Metaphor: ReFantazio tried to make you love turn-based combat again, but it almost broke the game during development

A thing about me is I live according to bushidō, tempering the iron of my will against any enemy the world sends my way. At all times I am sharpening myself on the whetstone of my foes, fashioning my body into a missile which I can launch at the bourgeoisie. My entire life is agōgē, especially the bit where I spend eight hours a day writing about videogames for money. Seven, discounting lunch.

But not everyone has my dedication to martial asceticism. Some people just want to get on with things, and that’s why Atlus—the guys who make Persona and Metaphor: ReFantazio—has been finding new ways to make its combat a little less of a chore in its recent games. In Metaphor, that experimentation took the form of a combat system that alternated between real-time and turn-based—letting you easily clear out low-level mooks but dropping you into a more traditional, RPG-esque squad combat mode for tougher enemies (Persona 5 had a similar system, mind).

It’s one of the best things about the game, but apparently it took Atlus some risky experimentation to get there. In a talk at GDC (via GamesRadar), lead battle planner Kenichi Goto said the devs almost broke the entire Atlus formula in their quest to create a combat system that didn’t bog players down in trash fights.

The goal was to “reduce the number of battles where the result of who would win was obvious from the beginning,” said Goto, an experience that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever trudged all the way up a many-floored dungeon in Persona 3 or 4. “One of the main reasons turn-based battles have become less popular is that battles start to feel like chores,” he continued, and Atlus’ answer was “the Fast and Squad battle system” that lets you wipe out weaker enemies without dipping into turn-based mode.

But according to Goto, at some point the team lost sight of the fact that they were trying to cut down on the grind, rather than generate “action for the sake of action.” Eventually, “losing sight of this fact is what led to us losing our way overall.”

The team realised they had to dial things back when they noticed players “felt that resorting to turn-based combat was a form of succumbing.” Instead of using the turn-based mode to take out harder enemies, they were just whacking away at them endlessly in the real-time mode, even when the foes were a similar level to them. “Players complained that it was hard to decide whether they should go into turn-based battle or put in the effort and defeat the enemies on the field alone,” said Goto.

So, well, Atlus shifted combat back to that style we’re all more familiar with: “We made it clear within the team that action only exists to smoothly get the player into the heart of the game, which is the turn-based battles.” It paid off, in Lewis Parker’s Metaphor: ReFantazio review for PCG, he scored the game 95% and paid it particular praise for combat that was “a huge step up from Persona 5.”