I really wanted to love this game. It started out quite strong, and the first 15-20 hours or so were super fun, addicting, and fresh. An interesting setting, premise, and really strong opening dungeon led me to believe I was in for a treat of a JRPG experience. Not to mention the really solid feeling turn based combat and the Final Fantasy V type job system which were awesome. I was hooked on this game for a while. The first month or so of in-game time is pretty great!

After the second main dungeon though, the game started to show many flaws that rendered it a complete boring chore.

I noticed that all of the side quest dungeons are basically repeats of one another, and don't offer anything interesting in terms of layout or setting/theme. The combat system starts showing its cracks once you unlock the main archetypes. The upgrades of them in their lineages are just that, pure number upgrades; instead of doing medium damage as a Warrior, now you do heavy damage as a Swordmaster, for instance, and that's pretty much it. The "real-time combat" featured is very barebones, feels super clunky and awkward, and bogs every encounter down to three predictable outcomes:

1. Stun the enemy and steamroll them completely/kill them outright without entering turn-based combat at all if they're lower level than you (this part is good/saves time!)
2. Initiate turn-based without stun, and hope you had the right party setup...
3. Get hit by the enemy and get completely steamrolled by them.

At the start of the game this felt fresh because you could mix and match archetypes a bit more freely and actually have fun synergizing characters the way you wanted, but later on, the game basically requires you to fight enemies according to their "weakness" and nothing more. If you have the wrong archetypes and/or skill setups for an enemy weakness going into an encounter, the game forces you to either waste your time getting killed by the enemy so you can change your party around and then retry (there is NO WAY to exit to the menu during a battle or option to recompose your party setup when using the Retry Battle feature!!!), or restart the game entirely and try again. This wasted SO MUCH of my very valuable time on this earth, and made me go from loving this game to not even wanting to open it.

In terms of everything beyond the combat, shortly after recruiting the fourth party member, I realized I was spending 90% of my play time staring at the text box at the bottom of the screen, reading what felt like literal filler dialog with almost no meaning behind it. I realized that I didn't care for ANY of the characters AT ALL, and reading their dialog was doing nothing for me. All of the characters feel very one-note, and they barely interact with anyone outside of the protagonist or villians; there's barely any party banter in a 100+ hour RPG! I started skipping a lot of the endless and pointless unvoiced dialog, and found myself missing nothing from doing so. Barely anything happens on screen during most of the endless dialog sections; characters rarely move around and the camera angle doesn't change. This plus the lack of voice acting for most of the dialog left me utterly bored out of my mind for most of the "gameplay".

Reading lots of dialog is usually fine for me when the game is well-written. This starts out pretty well written with the exposition and setup, but very quickly devolves into characters repeating the same things over and over and over again, and the narrative themes are very heavy handed. There is no conflict with the party towards the protagonist or each other, and the protagonist is barely a character at all; it is baffling when everyone talks about how amazing and great he is, despite him doing absolutely nothing special or interesting at all. The Social Link scenes all felt generic and one-note as well, and again, they are mostly unvoiced where you stare at the dialog box while absolutely nothing happens on screen in 3D.

My final issues stem from the graphics and performance. This game is UGLY. The environments are an eye sore to look at. The game runs horribly on the Steam Deck, a system which should have no trouble running a game that looks this bad, meaning it is not optimized well. There is some genuine good character and world design here (Louis and the Humans/the Gauntlet Runners are AWESOME), and the UI is gorgeous, but that's about where my praises end for this game's presentation. Beyond this it looks like a generic anime.

Overall, this game started for me as a great time and quickly devolved into an utter bore. Try out the demo before buying, I wish I had!

Maybe life is a metaphor

Maybe Metaphor being nominated for GOTY was a metaphor

Maybe I am a metaphor

Maybe you are a metaphor

But maybe just maybe the real metaphor was the friends we made along the way

Easily among Atlus's best games, they even managed to make none of the companions annoying this time. Unfortunately they still fall for the age old trap of filling the last two areas with recolored enemies and reused bosses from earlier in the game.