Metaphor: ReFantazio Review

Studio Zero's 2024 role-playing game is made by the core Persona 5 team - Katsura Hashino directing, Shigenori Soejima on characters, Shoji Meguro on music - and it takes their calendar-and-dungeon structure into original fantasy. The setting is a kingdom where the king has been murdered and the throne goes to whoever wins a magically enforced popular election, so the plot is a campaign trail and the party is a political movement. Combat layers a squad system over turn-based fighting: weak enemies are cleared in real time on the map, and serious fights switch to a menu where Archetypes - a job system where classes inherit skills from previously mastered ones - decide what you can do. The Archetype tree is the deepest thing the team has built. Its themes are unusually direct about prejudice and demagoguery for a JRPG, and the writing does not soften them. Around eighty hours, with a calendar that punishes wasted days. It won a pile of RPG awards in 2024.