Metaphor: ReFantazio is doing things Persona never dreamt of

Director Katsura Hashino and artist Shigenori Soejima explain why Metaphor breaks gaming boundaries

Metaphor: ReFantazio / Atlus

When you think of the Persona series you think of Persona 3, 4 and 5, and that’s because these are the games directed by Katsura Hashino. While there were three Persona games before Hashino took the helm, People think of Persona games as the RPGs that blend dungeon crawling and making friends. The friendship simulator aspect was completely unique to even the Persona series when it was introduced in Persona 3, and the series’ defining characteristic is all thanks to Hashino-san. “[Persona’s] not really about one person,“ he tells me during our interview. “Rather the people that you meet and the kind of bonds that you form with them.”

Hashino-san has not only worked on the modern Persona series, but Shin Megami Tensei, Trauma Center, Catherine and many more Atlus titles. We were lucky enough to sit down with both him and series artist Shigenori Soejima to discuss their new project Metaphor: ReFantazio — developed under new Atlus sub-studio, Studio Zero — and just how it will be different from their previous Atlus RPGs. “Until Metaphor, until Studio Zero, we were focusing on modern stories and modern games, both in Shin Megami Tensei and Persona,” Hashino-san explains. “So we were very curious about if we made a fantasy game, what would come from that?”

Metaphor: ReFantazio / Atlus

Creating a whole new studio just to explore a fantasy setting seems an extreme move, but the more the pair discuss Metaphor, the more differences you’ll see. The dungeon crawling and the relationship building are there, but the daily structure is looser, the combat has more synergy, and most importantly, the setting and story are more grand than ever before. “Everything we designed for this game was completely new and didn't really overlap the things that we've done to date.” Soejima-san says. “I would say if you look at all of our games, especially the Persona series, it was all in one genre. Moving over to another genre, creating something new was a really interesting challenge.”

The fantasy setting is an obvious departure from their previous work, but fans are hungry for something fresher than ‘Persona but medieval’. It was Hashino-san’s mind-boggling final words, which gave us hope that Metaphor will really be something special. “I wanted to put a hypothesis out there for why the fantasy genre exists,” Hashino-san explains. “The theory goes that reality doesn't need to be our reality, and that our reality doesn't need to remain the reality that it is. That's why we visit fantasy worlds to expand our horizons and see other options for reality.

Metaphor: ReFantazio / Atlus

“We hit on this idea of: what if the fantasy world that we create views our world? What if our real world is in reality their fantasy? We thought that might be something that doesn’t really exist in other games.” If you’ve played the demo, you will have seen the abominations that the characters of Metaphor call humans, showing us exactly what Hashino-san means when he says ‘how the fantasy world views our world.’ You can check out those horrors right now by playing the Metaphor: ReFantazio demo on PlayStation, Xbox and PC, or wait for the full release on October 11.