Can Metaphor: ReFantazio change the world, just a little bit? Its creator hopes so

Game creator Yoko Taro, best known for his game Nier: Automata and his commitment to wearing a mask in public, recently shared high praise about Katsura Hashino, producer and director of the Persona series. “Hashino really knows his stuff,” Taro said. “He believes that games are essential to making the world a better place.”

Hashino’s new game, Metaphor: ReFantazio, appears to embody that philosophy about the medium, maybe more so than his previous work. Metaphor is a fantasy story about tribalism and racial tension, about deposing a power-hungry leader, and about winning an election. Personal growth and strengthening interpersonal bonds are core to both the game’s narrative and its gameplay mechanics.

“Yoko may have exaggerated a bit, but in my opinion, games are a different sort of medium from movies and anime,” Hashino said through a translator in a recent interview with Polygon. “Players themselves become the protagonist. In that way, they’re a way for the player to earn [experience] for their own lives. And since experiences change people’s lives, for better or worse, they are a factor in how society itself is shaped. Though the games we make are just a tiny part of that, it’s what we think about when we make games.”

Hashino, speaking in a video call, said that players might need motivation themselves to change, or to overcome their anxieties. “I want games that I make to be able to provide that push to people to exceed those [limitations],” he said.

Metaphor: ReFantazio is a foray into traditional fantasy, a contrast from the modern-day, supernatural worlds of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games that Hashino and his team worked on in the past. Hashino said that the impetus to pursue a fantasy game came down to his team’s wishes. They all wanted to make a fantasy game, he said.

“I started asking them, ‘Why do you like fantasy?’ And nobody had a really clear answer,” Hashino explained. “Everybody was a little bit vague. So I got really curious about this idea of fantasy and what makes it so compelling and attractive to people.”

Hashino himself didn’t have a great answer to that question either.

“I didn’t really know much about fantasy, [but] I ended up meeting up with a bunch of different Japanese fantasy creators,” he explained. “What I ended up learning from this is that what they thought about fantasy, and what people seem to like about fantasy, is that it’s a very free medium where you can do anything that you want to do — it’s not limited by the real world in any way.

“One of the people I talked to about this was [Ikuto] Yamashita [the designer for Neon Genesis Evangelion], and he said, ‘Don’t let yourself be hemmed in.’ That really helped me make the decision to take Metaphor in our own direction.”

Even without the limitations of the real world, Hashino said the Metaphor team took inspiration from it. The journey of the protagonist and his allies was modeled after a road trip, and inspired by “how modern people enjoy vacations.” And while Hashino stresses that “Metaphor is not the real world” but the different tribes in the game’s are inspired by the people of our world.

“We decided that it would be really interesting to split up different tribes by personality type,” he explained, “to diverge from the kind of standard flow of fantasy and make it our own take on the genre.”

Hashino said that the personality traits that define the tribes of Metaphor are based on modern Japanese society. One tribe is based on older Japanese people who “try to push their values on young people and make them follow in their tracks.”

“Then there’s a group of people who have trouble speaking their mind and putting their emotions and their thoughts out there. In Japanese we call them ‘muttsuri.’ We formed a tribe around them,” Hashino said. “The long-eared tribe of characters are based around the personality trait that, in Japanese, we call ‘yujufudan,’ which means indecisive. Basically a group of people who don’t really have any opinions of their own but are very quick to [agree with another’s opinion].”

Hashino said that the Metaphor team didn’t strictly follow the templates of Persona and Shin Megami Tensei games when deciding the direction of their new title. Instead, they worked toward fulfilling the ideas of their original fantasy concept. “We didn’t look at our previous games and calculate, OK, this is what we want to keep, this is what we want to take out,” he said. That meant cutting or altering some familiar mechanics that wouldn’t work in the world of Metaphor — including romance, which does not play a part in the game’s story.

“We have to create games where protagonists form connections with people along their journey,” he said. “They can’t do it alone; they need support. That hasn’t changed throughout our games, but the difference between Metaphor and Persona is that in Persona, you’re playing as teenagers — love and romance is part of that experience.”

Added Hashino, “For Metaphor, we didn’t really aim to be more mature or grown up, but the goal that the character’s trying to do is more large scale and epic. There isn’t really time for love. When you’re aiming to be a sovereign, you can’t go off [on dates]. Instead of having these loving relationships, you instead have people who are going to support you as a leader, [and] through their support, you unlock these heroic qualities inside you. That fuels the battle system and everything else.

“But maybe in the end it is a little bit more mature than our previous games.”