Metaphor: ReFantazio

This is my first real experience with an Atlus game with this kind of combat system. I did play some Persona here and there, but I never really got that far. First off, the game is very cutscene and story heavy, at some points even so far that you'd have to be in a Visual Novel mood to really get trough all the reading. The story is pretty good though, so I don't mind. Without spoilers, it delves in the ideologies on how to run a country and everything with it, and how to win the people over. I have no overall issues with the story, but I did feel that certain topics and other character development parts got repeated a tad too much. This might be the case because there is tons of miss-able dialogue in the game if you choose other things to do, so that might be more experience based. Overall presentation is absolutely amazing. UI design especially is one of the best out there, and on par with the recent Persona games. The soundtrack is unforgettable and absolutely fits the game. The visuals have an amazing style, with very fantastic vistas, and enemy design, while nearing the end of the game get a bit overused, are still great to look at, especially the non-beast ones. The aspect I probably have the most issues with is the overall gameplay. Out of combat its basically a time managing game, where you choose what to invest in in the limited time you have. I don't have too much issue with this, only that some activity are just obviously more important than others so there isn't that much choice involved unless you want to nerf yourself. Also maybe a nitpick, but some activities also don't feel like they should take an entire afternoon/night. The combat I have more issue with. This combat system is known for how punishing it can be, which I like and respect to some extent, but it misses the mark in some crucial areas. The way they did bosses is great. You can optionally before a quest, Try to gather some hints and tips on their weaknesses, and prepare yourself for the battle, making them a lot more do-able, albeit still quite hard depending on your skills and levels. However, for normal enemies, That isn't really there, and makes it more of a guessing game. Not all strengths and weaknesses are obvious, and since even normal enemies can kill you in one or two turns, dying just for experiment sake is something you are doing quite a bit. To counter this, quite early in the game you unlock something that makes you able to restart a battle from the beginning without repercussions, and also remembers the strengths/weaknesses from an enemy. This kind of feels like it goes against the whole battle system, and makes me wonder what even the point if it is. Another factor of the combat is the overworld combat. Its a very basic action combat system meant just to get an advantage or disadvantage in the turn based combat system, or to instantly kill enemies much lower level. There is a dodge with I-frames, and a single attack button. Its clunky, but It works for its purpose. The problem is, is that you don't get any leeway. Get hit once, which is bound to happen, and you get into a disadvantage. which means the enemies get a turn first to wail at you. With how ruthless the combat system is, that could be enough to really screw you over, and might even make the fight not worth it or unwinnable. What baffles me the most about this is while we get a broken "start battle from beginning" option, there is no way to restart out of this situation, or just even a simple "load from checkpoint" option. You either die on purpose or sometimes just alt-F4, which might even be faster depending on the battle. If you hit an enemy enough times it gets stunned and you can battle it with an advantage. That means you deplete a good chunk of his health, and the enemy starts in a stunned stage. Stunned enemies take an extra turn to get out of stun. This is a huge advantage, so to balance that they made it so that an attack against the enemy also has a chance to get them out of stun, so the enemy doesn't waste a turn. This would be fine, but the option to restart the battle has no drawbacks here either, making it so that you just retry the battle hitting the enemy and restarting the battle if it gets out of stun, effectively just wasting your time until you get lucky. Its not all negative though, the combat opens up a LOT while progressing in the game. There are a lot of archtypes and you can custumize a lot of things how you like. It might just take a lot of grinding to get to the build you want, but the combat improves (or just wastes less of your time) in the later sections of the game I have no idea if SMT/Persona did this combat system any better, but I have quite the few problems with how it works in this one. So much so that I just recommend not bothering with the harder difficulties, which I think is not what a game should strife towards. All in all, I would still recommend the game. Maybe not full price, but the rest of the game is good enough to make it a positive experience and outweighs the problems I have with it. I clocked in 90 hours on my save file when I beat it, so be prepared for a long one.

Really fell in love with this game! Really reminds me of the first Persona. The character development, plot, story, world and even the political climate all make it a nice feel. From start to finish I've had a blast! 10/10