Sholva Metaphor: ReFantazio Review

2024’s GOTY nominee for best RPG felt a bit underwhelming, for me. I’m a big fan of Turn Based JRGPs and I’ve been wanting to play the famous Metaphor ReFantazio, a game so many people claimed it was the best thing in a long time, for the genre, and proof of that is just looking at the many nominations in various awards it got, and all the accolades it received. But, a perfect game for others doesn’t always have to be a masterpiece for me, sometimes not even the best JRPG of that year, or even great, for that matter. And, for me, that is the case with this game. Before explaining my experience, this is a PC game review, therefore we have to talk about the Quality of the PC Port and, in this game, the serious Lack of Optimization and really Poor Image Quality experience, due to the obvious lack of any decent Anti-Aliasing tech in this title. While on my Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB system, the game can be considered “sufficiently playable” at reasonable resolution and frame-rates, it’s nowhere near the level of Optimization and Scalability expected from a title that looks the way this game does. Looks and art style are quite different things here, though: I love Metaphor’s art style, it completely matches the vibe of the story, the characters, the world, etc., it’s perfect for it. But I don’t think a game with this level of fidelity should run like this game does. Furthermore, the game requires insane amounts of Downsampling, via DSR or DLDSR, plus applying the internal resolution scaler on top of that, to even begin to remove some of the extremely ugly Aliasing in the game. It is absolutely, without any doubt, the first AAA game in a long time, for me, where I just couldn’t believe how absurdly aliasing most of the game looked on my machine. It was the case for the Demo, they released, and they only added some FX and SMAA later…and that is simply not enough for the types of assets used in this game. So, performance and graphically speaking, this game is quite disappointing. The Ambient Occlusion used in the game is also too demanding for what visual benefit it offers and, thankfully, the amazing Lyall comes to the rescue with t heir MetaphorFix, so make things more bearable. With that said, this already removes lots of “points” from any review of mine, because there’s no excuse: this game was, to a lot of people, 2024’s best JRPG and thus, it should be better, on all platforms, at a technical / port level at least. Zero excuses, Atlus, please do better, because this is a 70€ game : ) When it comes to Gameplay, I also felt quite disappointed with the combat here; while the basic turn based JRPG mechanics are there, they’re quite basic, too much like some of the Persona games, which doesn’t do any favors to this game, I reckon and, basically, the “action” portion of the combat is so poor and under-developed and uninteresting that one wonders why even adding it as an option, instead of a more direct approach to initiate combat encounters. I don’t mind “basic” for stuff like this but, in the case of Metaphor, it felt quite below basic, even. Once inside the actual turn based experience, for the combat, nothing really felt too new or refreshing, it is basically SMT and Persona mixed in together. If you love that, great, happy for you, but I mean, those other IPs already exist, and I expected something fresher coming from a new IP. Music and the Soundtrack are some of the most praised aspects, overall, in many reviews for this game; while I don’t disagree, I feel like the regular battle music in this game is way, way, way overused, a common trend in Atlus RPGs, and it is what it is. Regardless, the OST is quite enjoyable and distinctive, so I appreciate that. Visually speaking, and when it comes to the Art Style, the game is quite unique too, I like it but, again, all gets bumped down a few notches due to the awful aliasing, a shame, because this game would look so clean with good upscaling like DLSS, a real shame indeed. Story and Characters were a strong point for me, in this game, for the most part, leaning more towards its characters, I liked them all, great performances from the English cast, for sure. The Story itself, not the greatest out there, some decent ups, some puzzling downs too, and the ending was not too satisfying…it just happened the way it did and…well, it is what it is. All in all, I wouldn’t say I don’t recommend the game, but I can’t rate it higher or at the same level of some of my favorite JRPGs or even the Atlus RPGs I’ve completed so far. For me, this game could’ve been much more, with some changes here and there but, who am I to ask for that? No game is for everyone, after all.