Why Persona's longtime director made an epic fantasy RPG

Persona 5 helped the role-playing game franchise break through to mainstream audiences, and it's also a game that's been a long time in the making. The first work began shortly afterwards in 2008 Persona 4 came out and full development began three years later. So, shortly before the release of the game in 2016, director Katsura Hashino – since then manager of the franchise Persona 3 – asked the team what they wanted to do next. “Everyone said fantasy,” he says The edge.

This game would turn out Metaphor: ReFantazioan epic role-playing game coming to PlayStation, Xbox and PC on October 11th. In many ways it is reminiscent personawith sophisticated menus, turn-based combat and gameplay systems that come from making meaningful connections with characters. But the detailed depiction of modern Japan is gone, replaced by a high fantasy realm full of fairies, kingdoms, and terrifying monsters called humans. The story begins with the king being killed and a sort of tournament being held to find his successor.

For Hashino, fantasy was a chance to explore some ideas that weren't possible there personais the modern ambience. For example, he really wanted a game that emphasized a long journey, which is a common fantasy theme. This is more difficult with a story about high school students. And so metaphor lets players travel through a fantasy realm so vast that you actually get a vehicle that can be used to reach distant cities and dungeons.

That's not to say that all swords and sorcery means that metaphor does not address real-world problems. Instead, Hashino uses the fantasy setting to address these themes in a different way. “Thematically, we put fear at the heart of the game,” he explains. “Partly because everyone is afraid. But if we were making a game that focused on real-world fears, we would have to focus on very specific things about how they affect people in the modern world. And we would drown in the details.”

In metaphorFear manifests itself not only as an emotion, but also as something physical, an actual particle in the air that you can see. “This is something we couldn’t really do in the real world,” Hashino says. “It’s more of an abstract idea.”

But the transition to fantasy also brought its own challenges: namely, reimagining a world from scratch. After spending so much time playing games set in modern day, Hashino took a crash course in fantasy and read books like The Lord of the rings as a refresher. Whereas, with Persona 5, He could gather ideas just by walking the streets around his office. Inspiration wasn't quite so easy here. But he soon realized that simply imitating the existing fantasy canon wouldn't work.

“I realized that if we tried to imitate this in any way, be it the characters, the setting or the world, it wouldn't really live up to the originals,” says Hashino. “If we tried to copy that, it would just be a copy. So I thought: Let’s try to make a fantasy game that only we can make.”

In the end, the game gave Hashino and the team exactly what they were looking for: a new experience. It forced the director to not only create a unique world, but also to imagine how people would act and live in that world. For example, if fear particles suddenly appeared in Tokyo, people would understandably be unsettled. But inside Metaphor, They are an everyday thing.

“Trying to put myself in the shoes of people in this fantasy world and how they would think was a really interesting experience for me,” he says. “And something I had never done with it before persona Series.”