I will not be finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Primarily because it leaves GamePass in like four days.

Aside from that, there are a couple other things working against ReFantazio. The biggest of which is the fact that I literally finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a week or so prior. In many ways, Expedition 33 felt like a repudiation (or perhaps more charitably, a “reimagining”) of the classical JRPG formula. I disliked the dodge/parry mechanics in Expedition 33… but will admit it has been a bit more challenging than expected going back to a fully turn-base system. Watching enemies just sorta attack me and being unable to do anything but take the hits feels bad now.

Exacerbating things, ReFantazio has a sort of rock-paper-scissures punishing design. Instead of everyone getting a single turn apiece, there are turn “orbs” that only get half used if a given attack/spell happens to trigger the target’s weakness. For example, if you cast a Fire attack against an enemy weak to Fire, your next character can use the remaining “half-turn” to pile on the damage. So, theoretically, if you were facing a boss with a weakness to Fire and all your characters had Fire attacks, you could get six turns in a row.

Problem is, this also works the other way around. Enemy hits your entire squad with an AoE attack and any of your characters happen to be weak against the damage type? Bam, extra attack, which could very well be another AoE one. Later on, if one of your attacks gets Absorbed or Reflected or whatever, you actively lose extra turns, because fuck you, apparently.

This sort of design is interesting… on paper. One of the principle conceits of the game is that any of your teammates can channel any of the Archetypes (read: jobs) you have unlocked. Recruit a knight-looking dude that literally starts out with the Knight Archetype? Make him a Mage. Make your whole team a Mage! Characters can also “inherit” skills from other Archetypes as well to really get some combos going. The problem is that all of this revolves around either looking things up ahead of time, or getting unpleasantly surprised by getting smacked around. There is even an in-game feature that shows you what the most-used composition was across all players for the dungeon you are about to enter, pseudo-Dark Souls style. Which… thanks, I guess?

The real nail in the coffin for me though are the time limits.

I have railed for years against plots premised on fake time-sensitivity – “rescue Ciri before it’s too late! Or take a few weeks questing, whatever” – so you would be forgiven for assuming I want actual deadlines. I do not. At least, not in long-form games like RPGs. So imagine my dismay when in the first post-tutorial section of ReFantazio I get notice that I must clear the dungeon within 10 days or else I lose the game. Also, each day is divided into two parts, so you can talk to one person in the morning, another in the evening, then time passes. Dungeon delving takes a full day though.

Is it a serious, tight deadline which you must relentlessly optimize? Probably not. But it was enough of a mental friction point that I wanted to look up what happened if you beat the dungeon early, which inevitably led to spoiling elements of the dungeon, and at a certain point the game unraveled, reductio ad absurdum style to the paint-by-numbers that it was. Stack Mages at this part, then switch to Brawlers, farm infinitely respawning enemies at this next bit because the final mobs are level 20, etc, etc, etc. I was already primed to grind levels considering the timer otherwise makes it more difficult to do so later, but seeing the solutions already laid out ahead of me flipped a switch into the off position.

Overall, it is probably my own loss. The plot looked interesting, I loved the frequent anime interludes, the UI is pleasingly hyper-stylized. It has a 94 Metacritic score, for god’s sake. Which, is somehow 2 points higher than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by the way.

But I’m really, really not in the mood for another lengthy game that is a chore to actually play, and certainly not when it’s leaving Game Pass in a few days. Metaphor: ReFantazio will either come back, get in a cheap bundle, or I’ll catch it on Youtube.