There’s a long list of stuff we still have to tell you about the Tokyo Games Show 2024. After the MGS3 Snake Eater Remake, one of the other “big” games at the show was a game from Atlus. Atlus is well known for its Persona series. But this year, they have a true new game, called Metaphor : ReFantazio. It takes place in an imaginary world, with the usual JRPG tropes: warriors, magic, fairies and elves. Does that remind you of the recent anime hit Frieren? Could be just a coincidence. There’s some political conspiracy going on as well. People like Game of Thrones too much for their own good.

In any case, Atlus (part of SEGA) had bet on this new IP, and the game was playable in different parts of the show: of course at SEGA’s booth, as well as Playstation’s and the Samsung SSD booth as well. Atlus was also fairly smart as they released at the very same time on Steam a demo of the game, since it’s very close to its official release date. Good marketing.

But is the game good?

Well, it certainly feels a lot like Persona. The character design inspiration is obvious, and the way you play is also fairly similar. I played the part in a dungeon with numerous fights, and you could either hit the enemies on screen as you were moving, or go directly into a different fight mode, with a turn-based fight against multiple enemies at once. There’s nothing too original, but just like for Persona, the design that goes into the transitions, the visual effects are excellent. There are very few games in the industry that have this level of polish. They also went ahead and added a bunch of cutscenes, probably produced by some animation studios, that look quite decent.

While I can’t talk about the game at large, the parts that I could play were however, not too impressive. The dungeon was just some uninterrupted figthing, with pretty much the same enemies over and over again. While I admire the overall design, the 3D in the game is fairly basic and looks fairly primitive, with probably a lot of asset re-use from all over the place. It does not feel like a game of this generation, to be perfectly clear. My guess is that their A team is working on Persona 6 full time, and this title is something made with less talented resources, to make people wait for something more consistent. I have no doubt that it will do well commercially. There’s not that many JRPGs these days on the scene, and Final Fantasy keeps sucking at it, so there’s some hungry gamers out there for something substantial, even if it’s far from perfect. But this is certainly not to the level of a Persona production.

Metaphor: The Booth

The booth was well done, with a large statue featuring a glowing core, large posters of the game’s characters, and cool cosplayers who showed up once in a while.

I like what they did. You can’t really go wrong by magnifying ATLUS’ artwork. They have the best.

And here’s a few cosplayers:

I must admit, ATLUS had an even better show last year, with their excellent Persona 3 and Persona 5 Tactica dance numbers. That was outstanding.

Steam Deck

The game will be released in just one day from now, on the 11th of October, and the demo is still available on its Steam page. The demo is a huge download. It feels like it’s the whole game, that you just unlock once you purchase the thing. They also mentioned that the saved games from the demo can be re-used once you purchase the game, which would make sense if the demo is what I think it is.

On the Steam Deck, the game is marked as playable, with a couple of issues:

• Text will be too small in some parts
• The default settings don’t work well on the Deck, and you need to adjust it.

I have actually tried the demo on the Steam Deck after returning from the show, and it works well enough - you can get a decent frame rate. The text is indeed a little small, let’s hope that they will introduce some additional settings to make it a little bigger for handheld PCs.