I put Metaphor Re:Fantazio aside when Dragon Age: The Veilguard arrived, but to be brutally honest, I’ve not been enjoying BioWare’s latest. So, when I saw Metaphor’s nomination for Game of the Year at The Game Awards (to nobody’s surprise, really), I decided it was time for me to ditch The Veilguard and get truly stuck into some anime melodrama. Time is precious, and life is short.
Except I’d forgotten why I’d put it aside at all, apart from a shiny new game entering the bottomless pit of internet discourse – I’d actually been burning out, and hard.
I only remembered this when I jumped back in that I was in the middle of a big dungeon in Martira, and groaned aloud. This one had been particularly frustrating. It was bigger than the last dungeon I’d been forced to explore, it was linked to a mandatory story quest (more on that later), and brute forcing my way through it brought me little pleasure.
I’d been mostly using autobattle to get through grinding dungeons, because I generally find the length of these encounters quite unpleasant, but that can only go so far. While it does help me get through the easier battles fairly quickly, my party tends to drop like flies without anyone reviving them when fighting harder enemies. I suspect tweaking my tactics would help ease this burden, but at this point it feels more fruitful to just lock in and take down the dangerous enemies.
There is an alternative, though. After running out of items to use in battle (typical) while still getting accosted left, right, and centre, it became clear that if I wanted to survive without wasting another in-game day, I’dhave to zoom through it like Sonic. I weaved between groups of enemies. I dodged imposing monsters. I was basically speedrunning the dungeon out of pure laziness.
At this point, I was really lacking in motivation to keep moving. From what I remembered of the in-game days leading up to this dungeon delve, it had felt equally grindy and pointless. I was upgrading my skills and doing bounties, but for what?
And then I got to the boss fight.
Related
I’d Love RPGs To Stop Lying About The Final Battle
I know how long an RPG is. I know this isn’t the end.
I’ll be talking about Metaphor Re:Fantazio’s The Old Castle Town Kidnapper quest.
It seems that Metaphor had been playing the long game, and I hadn’t had a clue what it had been working up to. What had seemed to be a fairly basic creature bounty had turned into a wide-ranging conspiracy encompassing a whole small town. Before entering this dungeon, I’d tracked down Heismay, who’d been scapegoated as being behind a series of child kidnappings from the town, and he’d pretty much proved his innocence. If it wasn’t him, though, who was it? I’d have to go down a literal well to find out.
It was this well dungeon that burnt me out and drove me away. After I returned, I got into exploring the dungeon properly and discovered one of Metaphor’s many delights – it turned out that Morris, a Martiran guardsman and second in command to the man who’d given me in the bounty in the first place, was feeding those kidnapped children to a gigantic baby.
As I went on, I discovered more clues that helped me figure out what was going on and hinted towards the deep darkness of this particular story. It turned out Joanna, the religious Santoress of the town, had given birth out of wedlock, and the father of the baby had been forced to flee the country because of racial and tribal prejudice. Then the human attacks started, and the baby’s nurse, who’d believed that the half-breed child was the cause of the trouble, killed it.
Joanna, grieving and alone, railed against the world, blaming it for her child’s death, which is fair. Then she came across a human that looked like a baby and, under the influence of its Melancholia Magla, convinced herself that it was her child, reincarnated so they could be together again. She got the guard corps to kidnap Martira’s children and feed it to the human, blaming Heismay all the while.
Heismay, who’d lost a child of his own to prejudicial violence, tried to get through to Joanna. She flew into a fit of rage, ordering her human baby to kill the party. This battle, while painfully long, showcased the extent to which Atlus was willing to make its bosses absolutely terrifying to look at. Homo Jaluza is a squat, gigantic creature with a pacifier and brown curls. Looking at just its head, with its mouth closed, it could be a cherubic child, just with cuts extending almost to its ears.
Light In The Darkness
But when it opens its mouth, it becomes a truly horrific thing to behold. Its huge mouth opens to reveal sharp fangs, crowding its mouth. Its tongue is long and pointed, hanging out as it stares at you, as seen in the works of Hieronymous Bosch. It’s very gross, and somehow made me feel even worse for Joanna. What kind of mental shattering must she have experienced to think this was her child?
As the baby dies, Joanna grieves all over again, screaming and sobbing. As she begins to come to her senses, though, Heismay tells her, “The nightmare is over.” After all, he understands what it’s like to be a parent mourning a child – as he says before the battle, “Grief and madness fill the gaps where love had been.”
Atlus has never shied away from dark stories, but this is one that’s heartbreaking all the way through. It’s one ridden with grief, tragedy, and madness, but that has a glimmer of hope all the same – we can exorcise our darkness and hatred, and atone for our actions. I still hated having to grind through that dungeon, but if a story of this calibre is waiting at the end to be unfurled, then Metaphor: ReFantazio makes all this difficulty worth the trouble.
From the creative minds behind Persona 3, 4, and 5 comes Metaphor: ReFantazio, a unique fantasy world, where your protagonist will journey alongside his fairy companion, Gallica, to lift the curse from the kingdom’s lost prince.
Control your destiny, face your fears, and awaken magical Archetype powers that lie dormant in your heart. By awakening to an Archetype, you will unlock the power to channel and combine the abilities of unique job classes. Strengthen your bonds and build your party to take down powerful foes and discover the kingdom’s true nature.