Thread to discuss the new 80 hour Atlas RPG! Who will make it through the whole game… and what will be left of them??
Reminder that all the music in this game is diegetic:
I would also like to take a moment to honor the girl in my 10th grade English class who pronounced synecdoche “synec-douche”.
I’m in the midst of some other games but really wanna give this one a try.
are any of the personas or personalikes actually good. i ask this because everyone who talks about atlus games always sounds like “bought this day 1 and played it for 100 hours. i’m going to track down each of the developers and punch them in the neck until they die. here’s the latest news on the dlc.”
I like the spiciness of SMT (3 specifically) but other than MP stinginess (good) I’m starting to feel Metaphor to be very forgiving to the player. Not a terrible thing given its apparent length but it’d be nice to feel the threat a bit more.
I’m starting to get far more archetypes than there are party members and deciding who will commit to which lineage is becoming a source of anxiety.
I played like half of Personas 4 and 5. They both started very strong, with great art direction and music. The battle systems are snappy and satisfying, definitely above average for this style of RPG. Some of the characters are likeable, and in both games there’s a clever and evocative magical realist conceit with intriguing mysteries to uncover.
Both games are way too long and very steadily drain themselves of any juice as they go. Plus you sort of get the sense that the writers are on their best behavior at first, but then let it all hang out when they get too comfortable later on, and you start getting shitty anime-tropey gay/trans panic jokes and weird misogyny. I’ve heard tell that Atlas is consciously trying to get better about that stuff, and I haven’t heard yet about anything like it in Metaphor, but the game also just came out so people may have not gotten to it yet.
I’m still at the very beginning of Metaphor, but so far it has all the strengths of the beginnings of Persona 4 and 5, with an even more enjoyable battle system. The jury’s out on whether they can sustain this for a whole game, but I have my doubts.
I have encountered one person irl and another review online saying (without examples) that his game is somehow “extremely” progressive against the context of Atlus’ previous games. i just bring this up because it was an interesting thing to hear, not that I believe it. but it sure would be surprising if that were true!
Really got to love Atlus’ dedication to unique character design. Definitely haven’t seen this exact design already as a protagonist in an Atlus game. 
Some of the character designs are cool, like PG versions of the cenobites. I think there’s some really wild departures from the Atlus formula, the dungeons I’ve been through so far seem way more varied and alive than the last couple personas. The hybrid action/turn-based system actually feels very well calibrated and offers a fun risk/reward exercise. While it has all the structure of an Atlus game, it feels very much skewed towards evoking the spirit Dragon Quest/JRPG in general.
I am excited about playing this though I’ve been slightly terrified of the “social justice” (not in an afraid-of-‘SJWs’ way, but as a person who cares about social justice) themes people are saying are in this, since Persona 5 botched those so horribly
I’m still finishing up my playthrough of SMT V Vengeance’s Canon of Vengeance, though. I like Atlus RPGs and the only Hashino-directed one I’ve disliked is P5. I hope I can finish SMTV and get on this one soon
My experience of the themes so far is it never really gets beyond a ‘discrimination is bad/democracy is good’ position statement. They hint at suggesting that democracies aren’t some sort of magic solution to the problems faced by the world but for how much the game engages with a magically enforced political election, the politics are mostly quite simple. That is to say they are mindblowingly radical or ‘too political’ for the politically illiterate remnants of twitter et al.
The magical currency in the game is called “MAGLA”…hmm…and the item to replenish your mp is called a “Magla Pill”.
in p2 innocent sin you have to fight a bunch of assassins in a bathroom and the background for the fight is a bunch of toilets floating around in the void like they were copy and pasted in ms paint. One of your characters says “It’s whoop-ass time!” before the fight starts. So that’s cool you know
In the first one you get to shoot up a police station wth an M16 another high schooler tosses you after the wall of the gymnasium explodes from all the demon warfare going on. It would be cool to talk to a imp from Doom in Persona. So maybe they’re not very good, because they don’t have that.
I agree with all this! a friend demanded that I compare it to DQXI because he hadn’t seen me stick ith a jRPG to this degree since then and I have to admit it seems, at the very least, attentive
I hate the character design of the main character in this one
Looks like every damned isekai protagonist
honestly, I think I decided not to get this game entirely because the character design sucks so much. I liked everything else in the demo but having to look at this bargain brand kirito for multiple hours annoyed me too much
I’m 20 hours into this and really liking it so far. the way they stitched all of the systems together is elegant and compliments the setting (simple stuff like upping your social stats being tied to story bits that teach you more about the world, side-dungeons being paired with a good bit of unique party interaction, etc). the roadtrip vibe is nice and keeps the pace up (pacing being something that the persona games, 5 especially, really struggle with imo)
there is 100% less gross shit in this one so far, surprisingly. aside from that its politics seem to be gesturing towards boilerplate liberal democracy stuff but there’s also a weird utopian meta-layer running through the whole thing. also all of the monsters are called ‘humans’ for some reason, I’m sure the explanation of that will be the dumbest thing in any atlus game
main dude looks dumb but pretty much everyone else looks cool so it’s a wash for me
I played persona 4 golden as young queer person figuring my shit out and it means a lot to me (specifically the two queer party members whose arcs end with them admitting that they’re ‘normal’, actually, lmao) but I bet if I played it today I’d just think it was gross.
so to answer your question probably not
I do feel like we’re kinda past the ‘protagonist guy’ approach given the character highlights here. My favourite scene so far is the party banging on pots to force Heismay out of hiding and they start shouting about their gripes with each other. Even the protagonist joins in which is their best moment so far since they’re mostly just cordially agreeing with everyone they meet and saying nothing about themselves otherwise.
I thought the mimic dungeon was fun and glad that we’re having Sakaguhi-esque side-adventures.
I just unlocked a whole bunch of archetypes but don’t have the means to purchase them yet. The real Metaphor starts here. Faker seems nuts.
Unfortunate that the first main dungeon boss has a terrible scots accent. Was all in favour of RPG localisation brutalising accents until now. It was a good run from DQVIII
Tried doing 3 dungeons in a single round trip. First one absolutely destroyed me because I didn’t check the weather, second I get through having exhausted all MP several times, thought it better to head back and lick my wounds than clownroll through the third.
I was worried the game was getting too nice
