Persona 6: How It Can Learn from Metaphor: ReFantazio

Fans of Atlus have been craving the next mainline entry into the Persona series. Following the massive success of Persona 5 and its subsequent spin offs and enhanced ports, Atlus has been able to expand into new franchises and greatly improve the quality and production of their existing ones. One such new franchise is Metaphor: ReFantazio, the newest game made by the director of the Persona series, Katsura Hashino. Despite its medieval fantasy setting, it's very much closer to a Persona game than anything else Atlus has made, due to the nature of the systems in the game and how the progression works. I've been having a blast with this game, and now that I've done everything the game has to offer except the final boss, I will be going over my favourite aspects of Metaphor that I hope to see in future entries of the Persona series.

A College Setting

In Japan, high school life is very much romanticized and revered across all forms of media. Whether that's many anime series taking place in high school, JRPGs often following the life of teens, and more, it's clear that this trend is embedded into the culture itself.

This is due to the work culture prevalent in Japan. Many Japanese people view high school as the last time they have freedom in their lives while still being able to have fun, before the corporate world and work consumes them whole. Japanese college culture does offer more freedom but less time, so that allure of care-free living isn't there.

I, along with many other fans of the series have expressed interest in seeing a Persona game set in college with college students. All of the previous entries of Persona since Persona 3 have taken place in high school, and many fans have grown from high schoolers to adults and want to have the series grow in the same way.

The cast of Metaphor really showcased a wonderful group of older party members. The youngest characters in the game are Will, the protagonist and Eupha, where the former was said to be around 18 and the latter was said to be around the same age as Will. Meanwhile the rest of the cast range from young adult men and women to older men who could be grandparents to the protagonist. Atlus took a different direction here since this wasn't explicitly a Persona game, and it's been well-received by the general community.

The Persona 2 duology did something similar, having an interesting and varied cast of characters, with most being adults. Many people praise this game as having the best story out of all the Persona games, but sadly it did not sell very well, being the lowest selling games in the franchise at roughly 285,000 copies sold. To put that into perspective, the games released in the Persona 5 series have been estimated to have sold over 10 million copies as of November 2023, with the number likely being much higher by now.

Due to Atlus knowing how popular the high school formula has been since Persona 3, it's not very likely that they will deviate from this in Persona 6. However, there may still be hope for having other playable adult characters, as Toshiro and Zenkichi are both very beloved adult party members in their respective spin off titles.

Streamlined Social Link Options

One of the best new features of Metaphor: ReFantazio was the much more streamlined Bond/Social Link system. In previous Persona games, when you would spend time with characters in Social Links, many dialogue options were given. Depending on the character's personality, they would respond more positively to certain dialogue options over the other. These options would give points, where the more favoured dialogue options give a lot of points, while some didn't give any points at all. Depending on how many points you got, you may or may not have been able to progress the Social Link for subsequent visits. This would mean that the next time you visit that character, you would then be put into a generic event that would give you a bunch of points. As we know with the Persona games, time is money, and having to waste a limited calendar day for this could mean falling behind or potentially missing content entirely. In order to min-max and make sure you don't miss a day, you'd have to look up a guide just to see what the correct option is, or reload a save until you've found the right option. This would also remove a lot of player expression, as players would be shoehorned into only selecting a few optimal dialogue choices as opposed to the one that they might really want.

Metaphor: ReFantazio has a similar point system, where characters give different points depending on what you say to them. What's different however, is that the points don't affect future levels of the Bond. They only change how much extra magla you get from the time spent, an easily obtainable currency used to unlock Archetypes and inherit skills for characters. This allows you to relax and not have to worry about making the "correct" dialogue choice.

Character Availability

Another thing that I believe the Persona series can do better is the character availability. Not every single character in the game is available to hang out on any given calendar day. Some characters are only available at specific days and at specific times of said day, with the game not giving you any indication of when they're available. This puts a lot of pressure on the player to effectively plan out and schedule when they're going to spend time with one character or the other, as opposed to a more natural approach of spending time with characters or doing activities as it feels right.

Metaphor does away with this system, where every character Bond is available at any given day at their designated day/evening timeslot. The only exception is if you spent time with one character, they won't be immediately available in the next day. This allows players so much more freedom in how they spend their time

More Time To Do Things

The above mentioned changes made in Metaphor really ends up giving players a lot more free time due to less restrictions with how you spend your time. The worst feeling is having to miss core content of the game due to not being perfectly efficient with your time. Whether this is Social Links/Bonds or doing core side quests that challenge you and give good development for characters, it can become easy to miss things like this, especially if you're new to the series. For this, I would like to see Atlus just give more calendar time in general for future entries of the series, so players can breathe and not have to worry as much about being perfectly efficient with their time. In Metaphor, I was able to successfully complete all Bonds/Social Links, max out all Social Stats/Royal Virtues, all side quests, and other major content like the coliseum within the time given in the game. I was stressing out a bit in the last month of the game to be efficient with time, but was able to complete it nonetheless. I believe a newcomer to Atlus games can easily max out all the Royal Virtues and complete all the Bonds in the game without stressing out at all. I'd like to see more time given to players in Persona 6 for this as well, as key character development can be lost if they aren't able to complete all Social Links.

Conclusion

With all this being said, Persona 5 still remains as my favourite video game of all time. It did so many amazing things well, and I'm thankful to Atlus for creating such a masterpiece of a game. The critiques I gave here are purely out of love for the series and a desire to see it grow, and I hope Atlus learns from Metaphor and takes all of this feedback to heart. I'm beyond excited for when Persona 6 releases, and will patiently wait for Atlus' great minds to finish it at their own schedule.