I have to Guide Dammit here more than any other games, specifically because the game doesn't know how to communicate anything well, and punishes you for it.
Is "Mausoleum" the same as "Catacomb"? Not telling. You can enter and find out. Congrats you lost a full day. Now try a different location that may or may not be "Mausoleum" as I've unlocked multiple tombs already. Congratulations you have timed out, game over.
The team I want: Neuras, Catherina, that super helpful decaying Tooth.
The team I got: Strohl, Hulkenberg, Heismay.
I don't really dislike anyone in my party. I wish them the best, just I don't vibe with any of them either.
I'm worried that my team won't make it to the next destination after this food poisoning.
Especially considering this is kinda you know, Heismay's sons state.
Your elf: tall thin long eared waify fragile mages, who only drink the most vegan dews
Our elf: tall thin long eared brutes leaving elf shaped holes on walls, currently eating chunks of dry wall between bites of rotten possum remains
Brigitta is such a miserable lonely git, but also she's by far the easiest to bond with for that reason. But also her class is essentially useless. And she's just so so punchable. The peak Elon Musk who camps on Reddit kind of punchable.
Metaphor needs an option of doing whatever the NPCs want to do to others back to them. She's not even useful to me lol.
I'm at the Soiree and it's suddenly becoming quite interesting.
Junah is implied will be a party member. So we have a One Race Per Character party most likely. We are a fox missing and a third eye person missing so far. Hope it's Catherina.
Speculation:
Elda: lol there's only one
Clemar: Leon
Roussainte: Hulkenberg wait does she have a first name
Eugief: Heismay
Nidia: Junah???
Paripus: Catherina???
Ishkia: My precious brother in spirit Neuras
Rhoag: ???
Mustari: ???
Fairy: Gallica
They are all pretty shit to goblins and ogres tbh
Metaphor is doing that ridiculous thing like Clair Obscur where the "difficulty" is it gives you turn icons then refuse to respect it.
This is so old. Try something more inter, like every time the players almost won a fight, delete the game off the console mid battle. Also irritating and petty shit over fairness, but at least interesting.
That octopus fight is the worst of going out of turn I've ever seen.
Enemy starts with two turns. It howls and gains four. Then between each it gets a free AoE raid wide without using a turn icon. Then because it's series of random hits there will be one Crit, which generates another free turn icon. So each "two turn icons" is really 15 back to back turns from the enemy, that's completely not communicated, that no one can survive through.
Just remove turn icons completely if games don't want to honour this shit.
Something I'm super glad about Metaphor, is it uses regional accents, but not assigning them with an assumed real world culture with weird stereotypes.
FFXIV was doing well until it decided that it needed fantasy Mongolia and fantasy South America etc. The fantasy Poland in 2.0 that's mostly Arab aesthetics felt way less pointed.
I'm at the cultural imperialists has to imperialism part.
But can I say that the second Voice of Cards is the best narrative regarding to this specific subject matter in video games. By a long shot. None of the weak sauce like FFX or Tales of Symphonia. Fujiko F Fujio also did really well on his soft scifi manga one shot.
I still maintain that Voice of Cards is the best Yoko Taro series.
Let's get ready to dungeon crawl!
> Arrive to dungeon
Let's enter the dungeon!
> Scottish fold's foot got infected
Let's go home!
> Never knew what the dungeon look like roflmao
I just arrived to abandoned Shinjuku and literally what the fuck
I was not expecting to be caught with the same plot twist again, given how much both Monster Hunter and SMT IV wtf'd me good.
Years ago, the place I worked at had a door issue. As in the glass door will not open. We left a fridge next to it, if there's a fire the idea is shut your eyes and smash the door with the fridge and escape.
Anyway that was how I ran through that Shinjuku stage. I had no MP left after like 3 fights.
Not that I'm projecting my real life issues into this or anything.
I usually just turn up to all the optional dungeons regardless of the weather, as at this point it kinda doesn't matter. But 47C during a heatwave? Fuck no I'm escaping back to Trad where it's 15C and gonna do... public speaking or something instead.
"Here, honoured foreign guests! Before you leave, try our culturally significant rare fruit. We won't tell you that you'd be tripping balls on them. Enjoy the immediate long trip while operating an experimental vehicle on open sea while fucked out of your head!"
That's one way to take out the invading colonists I suppose.
Junah is a technical singer who sounds like exactly why I can't listen to classic radio anymore. The vocal quality feels like my ear drums being sanded down with a dental drill.
I have no idea what happened in the cut scene of opera assassination. My ears were too tortured for that.
Ahhh, a fuck the right off battle where there's a distinctive status makes the entire fight over the top in length and irritation, but just have the plot point that prevents your team from being able to prepare for any of them.
Do I want to restart the game so I just happened to have 6 anti-frostbite gear for this one Rella battle?
Hell no.
When a fight is so absurd that immediately you just skip every scene so you can save and you never have to suffer that again.
I'm sure it's moving and plot important and blah blah blah but that was a horrible bottleneck, and at least here the scene isn't worth it
I got to my usual favourite location that's all snow, and I'm kinda just losing momentum. Like I'm 7 days away from ?final (not sure because calendar has one more month), and the grinding is so tedious and I'm not half way unlocked yet.
It felt like there's too much to get through in the context of character building, without the same amount of content to make the build worthwhile. And because I like to explore and find out the best built myself, the way the game economy works discourages that as well.
My fucking face when the plot twist is "you are someone else's creative fantasy. Now you know this you have white hair."
To be fair, I suspect Clair Obscur and Metaphor came up with this gimmick independently. It's just, it's really not a plot good enough to worth one telling.
And if you max "Tolerance" the rank you get is called "Saviour", on a particularly marginalised island that you are essentially an imperialist royal invader who took their sacred spear and using it as a daily weapon.
>:(
Metaphor has to be the worst Guide Dammit game. I'm 3 days until the end, one more ranking event, and my bottleneck is I can't physically find the person who needs a talking to, despite the game just said "talk to him during the day".
It has a teleport to whoever you need to talk to function, just it doesn't work.
A surprise in what I like about Metaphor the most: the end game grinding is the most flow-inducing thing. Like doing a mindless cross stitch (NOT an artistic one).
I grinded for 50 hours to max all archetypes so I can get all royals. During this period I caught up on so much study/work related education podcasts it's kinda wild
I'm gonna 99 and max all archetypes for all my characters, because the best thing about Metaphor is it's the dream of a fidget spinner to grind.
The fact that all the podcasts I'm listening to are more interesting than Metaphor's own narrative, is a separate thing and this is much less positive.
Unless I get some major surprises, Metaphor is shaping out to be my Worst Game of the Year of 2026, that also did some things really well.
It's tempting to say it's an Atlus game, but it's more accurate to say it's a Persona game. Atlus is capable of some incredibly nuanced and savage tales when it wants to be, and that usually happens in SMT. In here I'm just left confused, it seems like it wanted to stand for something with its narrative, but never went anywhere with anything it opened with interesting ideas.
Basically let me save you 80 hours and here's the narrative:
1. Low-born worked their way up and care about equality: crass, evil, fanatic.
2. Hereditary royals who did nothing except napped in a bush: noble, good, reasonable.
It's a power fantasy, but not the kind that makes the player feel good about progressing and personal growth, rather the kind that the more power and more fantasy the more second hand embarrassment I feel.
The princeling really didn't endear himself to me, he's just so bland and so passive, the only thing he did was fetching pictures for a kid that he took credit for but didn't draw, baked a few cakes, and killing any political opponents who didn't agree with him. Also imperialised an island and stolen a sacred artefact, but I guess Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor did show us that there are still a few low bars that Princeling hasn't really dipped under yet.
And be to clear here, there are no governing, no serving. Just ruling. Ruling his nation that because of implied exploitative parental lineage, but also the places he bulldozed through and annexed in recent invasions that he still refuse to acknowledge locals properly.
To make it even worse, it wanted to make some statements about racism, yet never went past a few slurs, make the most human-traited player character the oppressed Elda, only to end with a By The Way, you are the master race! Can't allow equality here, equality is for fanatics apparently. Can't even give him a non-American accent.
The entire Eupha plotline bothered me. Please tell me more imperialist saviour on how you would just barge into a culture and by pure luck you'd know more about the truth of their local spiritual lore than these silly brown savages. Now take their ceremony spear and use it to impale a few chickens. Oh great now Eupha wants to bang Princeling. As if we haven't heard what happened to Princeling's mum when that happened. Given the royal's tendency of sockpuppeting their own imaginary selves, I don't even trust that voice in More's Library isn't just the King doing another royal roleplay.
Then the Eldritch plot was... It's "anxiety"? Really? I never liked that aspect of P5, felt like it was a game that was about individual slips of judgement and personal responsibility just to end with grovelling to learnt helpless, in here it didn't even set up the story well enough for me to feel disappointed.
Interestingly my favourite core plot narrative of all "Persona" game is Monark. And you'd think I'm not a fan of monarchs, and I'm not; Monark is all about understanding the nuances of extreme circumstances.
And the cast is difficult for me to bond to. Nothing wrong with them, just before the hair bleach it felt like a bunch of polite people who don't know each other have to stay polite as temp coworkers who occasionally trauma dump, and after the hair bleach it was purely about the status of a king ruling over his properties. For a game that loves to talk about the power of interpersonal bond, there sure are sweet fuck all genuine feeling of interpersonal bond. I'm glad his six sycophant tools at least got some important power trip via nepotism. Just bring out the guillotine already, please.
The absolute highlight for me in the narrative was the Shinjuku segment, and how the cast found a used plastic vape and assumed it's some incredible magic artefact.
I'm also super annoyed by how the game promised the player that they will have full control over the character progression, only in the last segment dumping in this new info that you can build the characters wrong, it will take another 80 hours of grinding to correct this, oh you failed this test that you never knew was a test to start with.
My favourite thing about new games is to discover the system, explore what skills I can unlock, and test them out. In here I just gave up and guide dammit right in the beginning as I don't want to waste 100 hours. Solidly the most fun aspect of any games are gone because of that. I regret buying it alone just for this. Feels like buying a meal just to realise it's been pre-chewed and spat back out.
Lastly. Anyone know what this music being the source of magic thing is about? It randomly talks about that like it's the most important thing, and rest of the game just ignored it. Don't even have a musician archetype.
- Top voice acting sans Protagonist and Gallica. (Gallica is alright, just she repeats the same four lines four million times per battle.)
- Plateau.
- Shinjuku segment.
- Basilio, Catherina, Junah, and Neuras.
- Grinds like a well oiled fidget spinner, and I went through some good podcasts when Metaphor's narratives got too irritating.
While the gameplay had been ruined because of the absurd decision of there's a single ideal build for each character in order to finish the game, but the game don't tell the player about it until last segment, I never got to enjoy discover and experiment with the builds. But I did work out an exploit that ruined the game on my own term: Junah ice weakness dance, everyone else do that ice elemental attack that also applies ice weakness, Hulkenberg occasionally do that full party damage nullify. Rotate until every battle is won lol
@BigShellEvent thank you for saying all of this! When I'd finished the game, all I could hear from other folks was "omg game of the year! Best narrative game!" while I was staring in disbelief that a game in 2024 had an explicit colonial subplot, did fantasy racism yet again (what's new…) but unlike other games that do this, this one had a lot of contempt for the races it was depicting as the underclass, even though it was acting like it had an anti racist message!?! And depending on which events you witness, there's even a "climate change is bad but we can't really get off oil, incrementalism is how we solve it all!" allegory in there.
And the bizarre choice to have the main character still be royalty and mostly in favour of the status quo for existing structures, incapable of radical change… in a FANTASY game. The lack of imagination of it all. Ughhhh.
@uncoolmouse it feels like White Lotus the Game. Or Murderbot the Game. It wanted to be seen as having something to say, yet it has absolutely nothing except to pander to indifferent people who want to feel they are good.
PS I want all Persona people to play Monark. That game hits my feels.
@sayonaraminasan it's... Certainly making me feel things, which I prefer over nothing.
The core issue imo is it is taking too many risks with things that should be safe (QoL, players shouldn't be pointlessly misled about builds), but way too safe about the narrative that so far is showing nothing of real substance.
@uncoolmouse It continued some unfortunate traditions of Persona for sure.
I'm no longer sure if it wants to be a progressive work to start with, or the 2026 equivalent of nobles making their fortune in slave trafficking also like to pose for newspaper articles about their charity galas.
I will write a longer version later. Unless it surprises me greatly in the ending, I'd say this is the worst Persona game.
Manic Emo Dream Ghoul
Uncool mouse
さよなら皆さん