What I have always admired about Japanese role-playing games is their unashamed grandiosity. The likes of Final Fantasy, Persona and Shin Megami Tensei don’t restrict themselves to the familiar trappings of good v evil, wizards-and-goblins, swords-and-magic; they absorb all of those things, and plenty else besides, from science fiction and mythology and comic books and psychology and classical art and whatever else interests their creators, and construct these absurdly ambitious worlds and narratives out of them. The themes are never small, the playtimes never short. Think of them as the operas of the video game world: a theatrical synthesis of different virtual arts, from storytelling and stagecraft to music and movement. And as something of an acquired taste.
Metaphor ReFantazio – out this week – is the most extravagant example of this genre that I’ve played in many years. It is lavishly over-the-top. In the first few hours, you are introduced to a world segregated by a controlling monarchy, military and religion into strict racial hierachies, where people with cat ears and tails are subservient to those with horns, or longer elven ears. (Your perfectly manageable task? Dismantle all of this and bring forth a new age of equality.) Characters pull out their own metal hearts, engrave them and transform into robot-styled manifestations of their inner power. You encounter your enemies: monstrous, powerful chimeric grotesqueries, tangles of legs and tongues and spikes and teeth. They are called “humans”, and they are more powerful and crueller than any of the game’s races. Subtlety is never on the table.
Quickly you become entangled in a kingdom-wide contest to elect a new king, triggered by the murder of every eligible royal candidate, orchestrated by a cruel man called Louis who has gorgeous hair. The complexity of the story threatens to it, but the flair and seductive stylishness of the presentation carries you along. I felt hypnotised watching my team of transforming heroes dart in and out of the battlefield, with their twirling sword-slashes and flamboyant magics. Metaphor ReFantazio’s fighting is at once very deep and very easy to enjoy, soundtracked by high-speed chanting and choral music. You can manipulate the system to grant you extra damage and extra turns against your enemies, a kind of meta-game of handling each encounter with maximum style and efficiency, but whatever you do it looks splendid.
In between tackling dungeons, the blue-haired hero – who comes right from the bottom of the kingdom’s racial hierachy – escapes into a fantasy novel about a place that looks suspiciously like modern Japan. Even in the opening hours there are mini-treatises on the purpose of fantasy as a tool for societal liberation. Its grand themes are surfaced so quickly and so unselfconsciously that you can’t criticise them for being obvious. Like the Persona series, it pairs philosophical postulating on friendship and power, overcoming societal corruption and harnessing your inner weaknesses and strengths, with moments of intense strangeness and outrageous style. In short, it’s never boring.
I am unlikely to find the 80 hours required to finish Metaphor ReFantazio, but after a few evenings of play it has already given me plenty to talk about and marvel at. It is so bold, and so well-crafted: the developer, Atlus, has set exceptionally high standards for visual design and music over the years, and it’s impressive that ReFantazio lives up to them. I like that this world is infected with danger and discrimination and violence – this is no cartoon. And even when its themes are heavy-handed, they are also deeply felt, and communicated with conviction. That sincerity is an important counterpoint to grandiosity, and it’s what gives this genre its heart.
What to play
Appropriate given our increasing proximity to Halloween, it has been a bumper time for horror fans. Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 came out this week and despite fans’ reservations based on earlier footage of the game, its reception has been pretty great. (Disclosure: my partner worked on this game.) And Until Dawn, the PS4 choice-and-consequence game about a bunch of kids getting murdered in the woods, has also enjoyed a glow-up, rereleased on PS5 ahead of its film adaptation later this year. Crow Country, meanwhile, the PS1-style horror adventure game I enjoyed earlier this year because it lets you turn the monsters off, is out on Switch next week.
Any one of them would make an excellent spooky season choice – and look out ahead for a new game based on the horror film franchise, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead (17 October), and another retro-style chiller about two teenagers and a ouija board gone wrong, Fear the Spotlight (22 October).
Available on: PS5 (all), PC (Silent Hill 2, Until Dawn), Nintendo Switch (Crow Country)
Estimated playtime: 15 hours (Silent Hill 2), 8 hours (Until Dawn), 5 hours (Crow Country)
What to read
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The short-selling firm Hindenburg Research has taken a big bet against Roblox, releasing a huge report accusing the child-oriented game platform of inflating its metrics (and thus its valuation) – and also calling it a “paedophile hellscape”, having gone looking for ways to get around its inadequate content moderation.
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It was the superb horror game Alien Isolation’s 10th anniversary this week, and to mark the occasion, developer Creative Assembly made the unexpected and welcome announcement that a sequel is in early development.
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343 Industries, the developer that made the last few (not especially impressive) Halo games, has rebranded as Halo Studios, and says it has multiple games in development. It is also abandoning its own game engine, often blamed for the many problems during Halo Infinite’s delayed development, in favour of the cutting-edge Unreal Engine 5.
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Following Ubisoft’s recent troubles, founder Yves Guillemot and Chinese investor Tencent are thinking of taking the company private, GamesIndustry reports.
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I loved this feature by historian Holly Nielsen on Age of Empires II and how it influenced and inspired the millennial generation of history buffs – though I still haven’t forgiven the appalling Scottish accents in the William Wallace Campaign. (Thankfully, fixed in the 2019 remaster.)
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What to click
Question Block
A question this week from Dale:
“Some games are so richly detailed they feel like real, living places. Are there any games that you think have raised the bar for architectural design within virtual worlds?
Apart from Metaphor: ReFantazio, which I have talked about quite enough already, I think Final Fantasy VII is a candidate here (specifically the first part of the remake, set in the city of Midgar), as is Dragon Age; fantasy RPGs are particularly good at architecture, I feel, because their artists are free to fuse science fiction and fantasy with classical, baroque, neoclassical or modern looks – and also, importantly, whatever they create doesn’t have to stand up in real life. Dishonored also springs immediately to mind, because of the way its side-streets can swallow you up, and the striking contrast between Dunwall’s slums and its grandeur.
I don’t much like the BioShock games, but you can’t fault the first one for that jaw-dropping art-deco underwater city. Oh and Bloodborne has the most incredible gothic architecture I’ve ever seen (that lecture building!), and that’s coming from someone who grew up in Edinburgh. Some of the castles and cities in Elden Ring are even more intricate.
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