Summary
- Anxiety and inner strength are key themes in Metaphor, with a focus on people coming together to fight fears.
- The game includes an election but does not have a real-world political agenda, instead, the in-game election is simply used as a tool for the story.
- Metaphor is a culmination of Atlus' RPG experience, incorporating familiar elements while venturing into high fantasy.
At the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metaphor: ReFantazio preview event in New York City, we spoke with producer Junichi Yoshizawa, lead scenario planner Yuichiro Tanaka, lead battle planner Kenichi Goto, and lead daily system planner Azusa Kido for a group Q&A about how their prev𒊎ious experience helped shape Met🍎aphor and the coincidence of the timing with a real-world election.
A pre-recorded message from director Katsura Hashino explained that one of the main themes of Metaphor is anxiety, “We wanted to explore the idea of people realising their inner strength, as well as fighting their anxieties and fears by finding common ground with others.” In explori💞ng the themes they wished to focus on, the team found themselves moving away from the direction of their past work and into “a fantasy world equivalent꧙ of an election.”
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Hashino quickly adds, “We really didn't realise this title might overlap with any specifi🍒c r🧸eal-life elections. We continue to be surprised by the strange similarities between our real world and the world of Metaphor.”
Fantasy Mirrors Reality With Elections, But There’s No Political Agenda From Atlus
Tanaka explains that while there is always an aspect of elections being tense and serious, the team wanted to focus instead on the aspect of “people putting in a lot of effort and power intoꦺ making a better future. We wanted to really focus on the power that it can potentially bring to make the world something better.”
Atlus decided to incorporate the election element from a very early conceptual stage. Although there are times of battle, there are also times of festiv⛄ity and a sense of trying to make the world a better place. Tanaka explains, “We wanted to bring that power to the forefront without ignoring it, but facing it head-on to depict that realness within this game because we believe that it has that power to make changes.”
Tanaka echoes Hashino’s earlier message, “We have no political agenda or message that we want to push. [The election] is a tool that we decided to use to convey the story that we want. In this fꦬantasy w🦋orld, if there were to be an election [with] magic, [we thought about] how people would react to it, what people would think, and what people would do to better the future for themselves? We essentially took this concept as a motif to push our story to the forefront. We hope that separating from that political agenda or message, people get to enjoy this election perspective as a tool within this fantasy story.
“I know we have the Presidential election in the US this year, and I'm sure there are various elections worldwide as well, but෴ it's pure coincidence that the release of this title ended up coinciding with that timing.”
High Fantasy And High Anxiety
Expanding on the theme of anxiety, Tanaka tells us, “When we'reಌ looking at the various clashes that we see in this world, [the team] were wondering what brings about those clashes. They would focus on people's minds and hearts, and also the anxiety that surrounds it. Nobody is perfect, so there are different ways that people face anxiety when they are confronted with it. There are different ways that people deal with 🎃it. With that idea in mind, we decided to separate these tribes from the actual races that we see in real life.
“We created different tribes with different hearts, if you will, with different ways that they feel or interact with anxiety. We’ve taken away all these existing ideas ꦆof race, and created these new tribes in the state, and put that as a foundation. We believe that that is a very original concept for this game and something that we are proud of.”
Originally Metaphor was known as Project Re Fantasy during its early development, with . “It's not like we went into the development thinking that we were going to create a hꦬigh fantasy like The Lord of the Rings,” Tanaka says when asked how Metaphor evolved. “We didn't necessarily have that mindset from the beginning. Throughout the development, there were various ideas and trial and error that brought us to this stage. From the very beginning, we didn't necessarily have the mindset to go down this very classic, traditional route, because that didn't really feel like us. We wanted to reinvent or recreate that vision that felt right for Atlus.
Comparing Metaphor To Atlus’s Previous Series
Though Metaphor is a brand new IP, it’s all too easy to draw parallels with Atlus’ other series, Persona and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Shin Megami Tensei, as thereꦰ are so many shared features between the three - both visually and functionally.
“We do acknowledge that there are similarities with Persona, but weꦺ believe the biggest difference aside from the fact that this is a fantasy game, is the fact that there is a journey component to this game,” Tanaka says. “With Persona titles, you mainly stay in one city. There is a progression throughout the story as you spend your days, but in [Metaphor], there is also this geographical journey, where you go and travel to various cities. It comes down to different tastes and aspects. That aspect of the game is something💞 that we took on as a challenge.”
Kido adds that another element that sets Metaphor apart is that the Persona series always focuses on a high school student in Japan, a much more familiar setting. Metaphor on the other hand portrays a young boy in an entirely unknown world, and has a cast of various ages. “When thinking about having our players enjoy this game, we wanted to make sure that we portrayed him in a way that would make him something that people could resonate with and feel like they could be playing in his shoes. That is something that we were very thorough and careful about. With th🐟at in mind, we made various system adjustmentsꦯ. That was one of the challenges for this game.”
Atlus’ previous titles were mostly set in the modern age, with SMT’s more apo🐈calyptic setting cropping up, but for the most part, it was all modern. Introducing a high fantasy theme presented a new challenge for the team.
“The element that was most challenging for us were things we took for granted, everyday normal [things that do] not exist in this fantasy🎃 world,” Tanaka explains. “With modern settings, we have a general understanding of what buildings look like or how money is used. W🌌e didn't have to put too much effort into creating world settings because players would naturally understand what that looks like. Whereas, in [Metaphor], we were creating a new world from the ground up. Everything from how money is shaped, how it's used, we needed to create the setting from the ground up. This was a new challenge for us, especially for Atlus. It was a fun, creative process, but also challenging and a lot of volume in terms of work to get that all right.”
Metaphor Mechanics
Tanaka tells us that the team’s previous work on the Persona games went against classic themes in that they were set in a specific city in Tokyo, following outlaw high school students as they “get back at adults”. Fantasy is such a universal theme, however, so in Metaphor the team were given the opportunity to take on a more classic approach and then given t🥃he freedom to put their own spin on it.
“That was a challenge to us, but we feel that we've been able to incorporate our touch,” Tanaka says, explaining the team’s experience with modern games helps them create something new for the fantasy genre. An꧅ example Tanaka gives is how Metaphor depicts the journey in the game. In modern-day travel, people move from one place to another bu🍌t when they look back on their trip, there are only a few memorable moments.
Tanaka explains this was something they wanted to incorporate into Metaphor, and that rather than depicting every moment, the team wanted to leave some parts to the imagination. “That is also why instead of fleshing out every single moment of the journey, we put more emphasis on trying to make sure that those peak moments and💙 impressionable elements of those trips popped out. That was something that c꧑ame up as an idea throughout the development process and something that we decided to adopt.”
As well as the journey aspect, Metaphor also focuses on its daily system, which adds a lot of depth to the game. “I understand that some people might be overwhelmed by the volume, but I also think that is the fun and entertainment element as well, where we're travelling to unknown cities and territories,” K🔯ido says. “We are on this journey with limited time, we have this mission in mind, and leading up to that, we're making smaller decisions along the way. We have this mission, so what should I do today? What should I do the next day?”
Metaphor Is A Culmination Of Atlus’ Work
Hashino’s 🧸message also told us, “We challenged ourselves to cr🌠eate something new while drawing upon many of the concepts that we had already developed in our previous works. You might say we are attempting to make Metaphor a culmination of our experience.”
Yoshizawa expands on this idea further, telling us how one of the team worked on Persona 3 and 4, before going on to work on Catherine🐷, which presented a new challenge that broadened their development viewpoint before they went on to work with Persona 5. After that, Metaphor being set in the fantasy genre presented a brand new challenge once again, so the team has worked on big challenges before and learned from them.
🌌“With creating Metaphor, we really put everything into i꧃t,” Yoshizawa tells us. “We wanted to create the culmination of our Atlus RPGs. We've done our best to deliver that with this game.”
The team explains that while some elements from past Atlus titles have been reworked for Metaphor, during development there were other ideas they had tha🌞t didn’t fit and might appear in other future titles. “There were elements that we had to let go of which we couldn't incorporate into this game but everything we thought would be entertaining and fun we were able to include and implement in this game and we're proud to say that.”
Kido tells us how she worked on various Shin Megami Tensei titles as well as Persona 3, 4, and 5, so it’s natural that there are familiar elements from across other games but that every💧 time they 💛approach a new project, the team thinks about what is best suited for that title. “Every single time we give it our all to make sure that we're putting forth whatever is best suited for that game. Every single time we go through that development process we're depleted of ideas at that point. Every single time we go through that process, we start that all over again when we start a new title. It's hard to tell what the future will bring but that's the cycle that we go through with each title.”
Metaphor is the lovechild of every Atlus game that has come before, imbued with all the hopes and passions the team has put into tackling the challenge of🎶 the unknown and undertaking their first step into a high fantasy world. It feels as though Metaphor wi൩ll be a glorious melting pot of ideas and features from familiar games while spicing things up with some new elements, delivered in an impressive setting via an enthralling narrative. Metaphor could very well be Atlus’ pièce de résistance, but we won’t know for sure until launch.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Metaphor: ReFantazio
- Top Critic Avg: 93/100 Critics Rec: 98%
- Released
- October 11, 2024
- ESRB
- T For Teen // Blood, Lan🦹guage, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence
- Developer(s)
- 𓃲 Studio Zero
- Publisher(s)
- Atlus
- Engine
- GFD
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