Metaphor Re:Fantazio and RPG Balance

The last 20 hours of Metaphor Re:Fantazio were intensely frustrating to me on a mechanical level, and I want to talk about why, partially because I can't tell if there's been some adjustment to my taste or if there are actually pretty strong design flaws about the game.

My assumptions as a player

I think I bring some baggage to any RPG that I play, and it's something that's evolved over time, but I have a complicated relationship to grind. For a long time I think I had an intense aesthetic objection to grind because I considered it to be a degenerate design pattern. I don't mean that as a value judgement, but instead to mean a design decision that creates a strategy that clearly beats out other strategies. In an RPG, a designer is creating a whole bunch of interconnected systems to influence moment-to-moment and long term decision making, resource management, and strategy, and all of these things tend to be completely trivialized by grinding, which let the player beat the resource and power constraints of the game through drudgery.

I've softened on this position, partly because I realize how difficult it is to build a turn-based RPG without grind, and partly because I have a better appreciation for how grind can texture an experience. It's a part of the designer's toolbox and can help serve as a self-balancing mechanism if a player falls behind. It's also kind of unavoidable! As players we've been socialized for decades to recognize places where we can get resources, items, or XP in tight little loops, breaking the power curve of an RPG very often feels like a core part of RPG strategy.

That said, I usually try to avoid grind as much as possible. I like combat challenging, and I want to have to think about item scarcity, I'm interested in what constraints the game is placing on me.

What does Metaphor want you to do?

1) Change your party composition. The game tutorializes this extensively and a huge amount of combat encounters require rearranging you character archetypes (and later your actual party makeup as well). Combat is fairly puzzly and exploiting enemy vulnerabilities is very often encouraged.

2) Learn the fight by doing the fight. Metaphor provides you with a rewind function and the strengths and weaknesses of enemies are recorded as you find them, so rewinding a fight a few times while you cycle through elements and buff/debuff combinations is afforded!

3) Learn the fight by leaving the fight. Metaphor doesn't have a lot of affordances here. Sometimes you just don't have what you need to win a fight, and you have to reload a save. This is tedious enough that I tended to avoid it unless it was absolutely necessary, but you will often end up in a fight without knowing what you'll need to win it.

4) Manage your calendar, sort of, I guess You have a finite amount of time and a bunch of quests and activities within which to do that time. A lot of dungeons are structured around the assumption that you will take several days to complete them, and player resources (especially MP) are finite, heavily pushing you towards returning. Calendar management is a core part of the loop, though I'll argue that you're not really given enough information to do it effectively.

How does Metaphor undermine what it wants you to do?

Archetype selection gets slower and broader, which makes it harder to be able to solve a given combat challenge. I think the early combat design is quite good, where the system teaches you about itself and gives you opportunities to experiment. The number of archetypes available are really narrow, so combat can be designed around those choices. As the game progresses, archetypes are locked behind relationships and levels. By late game there's no way to reasonably assume that the player has access to, say Heartbreak Strategem, which lets you stop enemies from casting barriers that reflect damage. These problems, taken together, push the player to grind.

The player isn't given enough information to effectively plan around the calendar. I think this harms that entire section of gameplay in a few ways. On the one hand, there are calendar choices (your various royal stats, king attributes, idk what they're called and will not look them up), which all more or less need to be completed but are largely interchangable (except for prioritizing specific character relationships). Beyond that, it feels like there's an implicit order to side quests and the player is left to discover them. Both of these are alleviated by grind.

Grind undermines combat. If you're a couple levels ahead of the enemies in a dungeon, then you can avoid the vast majority of combat. If you're a few levels behind in combat, fights can be arduous, sometimes taking 10s of minutes to fail. Neither of these conditions is particularly fun to me, and it feels like grind is used to compensate against these two conditions.

I messed up

I'm about halfway through Shin Megami Tensei IV and have enjoyed its level of challenge, so I decided to start Metaphor on hard. Early in the game this was pretty rewarding! I had to rebuild my party early and often and learn the systems before proceeding. I also found out that hard reduces the amount of XP the player earns, which is at extreme cross-purposes with how I want to play. I switched to normal later in the game to correct for some hours of lost experience. I think this difficulty option ALSO undermines the game's systemic goals. I would have liked to see it called out, but I still think it's a bad design decision.

Did I not like Metaphor or do I not like modern JRPG design?

I don't play enough RPGs to have a strong feeling for how common these tensions are. Metaphor seems to be critically well received so I don't feel like my issues are broadly felt. Did you beat it? Did you like it? Let me know what you think.