Metaphor: ReFantazio is 2024’s Baldur’s Gate 3. The games may look and play completely different from each other, but they’re both the most critically acclaimed of their respective years (on Metacritic, at least, Metaphor is in a three way tie for pole position with Shadow of the Erdtree and Astro Bot) and absolute behemoths that require at least 70 hours to finish, even in a main quest beeline playthrough.
Baldur’s Gate 3 took me about 200 hours, so results may vary. A lot.
I’m still only about six hours into Atlus’ gargantuan RPG. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been able to dedicate time to it, as I’ve shifted my attention to games like Silent Hill 2, Mouthwashing, Star Wars Outlaws, and Mind Over Magnet that I could reasonably finish before I turn in my GOTY list. I was enjoying the game a lot, though, and taking this long break from it is leaving me feeling like I started Metaphor: ReFantazio at the completely wrong time.
But that isn’t really true. There is no wrong time to start a game like Metaphor. The downside is that there’s no right time to start, either.
You’ll Never Get That Gaming Time Back
Most gamers pick the hobby up as kids and, unless their parents are strict with their screen time, spend hours upon hours playing after school and on weekends. As much gaming as you can accomplish in those pockets of free time, the real magic of being a kid is the three months of summer break when you can play without interruption. Weeks may pass between obligations and, if both your parents work, no one is at home to monitor whether you’re playing too much. In your life’s gaming diet, this is like getting dropped off at Golden Corral for three months.
If you grew up with that gaming buffet, adult life feels more like trying to live on intermittent stops at vending machines. You piece time together with a Saturday here, an evening there. Though you could realistically blitz through a game like Metaphor: ReFantazio in a few weeks as a kid, adult life — with its full-time jobs, partners, children, and other responsibilities — renders that impossible.
As a freelancer, I fantasized about eventually getting hired somewhere and setting my start date a month out so I could game like it was 1999 again.
We tend to think of games as things that we start and finish, like movies, but it’s more helpful to think of Metaphor: ReFantazio like a TV show. A series is still finite, but we don’t expect to complete it all at once. In fact, attempting to do so would ruin the experience. Can you imagine how bad it would feel to try to rush through all nine seasons of Seinfeld in a week? That just isn’t how TV is meant to be engaged with. We live with TV, throwing episodes on during dinner or after the kids are in bed. We don’t speedrun it. Good shows are meant to be savored.
We’re better off considering long video games in the same way. There are games that are more compact, true. I recently played through Mouthwashing over the course of an afternoon, and have great memories of weekends playing Firewatch and Until Dawn with friends. But when you’re dealing with a runtime that stretches over multiple real-world days, you have to stop thinking about a game as something to complete.
A long RPG is something you can play slowly, in hour-long increments, over an extended period of time. That might be supplemented by the occasional weekend binge, but if you’re an adult, you can’t expect to get those wide-open lanes with any regularity.
There’s no right time to play Metaphor: ReFantazio, but that’s okay. There’s no wrong time either. When you start it, congrats, you found the right time.
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Why Metaphor: ReFantazio Should Win GOTY
Metaphor: ReFantazio should snatch the GOTY crown this year, here’s why.