BeeRadTheMadLad Metaphor: ReFantazio Review

There are good things about the game, enough to stop me from giving it a straight up bad rating, but it's far from great. The companions are all boring - paragons of virtue right from the get go, practically worship the ground you walk on with zero effort exerted on your part, and revolve around you to a bizarre extreme, such that they have near zero interaction with each other. Even one of them which starts off fangirling hard over a celebrity of sorts that joins your team later gets zero interaction with them and the dynamic is never even touched on because nobody is allowed to have any relevance to anyone except the MC. The writing is also extremely bloated. This has become a massive problem with story heavy jrpgs in the last 15 years or so - the writing is many, many times more verbose than it needs to be and has a lot less to say than the number of words used would indicate in any other genre. This also throws off the pacing when the game starts to get extremely heavy handed with the cutscenes it throws at you starting around the midgame. Another major issue is that after a few gritty moments early on, the writers spend the rest of the game single-mindedly prioritizing "don't offend anyone who plays this game no matter what." Consequently, themes like racism and oppression quickly become a mile wide and an inch deep here, the debates are just "pick the obvious dialogue choice" and you never even get so much as questioned beyond that, none of your political opponents other than the main one are anything but a cartoon parody, there's no internal strife or conflict within the party at all, no differences in disposition or walk of life that anyone would normally bring to the table is of any relevance whatsoever. It's just way too obvious that way too much of the writing in this game prioritizes sterilization and self-neutering over immersion and creative vision. This has been a scourge in modern video game storytelling across the board for upwards of 15 years as of the time of this review tbh, but I'm not going to score Metaphor highly just because a ton of other games do it too. Bad writing is bad writing, regardless of whether or not they align with a trend that is, for better or for worse, considered to be emblematic of the time in which the game's story was written. If you're more okay with these flaws than I am, you'll probably like the game more than me. Like I said, there are good things about the game. However, in judging the game as a whole, I have to say that it falls well short of greatness because of these issues (among others).