Metaphor: ReFantazio's original fantasy world gave the Persona 3, 4, and 5 director "freedom" to work on ideas "that we couldn't put into other games"
Oct. 13, 2024Persona’s high-schooling setting put a “limit” on what was possible for Atlus
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Long-time Persona director Katsura Hashino reckons working on the demon-hunting, high-schooling series is a little “easier” than creating a whole new world inMetaphor: ReFantazio, but the latter allowed the developers to work on ideas that they just couldn’t have before.
Speaking to the Official Xbox Podcast, Persona and Metaphor: ReFantazio’s Hashino said “we really had ideas we wanted to put into this game that we couldn’t put into other games.” He used his popular supernatural high school series as an example, too.
“Persona 5 is set in the real world - Persona 5 specifically in Shiba and Tokyo,” he noted. “That means the story we wanted to tell became slightly limited to the space we were within. It also means it’s a little bit easier for us to work with because we know the place, we have that sort of baseline to work from. But, once again, it does limit our options.”
Hashino compared that to the “entirely new fantasy world that we created” in the most recent genre giant Metaphor: ReFantazio, which iscurrently breaking records for its developer Atlus. “We have the freedom to explore all these ideas and things that we weren’t able to do in the past,” he explained. “In the Persona series, the characters [and] the story itself were based around a single location, a single hideout, usually, where all the characters hang out.” But Metaphor’s country-spanning story and much “larger” scale, on the other hand, gives players the “chance to see a broader perspective” from multiple tribes and cultures.
Metaphor: ReFantazio combines real-time and turn-based combat because its director wanted to embrace the idea of “manga and movie-style combat.”
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that’s vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he’ll soon forget.
Before Persona veterans decided Metaphor: ReFantazio had to be a fantasy JRPG, they had “talks about making a science-fiction universe”
As the Persona and Yakuza series fly beyond 20 million sales each, Sega says its JRPG successes are thanks to the power of multi-platform releases
As if The Outlast Trials couldn’t get any more deranged, the horror co-op game’s big new update adds more tooth guns and lady who lives in the walls
