If you enjoy anime as much as I do and want to play it in videogame form, wait no longer as I bring you Metaphor: ReFantazio. Developed by ATLUS and Published by SEGA, now sit back and I’ll tell you a tale of when the humans attacked.

Enter the captivating world of Metaphor: ReFantazio, a fantasy RPG that promises an exciting adventure. With eight tribes spread across the lands, the throne is vacant following the mysterious death of the late king, with no heirs to claim the kingdom’s crown. As the kingdom’s fate hangs in the balance, the responsibility falls on you to fight for the throne and shape the country’s and its people’s future, empowering you to become the architect of the kingdom’s destiny.

As you embark on your journey, the game treats you to a series of breathtaking cutscenes that set the stage for your adventure. These immersive visuals hint at a promising future, drawing you deeper into the game’s narrative. A brief cutscene then leads you to start playing, immediately immersing you in a dangerous area.

Tutorials pop up, guiding you on how to move, use abilities, and navigate the environment, ensuring you are always aware of what to do next. From the outset, you’re clearly on a mission to save the kingdom from certain doom. As you progress through the beginning areas to the capital to join the guard, you can eavesdrop on people’s conversations and hear them conspire.

At this point in the game, you have yet to face any conflict, that is, until you are sent on your first mission to the far reaches of the capital. Luckily, your informant is stationed in the fortress you are sent to. Once you reach the fortress, it becomes clear that the fort is under attack by beasts called Humans, and I kid you not, they do not look like humans, but monsters with parts of humans mixed in, which in some forms are graphic.

Once you are in combat, depending on the level of the enemy, you can go hand to hand in combat and slay them, or if a higher tier monster, you can go into a party mode where you and your followers can go in a turn-based sequence fighting low tier to boss tier monsters and let me tell you some of the bosses are a menace and require a decent amount of tactics to defeat. As you follow the story, you find more betrayal of the kingdom, trying to bring in a traitor as the new king.

Little did he know that the prince, the king’s son, was still alive but stricken with a curse which is slowly killing him. And it is up to you to take care of the perpetrator who has cursed the prince and bring peace to the nation.

Controls are pretty straightforward, with movement being the basic control, with left and right sticks going towards movement, the left trigger going towards Fae Sight, which allows you to see hidden enemies and the right trigger going towards sprint, with X going towards melee, and Y going to activate party battles, once in a party battle you are given more buttons to press for melee attacks and ranged attacks, even buttons for blocking or skipping your turn to give another follower, and so much more.

Graphics set everything in motion with beautiful animation on par with most animes, not to mention the attention to detail in all aspects. Even when running around the environment as it moves around you and watching monsters chase you, setting the scene, even fight scenes and changing form into your Archetype to do special moves with swords and magic attacks, smashing enemies with big numbers showing up for damage. The amount of detail shown by shading and lighting on buildings and the shadowing environment creates a tremendous visual masterpiece.

One thing that caught my eye was the sound, with a lot of voice acting throughout the game. Although the mouth-to-speech was off, I understand that English is not the game’s original language, but I could see that much effort was made to make the speech-to-mouth as accurate as possible. Even the sounds that monsters made in cutscenes, and fight scenes were tremendous and precise for what was shown.

Overall, I’m super happy with how this game felt and played. If you are an anime fan, you will love this as much as I did. The character development and backstory were well done, and the effort put into the graphical detail and sound was on point. Every aspect seemed true to its nature, and I can’t wait to jump back in and play some more.

Written by: TypicalCambieAU