Topic: Metaphor: ReFantazio Thread

Apparently they accidentally re-added the test folder back in so it patches the entire game. Not sure it's been corrected since.

Alright, I've clocked in about 15 hours now and am really enjoying it. In my most recent play session, I finally finished the Grand Cathedral dungeon including the final surprise boss. Definitely took a while to get through that one! It seemed like it'd never end. I did have to go back and farm some MP once before I encountered Zorba or else I'd have been done with. I'm not someone who enjoys grinding in the slightest, but the overworld combat made it way more tolerable. In general, I don't think I'm going to be doing that for every dungeon, but it just seemed so unsatisfying to get all the way to the top of the Cathedral just to back out then and rest for some MP. At that point I had to just bite the bullet and farm a little rather than risk being slightly annoyed. It'll make me more wary of my MP usage for sure, which I didn't realise until this dungeon was such a scarce commodity.

I actually played and finished the Belega dungeon before tackling this one, so it helped to be a bit more high level than the game might've expected for the dungeon. I was actually surprised to find out that going to the Belega dungeon is more intended to be done after the Grand Cathedral. Sure, the characters are all talking about how maybe this is a harder fight and we should save it... but at the same time they're saying we should do some practice elsewhere before going into the Catedral so like, what do you want from me? It was the only combat area available to me pre-Cathedral! Very mixed messaging there, but luckily I was able to handle the Belega dungeon with relative ease. Just the Guptauros kicked my butt a little, but by the third try I'd figured out what works and was able to put him down. Now, after finishing the Cathedral, everyone in my party is level 18 and I'll be heading out into the Triad Desert next. I wonder if I'll be overleveled for it at this point. I tried to go to the desert before heading into the Cathedral, but the game wouldn't let me, so I'd assume the enemies are higher level there than what I've faced before.

I do like the Archetype system, but I'm having trouble coming to grips with what's the best way to get the most out of it. On one hand I want to fully level archetypes, but then the game is also constantly throwing new ones at me and recommending certain ones over others. Then combined with the inheriting skills and requirements for Archetype upgrades... it's a lot to think about. Maybe a bit too much personally, since I do enjoy when combat systems are more streamlined. I do like that it clearly gives you much freedom in how to put together your party however, but I'm not sure how much I'll be using that as I tend to just stick to what I know in games. I mean, I finished the entire Mass Effect trilogy on my first playthrough sticking exclusively to a pistol simply because that's what the game gave me first and I never switched to anything else. I'm that type of player.

I'm enjoying the story a lot so far, and it's been nice post-Cathedral to finally have a bit more of those one on one sessions with your party members which Persona was so well known for. I was kind of surprised how underbaked they felt, though? They're all such short sequences which then result in an instant improvement of your bond. I thought I'd have to work a bit harder for it. Even getting Strohl to bond level 3 with him going to see the noble to help his people I thought was going to be a much bigger thing and not just a short cutscene. Not sure how I feel about these segments not being voice either, since they're supposed to be such an integral part of the formula and forming an investment in these characters. I imagined they'd feel less like an afterthought, especially since Atlus is widely known for this being a core gameplay element. I was excited to see Strohl saying he wants to return to his hometown, only to realise that it was all talk and I don't actually have that option on my map yet. I guess it'll show up again on some following day.

@Pizzamorg I completely understand your frustration with the Archetype system in that sense! Like I said in this post, I'm not someone who's particularly experimental with combat styles and tend to go for the brute-forcing route if possible in games. I think so far it hasn't affected my experience greatly, since the first few areas are rather straight-forward when it comes to weaknesses and all that, but since you're further in the game I can imagine this might become a sticking point for me as well. I'll have to report back at some point and let you know how it's been developing for me!

This in reply to @Yagami more directly, but also addresses what I mean too @Tjuz

I dropped it down to easy, but I am not sure how much it really helps. My issue is not in moment to moment combat, in fact there where your builds and so on are tested, I feel really strong. My issue is with the gimmicky boss fights that add some kind of heavy restriction on you, and as far as I can tell the difficulty choice doesn't alter these. I don't find puzzles fun when there is only one solution. The Archetype system should allow for player freedom and expression, but the boss fights are designed in a way to promote the opposite. I'm not suggesting people can't like this, but this really isn't how I wanted this to work, and it goes against my inbuilt memory for how classes work in other games, cause it sorta works in the opposite way a class system like this works in other games.

I have yah, but from memory none of them had bosses you needed to beat in a set number of turns, or before they do certain actions or other things like that - maybe optional ones, but not ones on the main path. They were always just regular battles that tested your team comp and tactics.

I actually don't think I can @Yagami as I believe that is where they started throwing those at me back to back, so I might be giving you spoilers unintentionally. A lot of it is kinda muddled timelinewise where it all took place. They all started hitting for me around the 25 hour mark. Have you fought the worm yet? That might be the only one that took place before that city, where you had to kill all the enemies in the same turn or they'd infinitely respawn.

A heads up, once you hit September there are multiple weeks where the game is basically entirely on rails and is effectively a boss gauntlet. There is no way to break from this and grind, so you have to be ready before you hit this stretch.

I was around an average level of 45, and it was not enough. Especially the final boss in this stretch.

I thought I was truly hard stuck and was going to have to drop it to Storyteller which I wanted to avoid as you can't turn it off once it is on, but this is when I discovered I was actually playing on normal this whole time, not easy. So I turned it down to easy and it still wasn't a walk in the park because the boss had basically a 100 percent chance to apply a party wide status effect every turn but they do significantly less damage on easy versus normal, so I was able to just face tank enough to squeeze out enough damage across the phases to win.

@Yagami Interestingly after that stretch it seemed to mostly move away from that mechanic (at least so far).

I dunno though, I am like 45ish hours in now and I still don't enjoy the gameplay of this.

The next dungeon after that no spoilers was just a gruelling slog, densely packed and intentionally difficult to navigate. Then you go into that basically linear unavoidable boss rush.

You may be okay cause you sound significantly more levelled than I am. I am probably compounding my problem cause I find the moment to moment combat so unenjoyable I am going out of my way to avoid as much as I can, which is probably making my experience actively worse in the process because I am probably falling further and further behind the recommended level.

Again, I dunno another game like this for me really. Where I love the world, story, characters etc so I want to keep playing, but I dread the next time I get to an actual gameplay section cause I know I am just gonna be frustrated and just want to get through it as fast as I can to get to the next story beat.

I'll be honest, I really can't remember, but I believe that takes place right at the start of August and I am only like 10 levels ahead of that despite going through two big sections of game (now close to end of September) in that time so I am going to assume I was significantly below that level 😂

So for the longest time I focused on Mage, pumping my points into the magic damage stat. But with how often bosses have some sort of ability to negate all magic and elemental damage I have kept both the debuff and the buff classes (not saying names in case you haven't unlocked them yet) heavily levelled too so I can swap to them in boss fights when they make my Mage build redundant. It also seems worth keeping the Merchant class levelled up, their moves cost money to cast rather than MP or HP, but they are Almighty with high crit rates, so they are useful for bosses who just decide they are going to be resistant or immune to every other damage type.

It would be really nice if we could respec our points. But I wonder if they haven't offered this because some of the later more advanced classes give you huge amounts of stats just for equipping them, so it might have been more beneficial on hindsight to keep my stats mostly neutral, as the class will give me a big chunk of the stats I need for that class anyway as a bonus.

Also yeah, both those abilities, but also abilities like Hulkenberg's ability to add a weakness to pierce and others are kinda vital on bosses that will often have no weaknesses. The debuff class also has a combo move which applies Almighty damage to all enemies and costs 0 mp, you can also get items that make 0 mp moves stronger, so that has been a strat for some bosses as well.

Yeah very low damage unless you use the 0 MP damage boost item. But sometimes it is your only choice when the enemy has a resistance or a block to every damage type in your party unless you wanna reload and change everyone's archetypes.

Honestly, it is more how you manage things than necessarily the things you do.

An example is one boss was weak to fire, but they put up a shield that blocked all elemental damage. I didn't have a move to bypass that in my party at the time. And also, once the shield was up, the boss would use that turn icon for a very strong team wide damage move instead.

Once you used an elemental attack on the shield, it would disappear and need to be recast. So sacrificing a turn icon to lower the shield even though it may result in no damage ended up being the way to go, as they couldn't use the team wide damage move cause they had to keep recasting the shield instead.

Reached the fifth city, the story is weird in an interesting way (nothing too epic but at least it has got an identity).

The performance keeps screwing with my progression as the game visuals give me a headache and I struggle to play for more than 90 minutes at a time

@Pizzamorg Thanks for the heads-up on the recommended level for September! I'm still way behind many of you it seems, even though I feel like I'm binging this game for my standards, haha. I just reached Brilehaven and will see the Exhibition of the Brave next time I pick the game up. I'm at level 30 right now, which I hope leaves me pretty up to bar with where the game expects me to be. I haven't really done any grinding, but I do set out to defeat every enemy in every dungeon. Not once they respawn though, or I'd be there forever. I hate grinding or anything repetitive in games. Still really enjoying this game and the conclusion to the Martira arc was incredibly well done. Excited to see where the game goes from here now that we'll presumably be getting a new objective.

I played the demo and I enjoyed it but I couldn't decide whether I liked it enough to spend $60 on the game. As it would be my first Atlus game, I decided to make a compromise and instead I bought Persona 5 for $15

@lotan666 Difficulty balancing issues aside, P5 (and especially P5R) is one of the best JRPGs of the last ten years. It's 100+ hours of gripping, stylish goodness.

P5 Royal is basically the Persona formula perfected (which is why I was sad more of its innovations didn't make it into Reload). Metaphor kinda just transplants the learns from P5R into a new world, setting etc and while that is great, the one thing Metaphor doesn't retain for some reason is P5R's strides in smoothing out the difficulty curve a lot of these games have.

People like me loved that loved that change for P5. I bounced off of that game for years, for a lot of reasons, but a major one was what a brutal slog every dungeon felt like. And I may never have finished it without the Royal version. However, long time fans didn't love this change as they see the difficulty of these games as part of their identity, and it deffo feels like Metaphor is a response to those long time fans, borrowing far more heavily from the mechanics you'd see in SMT. Which basically translates to "you better not get caught by random enemies in the world without an advantage as they will one shot your entire party and force you to restart, every single time".

I kinda grew to the point of absolutely dreading doing Metaphor's story dungeons because I knew I was just in for a big ole pile of frustration before I could get to the next story moment. I stopped playing Metaphor right before the final dungeon cause Veilguard came out, and I'm honestly not sure I'm ever gonna have the motivation to go back and play that game now I've been away for it for so long.

If you can accept that though, or even like the sound of that, I think Metaphor is probably the better game as anime lensed high school drama will always hold less appeal to me versus a sweeping fantasy epic would, but I think P5 Royal is overall way more fun to actually play.

@Pizzamorg Man, I had the biggest, dumbest grin on my face when I saw using multi-target spells that were nullified/drained in Metaphor lost you press turns even if you also hit weaknesses, just like in SMT. You actually have to tactically use abilities instead of just going with whatever the most powerful multi-target ability on hand is. It's still not as hardcore as something like SMT V: Vengeance in terms of complexity when it comes to team builds (how could it be?), but it gets difficulty balancing very right. This game is occasionally a little bit of a challenge even on the Normal difficulty.

Hoping and praying they see people don't need Pokemon-esque difficulty for Persona, and we get a return to more satisfying mechanics in P6.

I'm really tempted by the game but I really hate the time schedule element. I had two or maybe three attempts to get through P5 and bounced off each time - and that was with using a detailed guide so as to not mess anything up. I did actually finish PS4, though.

I played the demo and like it but there were no time schedule things there. It did get quite hard as it went on and I wonder, could you softlock yourself by running out of resources while grinding in a dungeon, like the cave i got to in the demo?

Also, I pressed the button that shows you what level other players were at that point and they were often way higher than me - like, what seems like hours and hours of grinding higher. IIRC they had max level "persona" (I forget the actual name) in some cases.

While it seems like most of you have either finished or dropped the game by now, I'm still making my way through it with some 70 ish hours under my belt. I've gotten to the part where Altabury has opened up and I'm doing the side quests and typical follower stuff in that area now before the next deadline. I'm still really enjoying it, but I'm baffled when I look up around how much of the game is left and it seems like I'm at like 2/3rds of the game. I have no clue what places this game is still gonna go if I'm not very near the end at this point. Both because the calendar seems to slowly be nearing its end (I'm in mid-September now) and because the story beats feel like they're setting up for the big climax. I'm not mad about it, but I do wonder if it's going to run out of steam at some point before the ending because of it.

I've been pretty lucky leveling wise in that I've managed to stay on track while not having to grind, which is something I absolutely despise doing in games. The game seems to be fairly forgiving on that front, which I was hoping it would be but not exactly expecting from a JRPG. For the most part, I'm still usually a few levels ahead of whatever enemies I'm facing. Nothing big in terms of any fights where I've ran into a horrible difficulty spike either, but I am playing on Normal. Rella's Ice Dragon was probably the hardest fight thus far thanks to it having two phases, but I still managed to get through that in one go despite having to use many items to do so. My party was definitely not optimised for that as mostly magic users, haha.

I just gotta say though... frick the Dragon Temple. That just went on and on and on and turned a cool setpiece into something I was praying to end as soon as possible. I do think it's funny that there's such a big moment in the game that continues to just... not be brought up again up to this point. I feel like there were some pretty big revelations there that we just seem to be ignoring, but what do I know?

@Matroska It's not really possible to softlock yourself. You can at any point leave the dungeon you're in if that's what you want to do, though it will ultimately "waste" a day. Alternatively, if you're short on time or just stubborn like myself, you can grind MP by killing overworld enemies as a Mage archetype to recover MP. Luckily, I've only had to do that once in the first big dungeon.