After spending about 20 hours in the game, I decided to check out the reviews on Metacritic, and the consensus was along the lines of: "The best RPG of the decade, an astounding political fantasy with an engaging plot, richly developed characters, unparalleled combat system, and a visually stunning, dynamic world that stimulates the imagination. A masterpiece that won’t be matched for years to come, a dream game."

I’m speechless (actually, I’m not).

The villain murders the king of some fairy-tale kingdom, leaving the country without a ruler or legitimate heir, as the king’s only son is in a coma due to a curse. Naturally, the throne is now up for grabs by the king-slayer, but the deceased monarch returns as a giant stone... thing, announcing that the next king will be whoever performs the most noble deeds by a certain deadline. Your mission is to help the protagonist, the prince’s friend, win the people's love and become the new ruler.

Sounds fair enough, I guess. I can tolerate Japanese absurdity nobody expected grounded realism (except, apparently, the game journalists who found some in this "intriguing political narrative" and gave it 10/10).

But the execution…

The storytelling leaves you with a vague sense of bewilderment, like watching a kids' cartoon. The characters’ dialogue, behavior, and motivations are so nonsensical, primitive, and illogical that you just sit there, baffled. The game’s lore and setting imply a world that isn’t meant for children—society is divided by racial and social prejudices, segregation, and class inequality. There are graphic depictions of violence and murder, like a public execution right when the hero first arrives in the city, with gallows scattered around and corpses in the slums. But despite this grim backdrop, the tone remains… childish.

The characters feel like they only have one thought on repeat. Take Stroll, for instance, your first party member a low-ranking noble whose family died while helping villagers. He believes it’s his noble duty to protect the weak, and you’ll hear him say this literally every time he opens his mouth: “I’m a noble, and it’s my duty to protect the weak/I must help the needy because I’m a noble/You’re evil, and I’ll destroy you because I’m a noble and I protect the common folk/Time to eat, by the way, did I mention I’m a noble and it’s my duty to protect the weak?”

And the same goes for every other NPC. The main antagonist, Louis, is pure evil and makes sure you never forget it. Apparently, the writers think the players have the memory span of goldfish.

Louis acts like a total sociopath, openly admits to killing the king, commits terrorist attacks, genocides entire regions (which he supposedly wants to rule), and even kills his own supporters to create an undead army, why? The dead king’s rules were clear: the throne will go to the most beloved candidate. Was it really that hard to make the villain even a little more complex? Even Pixar does a better job with their cartoon villains.

Awful. And I don’t mean the art style, I mean from a technical standpoint, the game looks and feels like a relic from the PS3 era. Releasing something like this in 2024 should be embarrassing, even for an indie studio.

Gear, of course, is just numbers on the equipment screen; Japanese devs still haven’t figured out how to visually show armor and other gear on the character’s model after 30 years of the genre being in 3D. Or they just wanna squeeze as much cash outta you as they can. You can buy a bundle of skins that costs like a third of the game.

Everything is just blurred-out textures with no detail, empty spaces, hero animations that look like they’re from the early 2000s, back when characters couldn’t even move in full 360 degrees. So, the MC can only run forward, backward, right, and left at perfect angles. Don’t even get me started on the physics, there literally aren’t any. All the cutscenes are anime-style drawings because I’m pretty sure the game engine can’t even handle any animations besides idle (when the character is standing still and doing something small) or basic walking/running. Even the camera can’t move normally.

All the in-engine cutscenes look like this: a character sits and says something, lies down, sits at a table, reads a book, or eats while the camera stays static, and the character doesn’t leave that one spot.

About 70% of the dialogues aren’t voiced. Instead of speech, the character just goes like, "Oh! Wow!" and then you read a wall of text.

If they need to show an action, but can’t be bothered to animate it, here’s what you get. For example, there was this moment (in a main story quest, mind you) where a girl asks you to find her friend among the hostages in a fortress under siege. When the heroes arrive, they find the friend dead. The girl (the quest-giver) walks into the room with a blank face, the screen fades to black, and a message appears saying: “The girl hugs her dead friend and cries.” Then the screen brightens, and the girl is standing in the exact same spot with a blank face.

And the loading screens. They’re everywhere. Start a conversation - loading screen. End the conversation - loading screen. Enter a fight - loading screen. Open a door - loading screen. Walk three steps down the street and turn the corner - long-ass loading screen. Move to another spot on the map outside the city - super long loading screen with an animation of a marker moving across the map.

The dungeons, meanwhile, are the usual copy-paste hallways with enemies and treasure chests, reminiscent of old-school Castlevania. The design is so lazy and uninspired that it feels like a step back in time, and navigating these endless corridors without a quest marker is a nightmare. Monsters respawn every 20 seconds, so you’re constantly re-fighting the same enemies just to backtrack after realizing you’ve hit a dead end.

The combat system is solid enough pretty much the same as Persona. Boss fights are decent, and you still have your "archetypes" (basically Personas) that reflect the characters' identities: Knight, Seeker, Healer, and so on. Archetypes work together, boosting each other's abilities based on party synergy. At least the combat doesn’t totally disappoint.

The city is bearable compared to the dungeons, with a few benches and NPCs scattered around, giving it some semblance of life. As in Persona, between dungeon crawls, you build social links that help level up your archetypes and advance the story. But don’t expect anything new, the same tired mechanics of watching mini-cutscenes, cooking food, sitting on benches, and engaging in dull, unvoiced dialogues. Rinse and repeat about a million times.

Metaphor: ReFantazio – A Long Journey of Disappointment
Any Western game with this level of primitive graphics, this blatant exploitation of mechanics that have been outdated for decades, this utterly helpless narrative, and this ungodly poor optimization would be buried alive by critics. But for some reason, Japanese games manage to win awards and get sky-high ratings. I literally can’t understand how these gaming journalists assess quality. 10/10 because “I feel like it”?

The counter-argument I always see is, “WeLl iT's a JrPg,” as if that explains everything. As if Japanese RPGs are immune to objective scrutiny, and somehow you can’t apply the same quality standards to them that you would to the rest of the gaming industry.