cubie

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"There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How’s the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'"

John Steinbeck prefaces his final novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, with this message:

"Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today."

Any time I teach a book in my high school English classes, at the end of the unit, I always ask the class what they think the title of the book meant. We’ve just finished Of Mice and Men, another Steinbeck novel, wherein mice are used as a narrative device to demonstrate how Lennie, a brawny man with an intellectual disability, is unaware of his overwhelming strength. Steinbeck cleverly weaves the rodents into the story and also channels Bobby Burns’ 1785 poem “To a Mouse” - which includes the titular line, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” - illustrating the bleak reality of how the working class dream a simple dream, but can’t ever achieve it.

They say “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but they don’t mention anything about titles. I can’t resist a good title. One Thousand Splendid Suns; Bless Me, Ultima; Their Eyes Were Watching God; I’ll read these without a second thought, just off the title alone.

Atlus's Metaphor: ReFantazio is the wildest, most bizarre title I’ve ever heard of for a video game, and that’s saying something, considering there are games out there with names like Color a Dinosaur and Super Monkey Ball 2. It is confusingly intriguing. But going into the game’s demo, I felt pressure to understand it. The title intimidated me. Like I was going to feel stupid if I didn’t get it. Shouldn't this be a piece of cake for me, an English teacher? Regardless, I plugged away at the demo. Despite being pretty familiar with recent Atlus titles, I was going into this one mostly blind - so the exposition, the lore, the setting – was all fresh to me. And after about seven hours, when I was done with the game’s prologue, I knew what I was getting into. I felt the familiar combo of awe + refreshment that I did when I discovered the Persona series in 2017. And it was time to get back on that train. There’s only a handful of games like this in the world (see: grindfest RPGs with intense attention to detail and a message beyond “the friends we made along the way”), and whenever I chance into one, I sort of make it a part of my daily routine. Time that I usually spend reading or exercising gets repurposed. Plus, with some personal life stuff stressing me out, I could use the distraction.

So I went to the video game section of Target and found a copy of Metaphor: ReFantazio. And I just stood there looking at the cover for a minute, repeating the title over and over in my head. Metaphor. Metaphor. The inclusion of that word, I suggest, is not insignificant. And when I would play the game, I couldn't get it out of my head. Because, ultimately, explicitly placing the word "metaphor" there in the title heavily altered my experience with the game. It pigeonholed me into trying to find an analogy in every single aspect, element, or detail of it. Because… if your game is labeled a metaphor, am I allowed to take any of it at face value? So I’d run into dilemmas. I never knew where to draw the line at what I should be interpreting figuratively versus literally. An enemy shaped like a tooth? THAT’S A METAPHOR! This guy caught a fish? THAT’S A METAPHOR! There are some obvious overarching parallels with regard to significant plot elements, but outright telling the player to look deeper into the game feels, to me, patronizing.

Imagine George Orwell writing Animal Farm, finishing the book, and then saying, “I think I will name this book Metaphor Farm.” I saw this movie in 2009 called The Men Who Stare at Goats, and at the end, a goat, like, passes through a wall, while these guys watch it. It was symbolic of something, though I can’t remember what. Maybe I’d remember if the movie was called The Men Who Stare at Metaphors. Maybe we could change that game about A.I., DETROIT: Become Human, to METAPHOR: Become Human. I could go on. It just feels heavy-handed. The game could have just as easily been called “Re:Fantazio” and I think players would still be able to pick up on the thematic parallels that the game developers are drawing between their fictional world and the real one.

This guy in Detroit is a metaphor for Steve Bannon

In fact, the “Re:Fantazio” portion of the title is even weirder. Like… what? Am I replaying a fantasy that already happened? Am I an escort replying to an email from an Italian guy about the lingerie he wants me to wear? There’s a lot going on, but my interpretation is that it’s an attempt to juxtapose “reality” against “fantasy” (something the game hints at frequently) but also make them one in the same, and also use Italian as an homage to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, whose imagery features heavily in Metaphor’s aesthetic. But your guess is as good as mine.

So… fantasy, reality, symbolism. Got it. “Does this world pique your interest?” That’s the question that bookends the game. But enough of this intro. Let’s talk about the actual game, shall we?

PROLOGUE

This is a VERY ambitious game, and I would expect no less from the director, Katsura Hashino. After all, he’s the one who took the Persona series from its, let’s say, “esoteric” origins, to the massively appealing contemporary legends that it produces now, by introducing some incredibly pioneering social-simulation game mechanics (many of which reappear in Metaphor [and some that thankfully don’t]). I applaud the risks they took with making such a political story in a brand new IP. Any of those “Keep your politics out of my games” goobers can buzz off. Games aren’t political enough, I say.

With that in mind, something unsettling began to poke at me. Something I had to indulge. So I gave in to temptation. I bit into the apple of Eden. I googled “is Metaphor Refantazio woke”.

I vaguely remembered there being a “Woke Games List” somewhere online that kept track of this sort of thing. I didn’t care whether Metaphor was “woke” or not, but since we’ve allowed the impossibly stupid concept of “wokeness” to become a societal culture war issue, and since I knew there would be losers with opinions on it, and also since I’m such a worldly and intellectually curious scholar of the human condition, I wanted to hear what these Elon Musk sycophants had to say, these incels who can only enjoy video games if the female characters have disproportionately big boobs or a masterfully crafted pert buttock, who cry about women not fucking them while also espousing the most estrogen-repellant views known to mankind. Take this note from the “Woke Games List” about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for example:

Yeah, imagine writing that shit and then having sex with a woman. That’s the biggest “fantasy” in any of this. My ****ing God.

Anyway, my search yielded a post saying something about how the only “woke” aspect of Metaphor is that there’s a single trans-coded character, but all the other content - the metaphors, if you will - are merely a reflection of how the player interprets them and chooses to impose meaning onto them. I think there’s something to that. It’s like a test where there are no wrong answers. So those “no politics in my games” mofo’ers are actually getting their wish. Shit! They got us again.

However, this is a good opportunity to examine some of the symbols in Metaphor: ReFantazio. But remember, class - NOBODY’S INTERPRETATION IS MORE CORRECT THAN ANYONE ELSE’S. So let’s talk about what some of these images in the game represent. I mean, what they DON’T represent. Maybe.

SYMBOLISM

"The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice."

The United Kingdom of Euchronia

The United Kingdom of Euchronia is a NOT metaphor for WESTERN CIVILIZATION! It is definitely NOT a play on “Uchronia,” a neologism that means “alternate history.” In the intro to Metaphor, you witness the assassination of the reigning king of Euchronia, Hythlodaeus V, in the royal palace. Since his son, the prince, was also “assassinated” years earlier, there’s nobody in succession to take the throne. The presumed assassin, Louis, attempts to usurp the throne with brute force, and he nearly succeeds, until a mysterious “royal magic” stops him, and a massive meteor with the king’s fucking face carved into it appears in the sky and just floats there. The dead king’s voice echoes over the populace, essentially outlining the rules for how a new king will be crowned, which is: the “candidate” with the most popular support from the nation’s citizens will rule over the land.

Thus, the game’s events are set in motion: an election The Tournament for the Throne emerges to crown a new king. You become one of the candidates in order to stop Lord Louis from claiming the throne and killing the prince - your very own best friend.

The United Kingdom comprises multiple locales: Grand Trad, the capital city; Martira, the old castle town; Brilehaven, a port city; Virga Island, a land of natives; and many other little towns that you merely pass through as you traverse all around the nation. Grand Trad feels the most “alive” of all of them; the sweeping fanfare that plays as you skate ride on your sword through the streets makes it the most vibrant city in any RPG since Final Fantasy XII’s Rabanastre (a city, I may add, that’s occupied by hostile forces - maybe they should have called that game Final Fantasy METAPHOR?! Sorry.). There’s a connection to the Vitruvian Man thing here, as the art style, full of broad brush strokes, as well as the motifs of science and academics coming together, are evocative of the Renaissance. Grad Trad looks like it could be London, Rome, Munich… ostensibly any large Renaissance city.

The Eight Tribes

The Eight Tribes of Euchronia are NOT a metaphor for RACISM! Euchronia has eight different types of... “people.” They’ve all got different features (horns, aggressively pointy ears, a third eye on their forehead, respectively), but they’re all, still, well, erm, white. Well, except for that one, who’s, like, gray. Yeah, I can’t say this was executed perfectly, and I think this is the most heavy-handed of all the symbols in the game. All the races speak with different accents too, and most seem to descend from somewhere in or around the UK, aside from the protagonist (and his consciousness fairy Gallica), who speaks like an American, though it’s not like he speaks much. (Neuras, the Ishkia, is easily the coolest character. A codgy old coot whose biggest joy in life is his landrunner/boat/airship thing that he dedicated all his time to and is his emotional attachment. Great facial hair too.) The message here doesn’t seem to be much more than “can’t we all just get along?”

In the midst of making sense of this symbolism was the moment I realized I needed to be cognizant of the lens that I’m viewing the game through. This is a game created by Japanese developers, presenting their interpretation of what a typical western-Renaissance-inspired fantasy setting looks like. And racism in Japan is much, much different than it is in the US. I think a lot of Americans are confused when they visit Japan and experience racism, because it feels so much less vicious there than it does here. I went to restaurants in Japan where they just straight up wouldn’t serve me. Many landlords in Japan will not rent to foreigners. The American lens views this as racism, which is bad. The Japanese lens, it seems, views this as racism, which is good. The liberal ethos tells us to oppose racism, but also to be accepting of other cultures. So what happens when the culture is explicitly racist?

Well, the developers of Metaphor had something to say about that, I guess, but I don’t really know what it was. Other than everyone in the game agrees that the tribe that you, the Protagonist are from - the Elda - is utter shit, the lowest of the low, because the Sanctist Church has branded you so. People shun you in public and make offhand comments about you. You’re never refused service anywhere, but you’re often asked to be on your way. One of the candidates for the throne, a Roussainte (a demographic majority who often carry high ranks and are known for their physical stature), is a straight up Roussainte Supremacist. The game stands up against him, though that isn’t a very tough stance to take. He’s an “anti-multicultural” type of guy who wants to segregate everyone by tribe. This is a similar ideology espoused by the 2011 Norway terrorist. Gallica, your fairy companion, is just like, “Oh no, THAT’s not a good way to think!” It’s a fairly toothless attempt at moralizing.

The Sanctist Church

The Sanctist Church is NOT a metaphor for Christianity ORGANIZED RELIGION! Actually, this one is a little more interesting, because the idea is that the Church is working hand-in-hand with the monarchy to maintain power. I wouldn’t say they’re outright Catholic, even though there is a Pope-like figure (the “Sanctifex”); there are also elements of Christian Scientists (some strident Sanctists reject using medicine in favor of prayer), though the imagery is highly reminiscent of Christianity. I’m actually kinda surprised by the stance the game takes here (not that rejecting religion is out of place in a JRPG, but rather because the developers take a harder moral stance here than they do with other issues), because the message appears to be that Sanctism is a farce. There is an “old world” that proves the Sanctist scriptures to be wrong, and their teachings are debunked over and over. Other religions in Metaphor, like the natives Mustari, which are based more off spirituality and less around teachings and dogmatism (though they all wear cages over their heads), are treated with more respect.

Sanctists deploy the phrase “Closurei” as a greeting which keeps them grounded and reassured about their faith. It doesn’t mean anything, but it keeps them feeling secure, hence the similarity to the word “closure.” It relieves followers' fears and anxieties.

See: “allahu akbar,” “peace be with you”

Humans

Humans are NOT a metaphor for MONSTERS! You see, in the world of Metaphor, people are NOT human. Rather, they’re referred to by the name of their tribe. So, you’ve got your Roussaintes and Clemars, your Paripus and Ishkias, but they’re all just… that. You’d refer to them as a “guy” or “lady” maybe, but never as “human.” Meanwhile, these giant fucked up mutants roam the world, and THOSE are the “humans.” So like. The HUMANS are the monsters actually. I mean, they’re NOT the monsters. Get it???

Lord Louis

Lord Luís Louis Guiabern is NOT a metaphor for DONALD TRUMP! Okay, I'm kinda joking about this one, but at one point, everyone had this knee-jerk reaction, right? Truthfully, Louis just represents demagogues/tyrants as a whole. He’s too clever and smooth to be a total stand in for Trump, because Trump is a bumbling schmuck. Louis wins favor over the population by proclaiming that he will protect everyone from the giant humans that have been recently causing more destruction. He believes not in a god but rather in meritocracy, so this makes him ideologically right-wing, or maybe libertarian. And he literally attacks the Church. He’s signalling that he wouldn’t be a pawn to the Church like the previous king was. “Draining the swamp” innit. He’ll kill you. Honestly, all of this just emphasizes how ordinary Trump is.

Trump meanwhile is explicitly Christian. Or at least he claims to be. He and Louis are both populists who pit classes against each other. By the end of the game, Grand Trad is basically split over whether they support Louis or not, and loyalty to him is a matter of one’s safety. “Even those who may have opposed him at first now counsel that condemning him would be imprudent, as it puts their ‘safety at risk.’” Trump, too, will kill you.

Louis is, for most of the game, a boring villain; not because of his actions, but because you just don’t really learn a lot about him. He fulfills the “totally evil” trope, and while you begin to understand his motivations as you power through the subsequent lore dumps near the endgame, he isn’t THAT much different from your typical fantasy RPG villain. He developed a victim mentality because of trauma, and he wants to exert the fear that he was subjected to back onto the society that subjected him to it. He doesn’t trust others, and he can only imagine a world “apart from himself.” His plight embodies the cycle of abuse. Hmm.

The more interesting characters are his lackeys, Fidelio and Basilio (Faithfulness and Royalty), who joined him because they thought his promises would improve their lives. Fidelio ends up getting killed after stopping Louis from killing some innocent people, ultimately changing his beliefs, and his brother watches him die, thus leading to a change in his morality. The message I get here is “total faithfulness to power is misguided.”

At one point, Strohl says, “A king certainly does his kingdom a disservice by refusing to rule it. But Louis actively defiles it, and that’s clearly the greater offense.” And now we’re just at pathetic, defeatist, “lesser of two evils” rhetoric. This sounds just like status-quo-ass Democrats who do nothing against Republicans who want to destroy the world because of zealotry or some shit. “He’s turned the royal palace into a den of monsters” - yeah, look at Trump’s cabinet. Maybe the message here should be something critical about the monarchy institutions of power and how they should be more heavily scrutinized because of all the violence they propagate. But Metaphor stops short of going that far.

Magla

Magla is NOT a metaphor for FEAR! But also… technology. And I don’t think I’m off base when I say that there’s a direct connection between the two. At one point you journey into an ancient dungeon and learn that there is an entire “old world,” which is the ruins of modern day Shinjuku, Tokyo. And you learn that in the old world, Magla made everyone’s lives easier, but also destroyed the world. The party gazes upon the decrepit husk of a public bus and they’re like, “I bet it took the ancients to all different types of places. It’s so romantic.” They are right. Public transportation unites people.

There is also a “lifeblood” sense to Magla, insofar as it flows through the veins of those with powerful spirits. What’s more, the ruling class monarchy was wielding Magla to brainwash citizens and whip them into a frenzy, making them angry and violent. It “robs them of their rationality.”

Once the concept of “anxiety” is introduced, you learn how Louis weaponizes it to control the population. This might just be a pet peeve of mine, but “anxiety” feels like too weak of a word here. Anxiety is what you feel when you’re an awkward teenager at a party and you think girls are stupid but you also want to make out with them. Bitches voted for Trump because of “economic anxiety.” But the people of Euchronia have been driven to fear, and they’re not just afraid of the future, they’re at each other’s fucking throats. I think the better term for what Metaphor is describing is “angst.” Angst is heavy.

But yeah, technology. Twitter makes you crazy, Instagram makes you insecure, self-driving cars kill children. This should terrify you. The future is bleak. Every week I have to grade 50+ papers, and at least 10 of them shamelessly copy straight from ChatGPT. I got a great idea, Zippy – let’s stop writing this essay, ‘n’ have Claude AI finish it while MAINTAINING OUR UNIQUE VOICE!

Sanctifex Forden declaring he won the Exhibition of the Brave before the tournament is over

Sanctifex Forden declaring he won the Exhibition of the Brave before the tournament is over is NOT a metaphor for PETE BUTTIGIEG DECLARING HE WON THE IOWA CAUCUS IN 2020 BEFORE THE RESULTS WERE RELEASED! Remember that? We all clowned Mayo Pete for it. It turns out there… was never actually a winner? Nobody can agree on who won the vote/delegates, and the Associated Press just straight up decided not to call it?

But yeah, the first portion of the purportedly meritocratic “tournament” that the Church organizes as a way for candidates to garner support from the populace includes something called the “Exhibition of the Brave,” where candidates need to hunt and slay a monster, and present its head in front of a crowd as part of a big extravaganza in the city of Brilehaven. This ends up being a pretty accurate demonstration of how populism works, as well as how power begets power. One candidate slays a giant fish and announces that it’s going to be sliced up and served to the needy, which gains him favor. Forden, the Sanctifex, gains favor by slaying a sea monster that had been tormenting Brilehaven, but he’s only able to do so because he has an entire military under his control; he then tries to end the race altogether while he’s ahead. (Lord Louis, like Trump, doesn’t even bother to participate in the spectacle.)

Isn’t it crazy that you can just lie, and it’s not socially repulsive enough to blacklist you for life? This might be a lib-brained fantasy of mine, but I wish liars were cancelled. We shouldn't tolerate these people. How are we at the point where we still expect presidential candidates to follow through on their campaign promises? Even Trump, who seemed the most sincere about all the cruel wall-building and deportation and lock-her-up shit, barely even followed through. (Edit: I wrote this in December 2024, and... yeah.) You know, I learned a hard lesson about being honest when I was 22, and it changed the way I look at the world. “Honesty is the best policy” is a cliche for a reason.

Dragons

Dragons are NOT a metaphor for INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES! I wrote in my notes that the “Dragon Lance” is a metaphor for wielding power, but I don’t remember this part of the game too well, and I gave my copy of Metaphor to one of my students, so I can’t even access the in-game glossary that serves as its encyclopedia. Whoops. But here, let’s look at this Nathan-For-You ass assassination plot that the party cooks up, with the Dragon Lance as the murder weapon (I just wrote “ass” three times in a row):

The Protagonist

The Protagonist is NOT a metaphor for YOU!

The main character - whose default name is “Will” (*eyeroll*) - travels through the world and interacts with the populace, gaining supporters as he attempts to ascend the throne, hearing their stories, aiding them, doing favors, having debates, and so on. Doing so makes him wiser, more courageous, more imaginative, more tolerant, and more eloquent. Through this, he gains strength, and builds strong relationships. And, like, you did too, like, in your, uh, life, and stuff. Right, Beavis?

The Protagonist carries around a little fantasy novel with him. Most inhabitants of Metaphor's world are perplexed by this, and don’t even really seem to understand the concept of a “book.” The fantasy novel envisions an “ideal world” where people worship whatever gods they want, and also have freedom and something called “democracy,” once again a mostly inconceivable concept to the inhabitants of Euchronia. But, in this fantasy world, war ultimately claimed everything. So it wasn’t really a utopia after all. The Fantasy Novel is NOT a metaphor for the real world.

I could go on forever about what the elements of this game represent. I mean DON’T represent. But, going back to what Steinbeck said, it probably doesn’t even matter what real-world stuff I want to ascribe the in-game stuff to. I’m better off looking inward. I’ll talk about morality in a bit. But first…

GAMEPLAY

"The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

Some virgins Reddit users are eager to declare that the combat system of Metaphor: ReFantazio is “dated.” I might - MIGHT - cede this point, with the qualifier that there’s nothing wrong with getting old, you fucking ageists. I, myself decidedly anti-Reddit, would describe Metaphor's combat as smooth as a Lady Junah’s bottom.

The turn-based combat system has been perfected with the return of the “press turn” mechanic from games like Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, along with seamless transitions, crazy moving visuals, and multiple battle themes that could probably pass for final boss themes in most RPGs. (I’ve said this over and over - a catchy battle theme is so god damn important in an RPG, because you’re gonna be subjected to it for hours. In Metaphor, we’ve got a pseudo-Gregorian choir singing over some type of praying monk who’s apparently chanting in Esperanto, that weird artificial business language that was briefly en vogue during the 90’s. What the absolute fuck is going on here)

Honestly, turn-based combat was near-flawless around Persona 4-5, and Metaphor perfects it. You’ve got elements from SMT, Persona, Tokyo Mirage Sessions… the Atlus greatest hits are all here, baby. The press turn system eliminates the awkward waiting like in most mainline Final Fantasy games, and rewards you for attacking enemies’ weaknesses by awarding you extra turns. Certain job classes Archetypes also give you skills that allow you to manipulate the number of turns you and your enemies receive. Figuring out the strategy needed to succeed in any given battle is challenging.

And let’s be crystal clear here: this is the successor to Persona 5. It’s not a “fantasy game with Persona DNA.” It doesn’t “borrow elements from other Atlus games.” It is a Megami Tensei game. Yes, the little nods to Jack Frost and Soul Hacker are cute, but the adherence to themes about gaining power, tyranny, large-scale change, group psychology, interpersonal relationships, and reincarnation are what give it the honor. It’s Persona and Shin Megami Tensei, one in the same.

I had been waiting to start Metaphor once I finished Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, a game that wasted a lot of my time. Because I grew up enjoying a certain type of RPG (i.e., the original Final Fantasy VII), the changes to the format have left me bitter and curmudgeonly. I understand that the traditional RPG battle - the turn based one - was born out of technical constraints. And now, with the advent of the PS3/4/5, we have the technology to turn battles into Hollywood-looking special-effects fests, with a Xanadu of various damage counters and skill bars everywhere, which definitely looks much sexier in a trailer than your four party members standing in a line waiting for their turn to run up to an enemy, slash them, and then run back to the line. But game developers are not stupid. Just like an aging man, getting fatter, wrinklier, and balder, a certain classiness comes with knowing how to accessorize and style oneself. So, take Metaphor's visually captivating battle screen as if it were a mature, worldly, debonair man, getting a couple of understated piercings, wearing a necklace or two, a decent watch and some bracelets, and overall updating his fashion sense. Tastefully of course.

Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, on the other hand, is like a guy who got a bunch of face tats. It insisted on thrusting me into battles where there were simultaneously 5 million different things to pay attention to: The synergy bar. The enemy’s movements. The seven thousand different five-digit numbers popping up on screen everywhere. The synergy skills (different from synergy bar). Status effects. My teammates’ actions. My ATB bars. The summon bar. Health bar. Limit bar. Stagger bar. Fuck.

Meanwhile, in a Metaphor battle, there’s only ever one action happening on the screen at a time. If I attack, I can immediately measure my attack’s effectiveness. Characters’ max HP usually hovers around 400-700, so if I take damage, it’s easy to tell how much I was affected. Gauging whether my physical or magic attacks are effective on an enemy is simple because there is precisely one number that appears on the screen. This feels like such a stupid thing to praise but it is perhaps the element contributing most to my increased enjoyment of Metaphor than nearly any RPG I’ve played in the last six years. Am I, like, stupid for preferring this? It just feels so damn refreshing. How do so many people prefer the alternative?

But it’s not like the game is even completely stuck in the past in this regard, because Metaphor actually incorporates overworld battles as well. Dungeons are a mixture of the two. The free-form combat is nothing spectacular, but it eases up on some of the tedium of turn-based squad battles all the time. You can basically use it to your advantage and launch a pre-emptive strike on an enemy with well-timed overworld strikes, or you can farm the hell out of items/EXP at certain points where enemies regenerate. I admittedly got way too powerful doing this, to the point where I had to increase the game’s difficulty; dungeons were just too easy. (But don’t be fooled; occasionally you’ll be cakewalking through a temple when some overpowered mofo’er with a giant frying pan comes through, grants himself 9 consecutive turns in battle, hits a couple of your weaknesses, and wipes your party out before you can say “Closurei.”)

I would be remiss if I discussed Metaphor without addressing the concept of Archetypes. It’s basically the wet dream of anyone who enjoyed the job system in Final Fantasy Tactics. The game presents you with some typical job classes common to RPGs: at the start, you get the knight, mage, thief, warrior, seeker (kind of an “all-around” type), and you unlock more later on. You acquire these via meeting people along your journey: for example, Hulkenberg, a sworn protector of the throne, embodies the “knight” archetype. When she joins your party forms a bond with you, your souls are intertwined, and you are able to “study” her archetype, granting you the statistics and skills native to that job class (in this case, increased defense, skills that are designed to protect your teammates, etc.) As you meet various major and minor characters along the way, you form bonds with them and begin to embody their traits, making you a more well-rounded individual. More on this later.

What ends up happening is you’re able to inherit skills from the different Archetypes as you spend more time in battle with them and gain specific Archetype EXP, though inheriting skills does feel laborious. As you learn skills, you’re able to use them even if you’ve switched to a different Archetype. So, you might study the Mage lineage with one character, decide that the particular dungeon you’re in is better suited for the “Gunner” lineage, but want to hang onto the ice Blizz magic that you got from the mage because enemies in the current dungeon are weak to ice. So, you switch your archetype to Gunner, but you choose Blizz to occupy one of the extra skill slots that the Gunner Archetype allotts you. As you study Archetypes further, you’re allotted more slots, allowing you to combine different skills from the different Archetypes you’ve studied. It’s highly customizable. You can’t switch Archetypes mid-battle, but you can swap out party members, so you can be prepared for pretty much everything if you put in the time. What I do notice is that I quickly max out the Archetypes that I like, and I don’t enjoy the ones that I need to improve (*ahem* Commander). Thankfully the game’s menus are cool to look at, because you spend a lot of time in them. (The game switches your equipment automatically any time you change archetypes, nullifying any carefully crafted sets you’ve put together. A pox upon this.)

“Studying” archetypes happens in a place - maybe another dimension - called Akademia. It’s a library, anchored by a guy named… uh… “More.” Like… I want to learn… More? Oh no, Zippy – Do we need to unpack th’ NEOLIBERAL POLITICS of th’ GROWTH MINDSET?! Oh, wait, he’s a stand-in for Sir Thomas More, who's the... author of a... fantasy novel... called... Utopia. I mean, he’s, uh, NOT a stand-in for him.

Dungeon crawling is a significant part of the gameplay loop, too. The main story makes you go through 5-6 dungeons, and there are plenty of optional ones as well. There seems to be three types of dungeons that the optional ones fall into: an underground tomb where you need to discover hidden passages, a forest with a bunch of branching paths, and a big spire with different enemies on every floor. These get old pretty fast. I’d usually be able to clear them out in 15-20 minutes. Resource management factors heavily here, as if you run out of MP before you finish a dungeon, you’ll be in a real bind, since magic attacks are generally much more effective than physical. And having to leave a dungeon early means you have to return on another day, which denies you a day in town where you can spend time with followers, increase statistics, and so on.

(This mechanic exposes a gameplay flaw, insofar as how entering a dungeon while overpowered and clearing it out yields very little in terms of EXP and reward. So I found that the only way to make a dungeon like this feel worthwhile was to spend hours farming gold with the “Merchant” Archetype equipped. This felt like a waste of time, and it was mostly motivated by not wanting to lose any precious calendar days. I feel like I always run into this problem with Megami Tensei games, and I mitigate it by finding podcasts or video essays to focus on while I basically wasted my day away.)

The final stretch of the game is a month where you’re given a lot of time to tie up any loose ends. The game follows the same calendar system that Persona 3 introduced, where you’ve got dozens of options on what to do during any given day (spend time with a follower? Enter a dungeon? Sit at a scenic vista and increase your wisdom? Enter a hot spring with your colleague and relax non-homoerotically?) except the days have names like “Flamesday” and “Idlesday” and weeks are only five days long. If you've played Persona games before, you'll know how to be strategic in your use of time, but Metaphor is REALLY forgiving here. I ended up just putzing around for the last two weeks in-game, doing literal laundry to raise my HP and doing the battle challenges at the coliseum. The 30-consecutive-battle challenge can kiss my ass.

(Can I say: I got a PS5 this summer with three games, all RPGs. One of them was Persona 3: Reload. I was excited for that, because Persona 3 was a game that I really enjoyed, but also suffered from some significant flaws, making it a perfect candidate for a remake.

There is no longer a chance of me playing Persona 3: Reload any time soon. These 120 hour games - half of which are cutscenes - are exhausting. I swear to god, there were multiple Saturdays where I woke up at 8AM, turned on Metaphor, and sat there watching cutscenes until lunchtime. Enough.)

MORALITY

"Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real."

The fantasy novel you carry around is read by both the Protagonist and by Lord Louis. Whereas you the Protagonist comes away from it with hopes of idealism and prosperity, Louis sees nihilism. So you’ve got two people who want to solve the same problem, but have wildly different ideas for the proper methods to do so. It’s a synecdoche for modern political discourse. Uh oh, Zippy – we’ve gotta do something about drug addiction… should we KILL IMMIGRANTS or PROVIDE HEALTHCARE?!

A video game puts you in control of a story’s protagonist more than a book or movie does, insofar as you have to physically guide their actions. In a book, the words are already there. Your participation is pretty much passive. Same with a movie. But a game makes you do it. It’s you who’s gotta press that joystick forward, who’s gotta choose to attack that enemy, or to trek across the world map. Everyone’s experience is a little different this way. Typically, games have a moral protagonist (there are of course exceptions such as Undertale and Drakengard - which, not coincidentally, is the name of Metaphor's largest dungeon, one that took me 10 god damn hours, with nary a save point). You're generally gonna be the good guy.

This is where I run into an issue with Metaphor. The Shin Megami Tensei games essentially thrive on allowing the player to determine their own morality, usually by presenting a path of law and order or chaos and frenzy. So, these games have silent protagonists, effectively letting your choices determine the character’s personality, alignment, etc. I’ll never forget playing my first game in the series, Nocturne, and being so repulsed by the three “paths of reason” the game offered that I chose to align with none of them, ultimately granting me the worst ending and denying me the ability to even fight the final boss. Couldn’t even re-load an earlier save. Damn you, Atlus.

Anyway, the same “silent protagonist” trope more-or-less applies in Metaphor. But the problem here is that you’re a candidate in an election, and the people need to hear from you. So this creates a paradox. It feels contrived when your cohorts and followers all adore and praise you, but you’ve never really said anything to them, aside from the pithy dialogue choices you’re given. You have Gallica in your ear, sort of acting as your mouthpiece, but it feels more like she’s just telling you what to think. Your cohorts deem you to be their captain, even referring to you as such. Actions speak louder than words, I guess? But… you just stand there mutely nodding.

YOUR TEAMMATES ARE THE ONES WHO HAVE ALL THE IDEAS! It’s Strohl’s idea to assassinate Louis. It’s Basilio’s idea to disguise yourself as the prince. All you can do is agree. You’re supposed to be a leader, yet your teammates make decisions for you. You don’t even announce your own candidacy to be king; Hulkenberg does it for you, declaring that you are the heir to the throne… “He has risen to vanquish evil!” she proclaims to the masses. You’re more like a figurehead being steered by advisors. (THAT’S A METAPHOR!) Wouldn’t this be more powerful if you just said it yourself?

Plus, the writing is stilted because of the issue of voice acting. Since you decide your character’s name, it can’t be uttered by any of the voice actors. So they call you awkward names like “Captain” and “Lad.” It worked in Persona 5 because everyone had appropriate codenames, and yours was Joker. But here it’s unnatural because they’re not writing about the main character; they’re writing around him. This is where some kind of “branching path” where you develop a platform and slogan would be effective.

This problem arises because the game is trying to immerse you. It’s trying to make you the actual protagonist. And because of massive 4k TVs, VR, and powerful consoles, this is pretty much industry standard by now. Most games do it. They want you right in the middle of the action. But I think it hinders Metaphor here. Trying to put me in the spotlight detracts from the potential character development of our protagonist. We're being immersed at the expense of the narrative. I really think it's time to reckon with "immersiveness." We need to move to uh... demersify?… we’ll workshop that. Regardless, we could all benefit from a little less attention. I am fine with taking a back seat and watching another character develop. Give them a history. Give them flaws. Make them interesting, dammit.

One way to mitigate the inherent immersiveness that’s pretty ubiquitous among modern games is to rethink how the camera functions. Most games these days give you full, 360 degree control of them. And I submit that this, subconsciously, gives you too much control. Your guy can stand there while you literally make the world revolve around him with your right joystick. It makes you feel like everything is happening around you. But it doesn’t need to.

Let me try to better illustrate this concept with the PlayStation 5 remake of 2001’s Silent Hill 2. Whereas on the original PlayStation 2, the technology didn’t completely exist to give you that flawless 360 degree control that you get on the PlayStation 5, so the game relied on static environments and fixed camera angles as you guide the protagonist, James, through the disorienting, liminal, moribund town of Silent Hill. The effect here is that the camera being detached from him gives you, the player, a feeling of detachment. Which, for Silent Hill 2, is a good thing. The game isn’t about you; it’s about James. You’re watching a guy succumb to his psychological demise. You’re fine though; you’re at home on your couch. Meanwhile, the remake gives you that control back. Ostensibly for gameplay reasons, I guess? But the effect is that you lose the voyeuristic aesthetic that worked so well in the original. And maybe there’s value in that. Maybe they wanted to present the story differently, I don’t know. I haven’t even played the remake. But NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ABOUT ME! I am a selfless in-da-vidge-you-ull.

There are moments in Metaphor where the camera actually does pull back and into a secured position. And these moments are striking. It’s time for this to become commonplace, I say. There used to be whole RPGs like this. One of my biggest complaints of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth was that it just felt like any old PS5 game, not a remake of the greatest god damn game of all time. Let’s contain the self-development stuff to Persona, yeah? And for a new IP like Metaphor? A perfect opportunity for the player to be an audience to someone else’s development. Place the player in the position of a normal citizen and let us watch the competition unfold, even. I don’t know.

The camera showing your party ascending the Heavenly Staircase of the Grand Cathedral gives you an immense sense of scale at the beginning of the game. More of this, please.

The game itself takes hard moral stances more than you do. For example, there is a moment where the party discovers that a high-ranking church official has been kidnapping children, and they find out that it’s more or less because of her own personal grief. When you capture her, you hear her out, and the game humanizes her. Your party sympathizes with her while also planning to bring her to justice, with your cohort, Strohl, saying, “We don’t want to instigate a public stoning.” And then the game makes its morality clear: she’s executed in public without a trial. She faces swift justice from the state, at your hands. There should be no retribution for people like her. Yet, the writers moralized here, not me. Which I’d be fine with – if there wasn’t such an emphasis on my morality.

The best attempts the game makes at giving your character an actual ideology are during the (optional) moments where you give political speeches to the townspeople. It involves making dialogue choices about what your platform is and how you would address the problems that that specific audience is facing. Usually there is a populist option - something that is designed to rile people up in the way that Trump does, by getting them pissed off and shifting blame regarding problems in society, but not actually offering concrete solutions. I would choose these options thinking they’d be successful, because I’ve seen them have success in the real world, and this is how I understand mass political messaging to work, but every time I chose this option, the crowd would see through it. They’d call it a load of poppycock. It’s another area where I wonder if there’s a cultural difference between the Japanese developers and an American audience: I imagine the average Japanese citizen of voting age is a little more cognizant or thoughtful or educated than the average American voter who’s prone to that kind of populist propaganda. In the game’s isolated island nation of tribal people who reject the state religion, I told them I would protect them if I were king, to which they responded positively. Wait a damn moment, Zippy – is it possible that PERSPECTIVE develops due to one’s INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES ‘n’ UPBRINGING?

I just don’t think the “empty vessel” protagonist works here. This guy is going to become King for Christ’s sake. He needs beliefs, and strong ones at that. His only personality traits are that he looks cool hovering around on his sword in the towns and that he’s heterochromatic.

Let me return to that “branching path” idea I mentioned earlier. What if they harkened back to Nocturne and provided the player with three paths to go down? How about this:

Path #1: someone who sincerely wants to alleviate the problems of the downtrodden, but is opposed by the ruling class because he threatens their power.

Path #2: a fundamentalist, crazed, religious zealot who attributes peoples’ hardships to what he believes are their sins, and quickly cultivates a rabid following.

Path #3: someone who appears calm, sensible, and moderate, but prioritizes not upsetting people rather than taking principled stances. They stand to be the voice of reason by reinforcing the status quo.

The writers can still moralize here, because ultimately they control the script. Give the neo-nazi the worst ending. Make the difficulty less challenging/less rewarding if you choose the more spineless options. That’s my suggestion for a way forward, at least.

(Side note: This game took me 145 hours to complete. Please don’t make a Metaphor 2.)

Say what you will about the tenets of Sanctism, Dude. At least it’s an ethos.

THEMES

"Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted,” which I suggest to you is not an accidental term."

Courage, tolerance, wisdom, eloquence, imagination - these are the “royal virtues” the game requires you to develop in order to further the relationships you have with your followers. All of these traits are required to be a strong leader of people, but the game is trying to emphasize that you first must practice them personally to ensure that you are a well-rounded person before you can command others. You need to wield these values over yourself to overcome your own fears and anxieties. Being a ruler - a good ruler - is largely about leading your subjects through their own fears. A bad ruler wields fear to gain power and imparts more fear on his subjects to retain it.

The emphasis on social links followers isn’t new to Persona games, and they’re one of its strongest features. I swear to God, these games are propaganda for the concept of “networking,” and they’re right. I feel like so many people who play Atlus games are shut-ins. There’s a stigma around anime, and it’s one reason I would rather write an interminable, meandering essay about a game with an anime art style instead of discussing it in real life. But one of the overarching messages is how having a strong community and support system around you makes you a better and stronger person. And it is correct. You ever hear women say that one of the most attractive qualities in a man is simply having a group of friends? It’s because it makes you a better person. “It’s good to have friends” - yeah, I know I’m reinventing the wheel here, but maybe it’s beneficial for the hikikomori to hear that every once in a while. I met a guy from the Middle East at a concert in New York ten years ago, and we got along pretty well. Ended up exchanging contact info, met up maybe once after that and then went on our way. I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing this, and an email just showed up from him; now, I have a contact and probably a place to stay if I’m ever in the Middle East. Imagine that.

One of the game’s final messages seems to be one about leading a thoughtful life. A life where before you can focus on others, you must focus on yourself. Ultimately, this game is about leading people, and the game is communicating that before you’re able to rule over people, you must be able to rule over your own mind. Your own body. Your own thoughts and actions and the consequences they will wreak on yourself, on your environment, and on your cohorts. What to pay attention to. How the individual contributes to the whole, and how the makeup of those individuals determines the direction in which the collective will go. Electoral politics will lead to change, yes, but the most significant, the most personal change in your life, will come from you.

If you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars – compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.

This is Katsura Hashino’s magnum opus. He left the studio that made Persona, a wildly successful franchise, to make this game. It’s his encyclopedic novel, his Gravity’s Rainbow, his Ulysses. It is biblical. Hashino, in addition to commenting on the human condition, is commenting on his artistic medium itself. The thing he’s dedicated his life to: video games. And now he’s asking you what their value is. How much you value them. What value you place on the very games you play. The narrative’s heavy focus on the problem of “anxiety” exists to offer “fantasy” as a solution to it. As a force that frees people from it. It’s Hashino acknowledging the outright misery of the machinations that control the world and offering you respite in their presence. This is how he altered his reality, and how you can shape yours. You find strength in the fantasies that stir you, because they don’t have to remain as fantasies in your head.

Maybe, when you’re done playing a game, you put the controller down and get on with your day. God knows I do. You’ve had dishes sitting in the sink for a few days, so you scrub them, dry them, put them away in the cupboard, pack your lunch for the next day, maybe do some reading, and go to bed. Maybe after you put your PS5 into rest mode, you take a shower, pick an outfit that matches, and meet up with your friends for a birthday celebration at the bar down the street. Many of us are old enough to have kids now, so maybe you spend some of the only quiet hours you get during the day relaxing with the old Nintendo before you have to go and pick up your kid from school. Once the game is off, maybe your focus shifts to whatever’s next on your calendar.

But, maybe, in one of the dull moments while you’re scrubbing a day-old egg off a frying pan, maybe a line of dialogue from the game you just played finds its way into your head, and just kind of rattles around in there a couple times. You keep scrubbing, and you also keep thinking about that line. Maybe the bar you went to is beat, and you’re staring off at a stain on a seat cushion, thinking about the boss battle you just lost and what you need to do to beat it next time, while a friend of a friend you just met is spending fifteen minutes painstakingly describing their banal workday routine to you. Maybe you pick up your kid from school and bring her to a playground. You watch her climb around, run, and laugh, and then she gets into an argument with another kid about sharing the swings. You don’t intervene, but rather you just observe, and they solve the problem on their own. As they continue to swing, operating under the contract they've just negotiated, you remember back to your days of playing Zelda on Nintendo 64, and the frustration you felt trying to solve the problems in the dungeons therein. But then you also remember the feeling of satisfaction and pride at having figured out those puzzles by yourself. You look upon your own child, just having solved a dilemma on her own, and you feel a connection to her greater than what you can express.

You think about these games because the moments you spent with them led you here. They became part of you. And now you use them to create your own meaning. Your own art. Your own stories. Your reality.

Maybe the metaphors aren’t so ham-fisted after all. Ham-handed? Ham sandwich? Reality is a… whatever.

?

"Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me."

At least once a year, I re-read this short story by Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s about a perfectly balanced utopia whose marvel is predicated upon the existence of a single miserable child locked in a basement, of whom all the citizens are aware. I first read it in a college literature class I was taking just to get my GPA up, during a period in my life where I wasn’t very receptive to education, and with a professor who stopped class on the first day to yell at me for walking in late. I only wanted an A in the class to spite this professor, and I wasn’t particularly interested in the class content, yet despite my efforts, I was drawn to Le Guin’s extended metaphor. I could liken the wondrous city of Omelas and its splendid festivals to the United States and all the pleasures and excess we enjoy as Americans. I could liken the miserable child, accepted by all as the essence of the splendor, but always pushed to the back of - but never out of - the mind, to our military-industrial war machine, always in pursuit of profits as they destroy actual human lives in far off, incomprehensible places. I could liken the spectators’ disgust to my own disgust at the havoc my country wreaks under the guise of keeping me safe. I could liken the ones who “walk away” to the dissenters, protestors, speakers of truth-to-power, the people who get jailed for standing up for justice and exposing the ghouls who keep the necks of the oppressed under their boots. And I could argue this endlessly, without ever being proven right or wrong. Such is the beauty of the metaphor.

“Omelas” changed me. It awakened in me the idea that I can dissent from society and see the rot at its core. It gave me something to strive towards. And it made me slightly less of a little brat. This is the power of fantasy to me.

I can trace a lot of who I am back to the different video game fantasy worlds I’ve travelled to. I played XenoGears and I thought about the ethical implications of religion. I played ICO and I thought about companionship. I played Mother 3 and I thought about my mom.

I keep including excerpts from David Foster Wallace’s This is Water because his point is that these extended metaphors that we use to impart wisdom - what he calls “didactic little parable-ish stories” - are how we make meaning out of our lives. Though they seem trivial, they actually have a life-or-death importance. They help us express ourselves because sometimes using literal language is too difficult or too outright painful to do. But figurative language is comforting. It lets us express a feeling that something gave us, without naming the thing outright. And we need to express ourselves.

If Katsura Hashino released a MANIFESTO: ReFantazio instead of a full-blown game, it would probably be a screed about his thoughts and feelings about video games and fantasy and government and reality and whatever else. Sure, it might be interesting, but it wouldn’t immerse include us in the same way that a layered work of art does. Isn’t it more powerful for him to put a fantastical buffer between us and his beliefs, and allow us - his audience - to create our own meaning out of it? The point is, figurative language (and art) is powerful because we don’t have to explicitly say what we’re referring to when we deploy it. In fact, it feels safer not to. And if you can translate your feelings into a figurative vision - like a video game full of symbolism - and release that vision onto the world, you affect someone else’s life. You form a connection. And isn’t connection, like, what we all want, or something?

That’s my take on it, at least. And you are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish.

back home, zippy?

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