Topic: Metaphor: ReFantazio Thread

Yeah very low damage unless you use the 0 MP damage boost item. But sometimes it is your only choice when the enemy has a resistance or a block to every damage type in your party unless you wanna reload and change everyone's archetypes.

Honestly, it is more how you manage things than necessarily the things you do.

An example is one boss was weak to fire, but they put up a shield that blocked all elemental damage. I didn't have a move to bypass that in my party at the time. And also, once the shield was up, the boss would use that turn icon for a very strong team wide damage move instead.

Once you used an elemental attack on the shield, it would disappear and need to be recast. So sacrificing a turn icon to lower the shield even though it may result in no damage ended up being the way to go, as they couldn't use the team wide damage move cause they had to keep recasting the shield instead.

Reached the fifth city, the story is weird in an interesting way (nothing too epic but at least it has got an identity).

The performance keeps screwing with my progression as the game visuals give me a headache and I struggle to play for more than 90 minutes at a time

@Pizzamorg Thanks for the heads-up on the recommended level for September! I'm still way behind many of you it seems, even though I feel like I'm binging this game for my standards, haha. I just reached Brilehaven and will see the Exhibition of the Brave next time I pick the game up. I'm at level 30 right now, which I hope leaves me pretty up to bar with where the game expects me to be. I haven't really done any grinding, but I do set out to defeat every enemy in every dungeon. Not once they respawn though, or I'd be there forever. I hate grinding or anything repetitive in games. Still really enjoying this game and the conclusion to the Martira arc was incredibly well done. Excited to see where the game goes from here now that we'll presumably be getting a new objective.

I played the demo and I enjoyed it but I couldn't decide whether I liked it enough to spend $60 on the game. As it would be my first Atlus game, I decided to make a compromise and instead I bought Persona 5 for $15

@lotan666 I really enjoyed Metaphor: ReFantazio, but I think you made the right choice. Persona 5 Royal is one of my favourite games of all time.

@lotan666 Difficulty balancing issues aside, P5 (and especially P5R) is one of the best JRPGs of the last ten years. It's 100+ hours of gripping, stylish goodness.

P5 Royal is basically the Persona formula perfected (which is why I was sad more of its innovations didn't make it into Reload). Metaphor kinda just transplants the learns from P5R into a new world, setting etc and while that is great, the one thing Metaphor doesn't retain for some reason is P5R's strides in smoothing out the difficulty curve a lot of these games have.

People like me loved that loved that change for P5. I bounced off of that game for years, for a lot of reasons, but a major one was what a brutal slog every dungeon felt like. And I may never have finished it without the Royal version. However, long time fans didn't love this change as they see the difficulty of these games as part of their identity, and it deffo feels like Metaphor is a response to those long time fans, borrowing far more heavily from the mechanics you'd see in SMT. Which basically translates to "you better not get caught by random enemies in the world without an advantage as they will one shot your entire party and force you to restart, every single time".

I kinda grew to the point of absolutely dreading doing Metaphor's story dungeons because I knew I was just in for a big ole pile of frustration before I could get to the next story moment. I stopped playing Metaphor right before the final dungeon cause Veilguard came out, and I'm honestly not sure I'm ever gonna have the motivation to go back and play that game now I've been away for it for so long.

If you can accept that though, or even like the sound of that, I think Metaphor is probably the better game as anime lensed high school drama will always hold less appeal to me versus a sweeping fantasy epic would, but I think P5 Royal is overall way more fun to actually play.

@Pizzamorg Man, I had the biggest, dumbest grin on my face when I saw using multi-target spells that were nullified/drained in Metaphor lost you press turns even if you also hit weaknesses, just like in SMT. You actually have to tactically use abilities instead of just going with whatever the most powerful multi-target ability on hand is. It's still not as hardcore as something like SMT V: Vengeance in terms of complexity when it comes to team builds (how could it be?), but it gets difficulty balancing very right. This game is occasionally a little bit of a challenge even on the Normal difficulty.

Hoping and praying they see people don't need Pokemon-esque difficulty for Persona, and we get a return to more satisfying mechanics in P6.

I'm really tempted by the game but I really hate the time schedule element. I had two or maybe three attempts to get through P5 and bounced off each time - and that was with using a detailed guide so as to not mess anything up. I did actually finish PS4, though.

I played the demo and like it but there were no time schedule things there. It did get quite hard as it went on and I wonder, could you softlock yourself by running out of resources while grinding in a dungeon, like the cave i got to in the demo?

Also, I pressed the button that shows you what level other players were at that point and they were often way higher than me - like, what seems like hours and hours of grinding higher. IIRC they had max level "persona" (I forget the actual name) in some cases.