Katsura Hashino, the director of the critically acclaimed Persona series, is confident that Atlus’ fantasy project Metaphor: ReFantazio will please any long-time RPG enthusiast. Especially if we’re talking about its gameplay duration. Based on HowLongToBeat.com data, a completionist playthrough of Persona 5 Royal can clock in at a staggering 173 hours. Because of that, expectations from JRPG veterans are sky-high for this new release. Speaking to Spanish publication Vandal, Hashino teased that Metaphor: ReFantazio length won’t only match, but potentially exceed, the vast content scope of its predecessor.
“Persona 5 was a very bulky game, a very robust game, and [Metaphor: ReFantazio] will be able to catch up with and reach [its content length] as well,” stated Hashino.
But it’s not just about quantity– quality and replayability are the center of the team’s vision as well. The director has promised a plethora of post-credit content, ensuring that the Kingdom of Euchronia is ready to entertain any repeat visitors.
“There’s a lot of fun stuff we’ve added to the game after you play through it that will hopefully make you come back and continue to enjoy it after completing it,” Hashino explained.
Hashino then added that the Studio Zero development team wasn’t expecting Metaphor: ReFantazio to have a similar length to Persona. “We thought the game was going to be maybe a little bit shorter,” he confessed. “But we’ve added so much content and there’s so much stuff in here that it definitely is as lengthy as Persona 5.“
But that’s not all, Metaphor: ReFantazio also didn’t skip a beat when pleasing fans of animated sequences in Persona. “We’ve included a lot of animated cinematic sequences. We had a large volume of them in Persona 5 and we’ve tried to keep that same approximate amount for [Metaphor: ReFantazio],” promises Hashino.
Metaphor: ReFantazio, releasing on October 10, 2024, for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, is shaping up to be a solid JRPG worthy to be Persona‘s successor. Stay tuned on The Nerd Stash for more updates on the long-awaited fantasy game.
