Metaphor: ReFantazio: A Brief Review Of Half A Demo. Maybe Not Even Half. And Maybe Not All That Brief, Either.

Today sees the start of the latest Next Fest, an event generously arranged by Steam to give lazy bloggers like me something to write about. Seriously, the posts pretty much write themselves for this one as I rip through half a dozen demos, then review them in unecessary detail as though they were finished games. A whole week of posts right there for almost no effort at all!

I would normally begin by posting a list of the demos I've chosen. A brief description and a couple of lines about what I'm expecting for each of them. Easy money.

Unfortunately, the event doesn't go live until 10 AM Pacific, which is six o' clock in the evening here and I'm too impatient to wait. Luckily for me, I'm already in the middle of a demo that may or not feature and I've taken a whole load of screenshots so I'm going to post about that instead. If it turns out to be in the Next Fest running order then I'll be a post ahead before it even starts!

The game in question is one I'd never heard of until a few days ago, when it started appearing in huge banner promotions across the top of the screen every time I logged into Steam. The image I was seeing was so striking and the name of the game so peculiar and evocative that I did something I very rarely do: I clicked through.

The game itself hadn't quite launched yet (It has now and it's something of a hit, with a peak concurrency over 80k, a Top Seller tag and a Very Positive rating from just under three thousand reviews) but there was a demo available so I downloaded it. And then I played it. 

I'm still playing it, although obviously not at the moment, because at the moment I'm writing this post. It's a very substantial demo, given I'm already three hours in and it shows no signs of stopping. There's a trailer just for the demo (See below.) that I this minute watched and most of what's in it I haven't seen yet, so heaven knows how long the whole thing lasts. I did think of finishing it before I posted but I have more than enough to say about it already and it would be nice to get into print about something while its hot for once.

Oh, it occurs to me I haven't yet mentioned the name of the game I'm talking about. Silly me! It's called Metaphor: ReFantazio. I said it was peculiar. Also, that joke would have worked better if I hadn't put the name of the game in the title of the post but you gotta get those clicks...

It's also confusing, or rather the developer's description is, because the first thing I saw when I clicked on the banner was a load of guff about it being the "35th Digital Anniversary Edition". Naturally, this made me think I was looking at a revival of a game from the tail-end of the 1980s, which did not inspire me with enthusiasm. 

On the other hand, neither did it seem to fit, even remotely, with the images I was seeing. If this game came out in 1989 someone must have done one hell of a lot of updating to produce the "live" stream Steam was showing of someone playing the current build. 

I had to go look it up to be sure what was going on but it seems the anniversary in question refers to the studio that developed and publishes the game, Atlus, not the game itself. Atlus was a new name to me but they've made some games I've heard of, if not played, like the Persona series and... well, just that, really.

Once I'd reassured myself I wasn't going to be wasting my valuable time on some cronky old relic from the dawn of the digital age, I downloaded the demo, thinking that at more than 50GB it damn well better be worth it.

And it was. Very much so. It's really good. As in really good. I can see why all those reviews are so very positive. This one is going to be, too.

Since I'm just reviewing a demo and one I haven't even finished, I'm going to be brief and to the point. For me, that is. I'm just going to cover three aspects of the game as I've experienced it in my three hours thus far: Graphics, Story, Gameplay. Of course, those all sub-divide into things like Aesthetics and Design and Writing and Voice Acting and Music and Combat and UI so it might not be as brief as all that...

Graphics

This was what got me interested in the first place. At the top of the post you can see the image that introduced me to the game and to the left is the full image from which that scene was culled, as per the developer's website.

It's a striking picture with a huge amount of detail that instantly draws the eye and fires the imagination. There's a dynamic energy to it that fascinates. If it was a panel from a comic book or a still from an anime I'd be interested in reading or watching so since it's a game I ought to be interested in playing it, too. 

Except, as we all know from countless, disappointing experiences, concept art and promotional videos for games do not always accurately represent what you see when you play the games themselves. In this case that's broadly untrue. 

Sorry, that's not as clear as it could be. What I mean is that yes, the game by and large does look like that picture, which is a fair and accurate representation of both the aesthetic and the graphic quality, but it doesn't look exactly like it.

In some important ways it looks better. The designers do a great job moving between graphic modes in the game so the street and city scenes look like animated movies with all the depth and detail you'd hope for, while the combat and travel sequences are much flatter and less ornate. 

The illustrative quality is gorgeous and rich, with many scenes ressembling stills or panels from purely graphic media, whereas the design aesthetic in play for the UI and the interstitials is mannered and intense in the best way of magazine layouts. Whenever you find yourself at liberty to enjoy them, the visuals are there to be enjoyed. When you need them to do a job and get out of your face, that's what they do. Smart.

Character design is charming. Characters, playable and otherwise, seem to play a major role in the gameplay (You collect them for your team and engage with them to gain powers.) so it's vital they look appealing and original, which they do. 

Well, okay, when I say "original" I mean you can easily tell the players without a scorecard, not that they're "original" in some kind of authentic or literary fashion. They aren't. They're tropes. But we'll get to that in the Story section.

Are we done with Graphics yet? I guess we are. You can get some idea of the style and quality from the screenshots. They're stylish. They're modern. They're clever. That about covers it.

So, on to the Story then.

Story

It's good. Again, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's good in context. Yes, it's the same damn story it always is - Threat to the Kingdom, Evil Mastermind, Secret Rebel Resistance, Only You Can Save The World (Because you're so special!) etc. etc.

Of course, that may all turn out to be a blind and there may be some big metatextual inversion of expectations turnabout deal coming, down the line. I wouldn't know. This is just a demo that starts at the tutorial and takes you through the prologue and I haven't even finished that. I'll just say that even if it doesn't turn out to be a hyper-aware, post-modern deconstruction of familiar tropes, I'll be perfectly satisified with the good, solid genre plot that's in evidence so far. Nothing wrong with a traditional tale told well.

And it is told well. The writing feels fluid and confident and crucially the translation is exemplary. In three hours I didn't notice a single syntactical infelicity but also and more unusually still there was little to no sign of the near-universal tell-tale signs that this was a translation of a Japanese original.

I would really like to do a whole post about this some day but I'm painfully aware I don't have the lingusitic understanding for it and I haven't done the necessary research to obviate that lack. I will just mention, though, that having now played very many games of south-Asian origin (Japanese, Korean and Chinese mainly.) one thing almost all of them have in common, in translation, is a much higher incidence of adverbial phrases than almost any native English speaker would be likely to employ in either in speech or in writing. A flurry of "recentlys" and "latelys" at the end of sentences or even sometimes in the middle is a dead giveaway.

There's none of that here. If the prose style doesn't always feel contemporary or naturalistic, that's just because it follows the more formal and flowery conventions of the fantasy genre as it's frequenly represented in video games. It's not going to win any literary awards but it's firmly within the parameters of "good writing" as those are understood within the genre.

I also saw not a single incident of deviance between the written and spoken word, except when the voice acting intentionally stops shadowing the text and devolves to an "I see" or "So then..." to indicate who's speaking, while the player is left to read what's been seen or concluded for themselves. I wish game designers wouldn't do that. It's annoying.

As for the voice acting itself, it varies from decent to very good. I was particularly impressed to hear a character with what sounded to me to be a genuine Scottish accent, an occurence so rare it deserves an award just for being there. There were a couple of moments where an accent or two veered dangerously close to those usually heard in Amateur Dramatic Society productions but there weren't many of those and they weren't that bad. I mean, it's not like we're talking Dick van Dyke...

Most of the characters were pleasant to listen to, which is the main thing. I very predictably enjoyed the perky American-accented fairy who accompanies the Protagonist (Who's actually called The Protagonist at one point and who very confusingly has to be given a different name to the name you give to what I thought was going to be the player-character but wasn't. I still don't know who I was naming when I did that...). The fairy, Gallica, gets all the best lines but the actor voicing the player-character has a deliciously subdued, resigned delivery that immediately endeared my own character to me, even though I'd had no choice in who I was playing, something that occasionally irks me. 

There's a lot of story to get through. (A bit like this post, then.) At times it can feel like a visual novel, although the frequent bursts of combat soon remind you you're playing a game. It fairly zips along, though, and I was always keen to see what happened next. I don't recall any longeurs although I did read ahead and cut the chatter from some of the minor characters. I often find voice acting, even when done well, can get a bit much after a while.

Perhaps the best part is the world-building, which I found fascinating. The part of the gameworld glimpsed in the demo is a quasi-nineteenth century monarchy with a monotheistic religion and access to both technology and magic. Outside the walls of the city-state the countryside is rife with monsters, making travel hazardous. Very curiously, the worst of these monsters are known as Humans, although when we get to see them, human is the very last thing they appear to be.

There's a great deal of play on the concept of bigotry and prejudice, a difficult theme here handled very adroitly. There are numerous tribes - nine I think it was - each with one or more distinctive features that make them easy to identify, although the protagonist's tribe, the least populous and most obscure of all, ironically has as its identifying feature the lack of any identifying features at all, something the other tribes find highly suspicious.

All the tribes stand in varying social relationships to each other, with a clear hierarchy marking some as superior, at least in their own estimation. Whether any of this has anything to do with the title of the game I couldn't say, although if so I'd say it's not so much a metaphor as an analogy. Whatever it might be, I found it very intriguing and I would like to learn more.

In summary, there's a solid if unoriginal story here that might or might not develop into something less predictable as it goes on. There's certainly more than adequate evidence to suggest the writers have the ability to pull some rugs. It's more a question of whether they have the will.

Gameplay

Often, when I'm demoing a game that looks good and reads well, it's how it plays that kills my interest. Very much not the case with this one. I was surprised, verging on astonished, by just how quickly I picked up the mechanics and how enjoyable they felt.

On the face of it, Metaphor seems like a mechanically complex game. Overly so, perhaps. The tutorial keeps introducing new elements and there are more and more screens to look at and tables to parse. The highly sylized typography, while striking, looks like it could make things harder to read than they need to be. 

Except they're not. Everything may be on a slant and fizzing with motion lines but I had absolutely no trouble seeing what I needed to see, when I needed to see it. Similarly, the combat options, so complex in the explanation, turned out to be intuitive and natural in context. 

Fights can be both real-time and turn-based. You can run up and hit the Space bar to launch a direct attack, then swivel to target another mob and do the same again in a frenzy of unprovoked violence or you can press "V" to go into a stately gavotte of mayhem, where you and your opponent take it in turns to try to set each other on fire or slice each other in two.

The game tells you it might be better to straight up charge into weak opponents and floor them before they have a chance to react, whereas tougher enemies could need a more sophisticated strategy. You can assess the threat levels of specific creatures as well as the general level of danger in the area by hitting "G" to see what Gallica sees. Fairies, apparently, know this sort of thing.

The fights, of which there are many, I found most enjoyable. I mentioned a couple of times that I was in the market for a tactical, turn-based game and this one admirably fits that bill. I can readily imagine spending many evenings battling my way through set-piece scenarios, figuring tactics on the fly. 

Should that later prove too difficult to be fun, as sometimes happens as games roll along, there are five difficulty settings to choose from, some of which can be changed and corrected as often as required, others which have to be set at the start and kept to throughout.

I played, as always, on the default "Normal" setting but for once that represents the dead center of the spectrum of difficulty. Below lie "Easy" and "Storyteller", above "Hard" and "Regicide". There really should be something in there to suit everyone.

Conclusion

All things considered, I'm quite impressed with Metaphor: ReFantazio. Or at least with the demo. Or at least with as much of the demo as I've seen. The website has a lot of media that give a good idea of what the game looks like and some text that tells you what it's about but since there's a demo, why not play that? Demos are great, aren't they?

Better than games, quite often, although I doubt that's true in this case. I'd happily carry on and play the whole thing if it wasn't for one factor: the price. The game retails at £59.99 for the Standard Digital Edition and £89.99 for the Deluxe version. While I appreciate that's the going rate for an AAA game, even the Standard comes in at roughly double what I'd be comfortable paying so I'll be waiting for a sale, something I imagine could take some time. I have wishlisted it on Steam, anyway.

In the meantime, I'll get back to finishing the demo (How much more can there be?) and then it's on to Next Fest.