#5: Metaphor: ReFantazio

Metaphor: ReFantazio really couldn’t have come out in a more appropriate year. Atlus adapts Persona’s social sim management mechanics to a medieval fantasy setting with a practiced hand, and the result is the creative team’s most impactful and consistent RPG yet, one that shows it’s not willing to simply rest on its laurels after years of success.

Building off of Persona and the broader Shin Megami Tensei structure, Metaphor: ReFantazio finds Atlus nailing its tried and true formula but with a better sense of scale. It’s as if Atlus let a skilled editor loose on Persona, and they both trimmed down the bloat that has made these games so hard to parse over the years, as well as helping to alleviate longtime issues with the studio’s treatment of certain characters and its handling of political themes.

Metaphor maintains the tough-as-nails turn-based challenge of Shin Megami Tensei while adapting Persona’s high school social-driven loop to the process of running a political campaign. There are fewer people to meet than in the studio’s other games, but Metaphor focuses its energies on establishing a strong thematic throughline that unites the characters, and Atlus achieves that here more effectively than it ever has in the past. Each conversation you have, mission you take on, and battle you face feed into that goal, and it makes every moment of Metaphor feel like it matters in a genre that has typically thrived in the meaningless mundane.

But its overtly political story of fighting prejudice and injustice isn’t just about being ideologically opposed to those ills. Metaphor’s greatest achievement is in how it manages to weave threads about political activism and fantasy-based escapism together to create a pointed story about how we retreat into fiction when shit gets hard. Even if it’s lacking in subtlety and has its moments of poor judgment (looking at you, Catherina subplot), we need stories like Metaphor: ReFantazio when things are bad. We can’t retreat into fiction and call it activism, but we can use it as inspiration and encouragement for the real action we must take. — Kenneth Shepard