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wonderfullifestream · 4 months ago

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What's a Metaphor you? (What drove me nuts about Refantazio)

One of the last things Hulkenberg says, which absolutely made me lose my mind, is, "The people cannot rightly trust a king whose face they do not know."

I want to remind Hulkenberg of something everybody already knows: the king's face, because of the events of the game, has become one of the most known faces in the entire world. Either Hulkenberg or the scriptwriters forgot that this world of magic has conjured up, in the center of a every town square throughout the land, a GIANT STONE FACE that reflects the king's appearance exactly and has increased in size with his fame. It is the one face the average person would know best aside from their friends and family.

This may be Potent Political Commentary on a lazy electorate who, even with magic at their disposal, refused to participate in their civic duty. A ton of people may just never look at the king's giant stone face at all. "Unless the king brings down the price of gasoline, I don't give a shit."

Also, let me get this straight about Pontifex Forden's big plan. He tried to kill the Prince by burning the Elda village, but I guess the Prince got away somehow to live at the palace. So then years later, he wants to kill the Prince using a child prodigy (Rella) so that he could give a demotion to another child prodigy (Louis). I feel like this could be Potent Commentary on organized religion's obsession with controlling children, but it strains credulity that Forden's whole career depends on managing no less than three very special unreleated children simultaneously.

(And he can't just have Louis killed as well, because, I don't know there would be an uprising amongst the armed forced if a particularly charismatic 14 year old died? (How the hell old is Louis supposed to be, exactly?) And somehow outright killing Louis is too risky... but killing the Prince is not risky?)

(And why does Forden have to threaten Rella with Junah's life? Why can't he just convince her to kill the Prince? He's the most powerful Church leader in the realm and she's some kid. Isn't the whole point of making a kid do your dirty work that they'll do whatever you say? Forden absolutely has people who are more loyal to him, so why doesn't he use them? I guess because Rella is somehow the only person capable of killing the Prince? Why??)

Anyway Rella gets stagefright and decides to improvise a coma curse on the Prince instead of killing him. Forden then, somehow (again!), loses track of the Prince's body and it ends up back in the Eldan village he was so sure he had destroyed. I'd also like to point out that Forden also failed to verify Louis' death after the party attempts to assassinate him. Just to highlight how much of the plot happens based on Forden failing to verify that these extremely powerful magical people who absolutely need to be dead for his plans to work are actually dead.

So Forden fails to 1) kill the Prince, 2) disenfranchise Louis, or 3) indoctrinate or intimidate Rella. This is the ruthless Sanctist Church we'resupposed to be so afraid of.

This game is pretty misogynistic. You don't just have to have female characters dress in gratuitously sexy clothes to be misogynistic. You can also just treat them as children or objects lacking agency. (See: Ann from Persona 5)

If Lady Joanna were a man, the cast would call him a disgusting freak for murdering so many children. Instead, she's just a smol bean because, I mean, who could blame her? I know if I were a mother and I lost my child, my life would be over and I would obviously go nutso crazy and could not be held accountable for my actions. At worst, I would accept my execution nobly with my head held high. Hey, when it comes to a ruler mudering a pile of children, we're all victims, really.

Heismay, being a man, can shoulder the tragedy of a child's death. Heismay's arc is quite unique for a video game. When did you last spend so much time helping a parent decide what to do with his child's remains? As for Heismay's child's mother? Well. Uh... who cares. In fact, let's not even allude to her existence a single time. Surely that isn't incredbly weird at all. She probably wasn't even cool!

Now, Rella, who cursed the Prince to save her sister's life? She's gotta die. "I mean, she's super talented, can't she just undo the curse?" No, sorry, that's not the rules of the curse. "Seriously, she's so powerful she can use telepathy on a bunch of people across a great distance. The Prince has already been comatose for a long time, we can wait a little longer for her to figure it out." Sorry, no, if we keep her alive, we'll have to explain why she can't join your party. It's way, way eaier to just kill her, trust me.

Speaking of magic, magic is bullshit. For random NPCs, it means telepathy and turning people into monsters. For you, it's only ever elemental attacks and buffs. And you never even use those in cutscenes. Gameplay over on this side, please, plot on that side, thank you.

The King's Magic keeps the top contenders for the crown from being assassinated. The ONLY way you can strike someone whose face is on the big rock is by challenging them to a duel. Okay. So how come, in the back half of the game, every single monster doesn't explode when they come near you? I sure as shit didn't consent to being attacked by monsters. If I walk around with my weapon out, does that automatically consent to every duel? Is that how it works?

The King's Magic is absolute. Unless you yell at the sky for it to go away, like Louis does. Well, to be fair, he probably had to do that so the script writers would be able to ignore the rules of the middle of the story so they can write a classic final RPG act where you just fight your way to the top. Thanks, Louis!

It's funny how, despite the possibilities setup by Metaphor's world, the writers always do their best to steer the game back toward what they know instead of trying something knew. They come up with the concept of a dead king deciding his successor based on the popular will. How does one achieve popularity? Well, dungeon crawling like you did in Persona 5. Boy, that's convenient. It's almost like the story could have been about anything and the gameplay would be the same no matter what.

Yes, I know you can "debate" your opponents. It's not an in-depth system or anything. The game can't end with batgirl mechanic Lina Kayden as king. You can't even get too popular too quickly, and the game will lock your popularity ranking until the plot decides your popularity for you. The popularity mechanic mostly feels like playing pretend with the game, because we both know that I can't change the script by debating or dungeoning-crawling differently. And the game itself acknowledges that the will of the people is nowhere near as rewarding as getting on good terms with about 14 very specific people.

Isn't it weird that the Sanctist Church co-opts the Dead King's Magic Contest to create a fake tournament of their own? Wouldn't it be to the church's benefit to ignore the contest and continue their largely unopposed reign, rather than allowing a public event to be coopted by someone they can't control? Wouldn't it be to your party's benefit to avoid participating in events controlled by the powerful institution that hates you? Why do any of them do this? Oh? So that there's a reason for an important plot point to occur exactly every 30 days, just like in Persona 5? Gotcha.

Remember how the Prince's curse is cured and we know about it right away, and we don't immediately go to him in our airship and let everyone know he's alive and instantly get everyone on our side? Why? Are we stupid? Does the script just need to to dick around for a week so the Prince can get "killed off" while defending someone? The Prince's soul-less body got up and, what, took a sword stab for some peasant? And the people charged with protecting him for years let him endanger himself, the exact thing they've been trying to avoid for years?

Isn't it weird that the prospective ruler of the kingdom almost never talks except to sound like a doofus or act as a thesaurus but only for the word Yes? Shouldn't a leader have a strong voice of their own, as demonstrated by the other frontrunners like Forden, Louis, and the old king himself? Oh? Because the protagonist is silent in Persona 5? Gotcha.

Mass Effect came out in 2007 and is still a prefect simulator for being a leader, making hard choices, and influencing people. Metaphor, just like Persona 5 before it, is a Special Little Boy simulator. You're not the main character because you've done anything. Somebody else decided you're a Special Little Boy, and that's why everything's gonna work out for you. If anything goes wrong, don't worry: you'll never have to change or sacrifice anything. In fact, it turns out you're a Super Special Little Boy, so those bad things won't happen, and everybody will be nice to you, because they have to.

Metaphor is a political game in the sense that I am Spider-Man for Halloween. I put on the costume and then I take it off when I'm done. I might say stuff Spider-Man would say, but I can't help you fight Doctor Octopus. Metaphor evokes racism and the institutional power of the church, but then it goes off and does whatever it planned on doing anyway and tells a story that might be challenging if you stopped reading books when teachers didn't make you anymore. The cute kid whose dad dies keeps a stiff upper lip and cheers everyone up. If someone in a pair of siblings has to die, it'll be the colder and more stuckup one, not the friendly one. The divine rite of kings is bad: unless it applies to you, then it's good and should be upheld. The land just needs a really, really Special Little Boy as King. The scam artist is secretly super noble and loves his mom and sacrifices himself to help you except just kidding he just faked his death! No bummers allowed here!!

Final Fantasy Tactics is a game where the first encounter has you failing to protect the princess. The second encounter makes you murder peasants in a wage dispute. If you're gonna tell me a game is political and it doesn't acknowledge how difficult it is to balance a society's material conditions without sacrifice - and it never puts you in a position where you feel that sacrifice - keep it to yourself.

Your mom uses the last of her magic (which, again, does whatever a NPC wants it to do) to save her soul and become a living voiceover instead of her subjects being burned alive. What an asshole. And this lady is supposed to lead me down the path to being a virtuous ruler? Well, she certainly knows what a bad ruler looks like: she is one and she also had a child with one. I would be so pissed if the child of these jerks ended up in charge of my kingdom.

Hey, Mom, if you're here to look out for me, why didn't you warn me about the requirements for unlocking the Royal Archetypes ahead of time? This game even takes its best quality, customizing your teams skills and abilities, and ruins it by revealing the "correct" way you should have been doing it all along to unlock the Royal Archetypes. You thought Strohl might be well suited to the Faker archetype? Sorry, fuck you, should have just kept him in his assigned role if you wanted to beat the superbosses. Imagine, a role-playing game that punishes you for trying to play a role.

The plot hinges on a Party City accessory. Louis keeps a headband with fake clemar horns on 100% of the time for his entire career. This only works because the character designs for Metaphor are incredibly lame. Clemars don't have cro magnon brows or fangs. They just look like regular humans with little horns. Paripus don't have pointed faces and claws, just little ears and a tail. The rhoag are just dudes with tattoos. The winged characters can't fly.

The nidia look like fucking Muppet Babies. But only for the two specific times where one specific nidia lets the magical glamour that makes them look tall and slender lapses. All other Nidia are constantly keeping up a magical spell to make them look like everbody else. What the fuck?

All of this makes the prejudice against the elda so flimsy. The average person has never seen an elda. Do they even know what one looks like? I thought elda had heterochromia, but apparently that's just a Main Character trait. So a random person sees the Main Character's fucked up eyes and somehow don't think he's a nidia (who, in addition to being Muppet Babies, have crazy prismatic irises). They don't think he's a rhoag with very faint tattoos. They don't think he has clemar horns hidden under his dumb headband. They jump straight to the wildest conclusion, that this person must be from the tribe nobody has seen for years. Louis fools even his political rivals with his stupid disguise, but some idiot in a back alley can instantly clock that you are an elda?

(You know what? It's probably just Potent Political Commentary about how the powerful can get away with obvious lies. It's certainly not a paper-thin excuse to fill dumb plot holes with more, still dumber plot devices.)

Even after they've given themselves license to do something out-there and weird by designing, I don't know, fantastical characters for this fantasy world, the designers have some kind of disease where everyone has be made tall, slender, and covered in Louis Vuitton patterns. The only difference from Persona is that the outfits in Metaphor would have you briefly detained by the police. Fantasy is dead, and Metaphor killed it.

This game where everyone constantly tells you exactly how they feel all of the time without any obfuscation or rhetorical tricks is called "Metaphor." Where is a metaphor ever used? Is this game supposed to be a metaphor for a good game?

Did I like anything about this game? Sure. Persona 5's optional frienship (social link) scenes were very boring because they were written to avoid interacting with the main plot. Metaphor, at least, allows the side characters to acknowledge major plot developments. (It's wild that I have to champion an accomplishment that Bioware made standard in their games for nearly 2 decade.)

Also, by virtue of being set in a fantasy world, the side stories at least allow unique opportunities to provide flavor. Nearly every tribe is revealed to have their own burial rites. We get to see how a small city decides to govern itself after their leader is executed. We find out an ally deals with chronic pain as a result of being subject to a fantasy Tuskegee Experiment. An unusually successful bounty hunter accidentally starts a cult of personality, then gives back to her community by starting a jobs program.

Although Heismay was an early favorite of mine, he (like all Atlus RPG characters) plateaus early and then spends every scene deploying his only rhetorical gambit: wisely recommending caution. The MVP of the game is, of course Big Dog Basilio. He is the one character we see with the greatest amount of complex relationships, each of which he is forced to reevaluate. Most playable characters merely allude to their tragic circumstances, but we actually see the horrible things that happen to Basilio and guide him toward change. His "awakening" scene is actually motivated by something internal and not just because the script says it's time for a new playable character to join. He also daintily pipes filling pastries.

I'm also thrilled that this game avoid a common anime foible by insisting that the Funniest Thing that could ever happen is that a girl is bad at cooking. Every playable character is actually an excellent cook, and one of the game's best features is that extremely useful items are accessed through culinary cultural exchange.

(They also insist on a new Funniest Thing, which is that Hulkenberg is such a gourmand that she'll eat gross food. That's the joke, and that's how they play it. A running gag is fine if you play around with expectations. It would be funny if we finally discover what food is too gross for Hulkenberg, or what simple and innocuous food she will treat as gross, or what gross-looking food she successfully convinces everyone is actually good. Hell, one of those variations might even have occurred, but I can't remember because of all the times they just play the joke straight.)

I also liked the part where they found a CD and tried to figure out what it was for. Hey, they never really satisfactorily explained why Shibuya was underground, did they? I guess if it looks kind of cool then that's all you need.

I would probably be able to remember even more stuff that I liked if my memories of them weren't all completely subsumed by the heaps of bullshit the game insists on yammering on about. For the last few hours I was just skipping through dialogue, and I realized that the script still made sense if only let every character speak the first sentence in each dialogue box and skipped the rest. If I could snap my fingers and eliminate half of the words in the script, this game would jump a full letter grade in my estimation.b

#metaphor refantazio #metaphor refantazio spoilers

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