I have been kind of astounded over the past years at how many millions of dollars being thrown at games that there will never be any reason to play. Bethesda recently released Starfield. A hundred million video game that wears out its welcome in hours and descends into dull time wasting from there on out. It's the result of a game studio that had a hit, didn't understand why it was a hit, lost their way, and now the people who run the studio are too out of touch to realize they don't have any idea what people want.

Atlas just released Metaphor, a game with the design doc of the persona series but an original setting. To note, it copies their design doc and all of its superficial trappings. It kept none of what made P5 a memorable experience, and instead created a bland lifeless setting that it feels no care went in to. After 9 hours I can't remember any of the characters, as they are all, wholly one note, and feel like archetypes that were ripped out of a better game. The only one I can remember are Louis, the necromancer, and your pixie. I remember your fairy, because unlike other atlas characters in this role, she's not teeth grindingly annoying from minute one. I remember the two bad guys because I kept agreeing with them and everything they had to say while all the main characters act like naive idiots every chance they get.

The world has no substance at all to it. So far there hasn't been a single story beat to sink your teeth into. A king of a country I've never heard of has been betrayed and killed, by a character who's obviously guilty and no one does anything about it. The first cutscene has a team of lords and knights around a dead kings bed, and yes I am interested in the revolutionary who is rightly pointing out that they're worthless idiots. I've been instantly sold on the bad guy on accident. From there we move onto the world. The world is series of races and their structure in the world, which is a real shame as the game features no actual racism.

And I need to say this again, there has as of yet, been no real racism. Someone got hanged unjustly, I was politely asked to leave a high end weapon shop my first time there, and everyone is very dismissive of me. That could be because the main character is an oppressed minority, or just because he's a teenager, because in this oppressive super racism obsessed world, there no racism. No one, outside of the opening muggers have been mean to me, and they were mean to me because they were robbing me. How about while I go down the street something interesting happens to illustrate the horrors of societal wide racism. How about someone calls me a slur, or just be's mean to me?

And that's it, the gameplay is P5, except that un streamlined it. Now you manage an entire parties worth of spell sets and loadouts like I'm playing FF8. It took persona management, which was snappy and fun, and turned it into a grind session.

So now I need to connect this back to my opening. Why play this? The world and story are painfully generic, the gameplay is a marked step down from every other SMT games, and to top it all off, this is the first Atlas game I've played that has a god awful soundtrack. It just sucks to see game designers identify and focus on the worst parts of their game as the parts we enjoy the most. You enjoyed persona management? Yes because it was quick, and fun. Archetypes? Make sure to constantly cycle through them, drastically changing your attack loadout every battle, meaning you can never get into a grove with the game. They took a fun system, expanded on it because they thought they were supposed to, and ruined it.

If I'm going to compare this to any other game, it'd be FF8's constant paperwork with the functioning system. If it were a movie, it'd be Batman V Superman, a film convinced it had something to say, that was vapid and empty.

I played the demo and was miserable the entire time. I bought the game anyway, because it feels like all Atlas games have incredibly bad openings. Heck, P5's opening is still way worse than this. Now I once again feel like I bought a game because I tricked myself into thinking I should like it. I looked past the bad intro because I thought something interesting would happen, and was wrong.

Well I look forward to doing this again next year when Civ 7 comes out and we find out Sid Meir has found a way to add even more pointless decision making to the endgame of the latest version.