Some thoughts on Metaphor Refantazio - no spoilers

This game has been taking over all my time lol.

I had to uninstall it because it was getting in the way of college. The way the game started i thought i wouldn't be that into it. Now that i'm on break i'm finally on the last stretch and need a place to ramble about it.

Maybe this will be a big one, maybe not idk yet. As a disclaimer. I still haven't done the final dungeon, want to wrap up some side quests. I won't spoil anything about the game plot itself, I'll save that for when i finish the game.

Ok so first of all. I'm not thaaaaaat big on archetypes. I like them don't get me wrong, i like the flexibility they give, but some upgrade trees are just ludicrous. The inheritance system does let you get some pretty strong builds tho, i like that.

Speaking of archetypes, there are two that just made me holler when i realized what they were references to. I think this ties to one of my favorite things about this game that is what motivated me to write this blog post but the game feels like an ATLUS JRPG in the truest sense. It's an classic JRPG setting with classic JRPG tropes but with a lot of callbacks to themes and mechanics to other ATLUS games: Some icons and models are taken straight from smt, there's a whole class that is dedicated to persona and the masks, the combat system is just SMT Press Turn, Persona social link system is also here, there's a whole ass main dungeon that is dedicated to Etrian Odyssey( I literally almost screamed when i realized it had FOEs), the dungeon design itself is also very persona 5. And there is prolly more stuff but i wanna save it for when i talk about the plot.

As a final bit of stuff i wanna say, and maybe this is a bit spoilery on the relationships, but i like how there is no explicit romance here. Actually, i like how the MC is a character on it's own and not just a silent protag. There is some implicit stuff here but you as a player doesn't get to play the "pick your waifu game", which is kinda messy. Most SLs are pretty engaging too, there's only one that i think is a bit boring but that's it.

Anyways, this was more of a ramble than something actually organized but i just wanted to talk about it. I've been really really really loving this game :v