Thank you @neatchee I'm sold.

Persona ish series are always odd. When they want to make good social commentary they are always spot on, but then they'd just do a whole subplot about sexual harassments and effect on teen girls, immediately followed by a skit where the player would give three options of a "joke" and all of them are sexually harassing your friend who is still dealing with the aftermath like WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS

I vaguely remember there were some comments about Metaphor has a build problem that if you got into it blind, the game can become unplayable later on. I also don't want to look it up because people are shit at spoilers.

So.

Is that true? What do I need to be careful about?

@BigShellEvent if you're going to be playing on Hard Mode like I did, you might want to look up how to unlock each characters Royal Archetype (their Ultimate Persona, basically) otherwise you'll find yourself with a whole load of grinding to do when you reach endgame. that was enough for me to quit the game as I just cba, still not finished it

if I play it again I'll be following a build guide

@BigShellEvent basically each Archetype (Warrior, Mage, Assassin, etc) levels up independently for each character, and the mid level ones require earlier ones to be at certain levels (eg. to unlock Knight you need to have leveled up Warrior to say level 10*)

some of the later ones require multiple earlier Archetypes to be at certain levels, and if you made the "wrong" choice for that particular character you won't be able to unlock their Royal Archetype without grinding the earlier ones. the game doesn't tell you this at any point until you reach endgame

*just an example, probably not what it actually is in game

@BigShellEvent I mentioned Hard Mode as the Royal Archetypes were pretty much required to beat the game iirc, probably not so on Normal

it's a great game, I was loving it until that point

@COMPU73E Another question. Does the game tell you what royal archtypes each character have, or do you have to unlock and grind each one to trial and error?

I really want to avoid guides if I could. But also, it sounds like potentially the worst grinding hellscape possible that isn't Saga Emerald.

@BigShellEvent they tell you what the requirements are, but you may have made different choices for that particular character throughout the game and not leveled the ones you need, so you then have to go back and grind the earlier ones to level them up

eg. to unlock Bob's Royal Archetype of Super Galactic Ninja you need to have leveled Ninja to 25, Ninja requires Assassin 20 and Rogue 20, Assassin requires Thief 10 and Ranger 10, Rogue requires Fighter 10, but you might've decided to make Bob your mage character instead and leveled up all the magic classes on him, so you're locked out unless you grind all those earlier ones

I hope that makes sense!