Metaphor: ReFantazio Gets October Release Date
The latest game from the team behind the Persona games has been given a confirmed release date of October 11th. This was announced as part of a 25 minute long ATLUS exclusive showcase that showed off a bunch of details on the game. This included additional information on the main story, combat and slice of life elements that make the Persona fans so popular among JRPG fans. You can check out the whole showcase for yourself here.
Image by ATLUS
Whilst this project clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the Persona IP, there are some notable differences between the two. Instead of the Japanese high school setting fans have become familiar with, Metaphor instead throws players into a high fantasy world with pixies, animal like races and a more traditional world with castles and knights. Its a setting that generally doesn’t introduce too many slice of life ideas (with the exception of specific releases like Fire Emblem: Three Houses to an extent) so it will be interesting to see how director Katsura Hashino and his team put their own unique spin on the high fantasy setting.
Image by ATLUS
The social link and combat mechanics of Persona aren’t the only aspects that are being moulded into this new release, however. In the showcase video, we could see that there is a time limit to the story that forces players to also have a degree of time management with their social links and actions that will force prioritisation for some activities over others It’s not made 100% clear on how this will be implemented exactly, but it seems that its going to work quite a bit differently than other games developed by ATLUS as your character will travel around the world to different towns to earn popularity to become the next ‘leader’.
Image by ATLUS
The story is kept purposely vague in the video but it seems to be a solid concepts that merges what people love about the Persona series with a unique fantasy setting that we haven’t seen tackled by this team so far. With the addition of different types of combat (both real time and turn based) and a new spin on the traditional JRPG job system, this looks like it may be one of the best games of the year if it lives up to its promises. If you’re interested, you can pick this one up when it launches on October 11th later this year.
