Reasons Why the Director of Persona Created an Epic Fantasy Role-Playing Game.
From Character to Metaphor.
Persona 5 was crucial in helping the role-playing franchise reach a broader audience, and its development was a lengthy process. Initial work began in 2008, after the release of Persona 4, and full development started three years later. Just a few months before the game's arrival in 2016, director Katsura Hashino, who has been at the helm of the franchise since Persona 3, asked the team what their next creative wish was. "Everyone said fantasy," Hashino comments.
This evolving project manifested itself in Metaphor: ReFantazio, an epic RPG that will be available on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC starting October 11. In many ways, it resembles Persona, featuring sleek menus, turn-based combat, and gameplay systems that encourage meaningful connections with characters. However, the detailed representation of contemporary Japan has been replaced with a high-fantasy realm filled with fairies, kingdoms, and terrifying monsters known as humans. The narrative begins with the murder of a king, triggering a sort of tournament to find his successor.
For Hashino, the fantasy genre represents an opportunity to explore concepts that could not be realized in a contemporary setting. He wanted to create a game that emphasized a prolonged journey, a common theme in fantasy, which is more complicated to achieve in a story focused on high school students. Thus, in Metaphor, players traverse a vast fantasy kingdom, even using a vehicle to reach distant towns and dungeons.
Although the plot unfolds in a world of swords and sorcery, Metaphor also addresses real-world themes. Metaphorically, anxiety becomes the central focus of the game. Hashino explains that this choice stems from the fact that “we all face anxiety.” Instead of a narrative that addresses anxiety in a real context, the decision was made to represent it more abstractly, materializing as visible particles in the air within the game. “That’s an idea we really couldn’t replicate in the real world,” Hashino clarifies.
The shift to a fantasy world brought its own challenges, especially when creating a universe from scratch. After having worked in contemporary environments for so long, Hashino delved into a re-examination of fantasy, reading works like The Lord of the Rings for inspiration. In contrast to Persona 5, where he could directly observe his surroundings for ideas, this was not so straightforward, and he soon realized that merely copying the fantasy canon was not the most effective solution.
“I realized that if we tried to imitate it in any way, whether in the characters, in the setting, or in the world, it wouldn’t be original,” Hashino states. “If we tried to copy that, it would just be a copy.” This led him to the determination to create a fantasy game that only they could make.
In the end, the game lived up to Hashino's and his team’s expectations: it provided them with a new experience. It forced them not only to build a unique world but also to conceive how people would act and live in that context. For example, if particles of anxiety suddenly appeared in Tokyo, the reaction would be understandable. In Metaphor, however, they are a part of everyday life. “Trying to put myself in the shoes of the inhabitants of this fantasy world and how they would think was a really interesting experience for me,” he concludes, “and something I had never done before with the Persona series.”
