok fine random side quests don’t need full voices but why does the voice acting suddenly drop in random cut scenes in the FINAL FREAKING DUNGEON. Maybe if you didn’t spend all your money modeling weird fish with legs you’d have more budget for voice acting?? I don’t know maybe Sugita and Nakamura were so expensive that one of their scenes was the equivalent of like 10 cut scenes with everyone else.
At the End of the Game there’s NOTHING TO DO
I was ready to beat up Louis’s ass but the game said “you have to waste 26 days first lol.” By now the only quests I had were “go to copy pasta dungeon that’s annoying as shit with elevators and maze floors”, “same as previous but it will unlock a social link for Nerocid”, “bear asses”. So naturally, I did none of those, and I just sat on this stupid bench even though all my stats had been maxed out. Just going to the bench every day was a stupid ordeal to fight with the UI and I couldn’t “force” the day to progress by sleeping at the inn. The game really told me to get my ass outside and do something instead of rotting indoors like some nagging parent. 💀
Much like with Persona 3, the pacing is completely out of whack where are some periods of endless downtime mixed with times where several cutscenes will play in sequence for hours while in-game only a few days will pass. I personally think that it’s much more fun to make it so that you won’t get 100% completion the game in one run (or at least not without strictly following a guide) so that it leaves you wanting to come back for more with a NG+ run to see things that you didn’t get a chance to see the first time. Instead we ran out of stuff to do with weeks remaining in the game as we spent the whole time doing laundry or dusting simply to progress the game enough to finally end things.
Now I know we’ve complained about a lot but the game did have 3 POSITIVE THINGS about it – none of which I think are worth buying or playing it but at least I can walk away with something nice about the game.
Sugita x Nakamura Yaoi Fest
It’s funny as hell that they cast 2 villains, one of who was insanely gay for the other one as Sugita and Nakamura. If you are out of the loop, back in the day Sugita and Nakamura used to do a lot of comedy sketches together and would frequently be goofy with each other in anime casts too. It’s been years since I saw them in a game or anime together so this was a fun surprise.
Eupha x Will Ship
This game left me picking up any crumbs I could of ANY POTENTIAL SHIPPING. Unfortunately the only thing they threw at me was Eupha x Will or Junah x Will and I wasn’t a fan of Junah being a lalafell IRL so I preferred shipping him with Eupha. I mean there’s plenty of yaoi ships for will if you’re into that, but I personally thought Eupha and Will were the cutest. 😭 Sadly by the end of the game, she went back to the most generic responses, along with everyone else so that ship kinda sailed into the sunset of my heart.
Funny Localization
The final good thing about the game was the localization. It was so out there, almost to the “old Trails in the Sky” level that it actually made all the flat 2D characters feel more lively. I generally don’t comment on localization unless it’s outright terrible but this one generally was carrying the game. It probably made some quests/scenes funnier than they would have been if I read them in Japanese. It carried them pretty hard to be honest.
So overall I wish I never bothered. It was 62 hours down the toilet and months of it sitting in my backlog – though it acted as a restrain for me to buy anymore new Steam sale games because I said I would not buy any until I finished it. Now that I’m done, I’m ready to open my wallet for the Black Friday & Winter Sale hehe. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)✨
Look, I was being hyperbolic with all my THE WORST GAME OF ALL TIME!!!!!!!!!! ranting. Honestly the game is really just like a 7/10 “Babby’s First Attempt At A Fantasy JRPG”. We’re mostly annoyed at how bizarrely hyped up the game was compared to how mid it ended up. If the critical response was “yeah I guess if you want an ersatz Persona that doesn’t take place in Japan, because you’re an uncultured swine, to fill a hundred hours” we’d probably think “yep, that’s what this was”. But this is one of the top rated JRPGs OF ALL TIME!!!!!
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