Summary
Metaphor: ReFantazio’s director, Katsura Hashino, has revealed that the game’s main theme is “anxiety”, which explains the surprisingly brutal method in which characters activate their abilities.
We’re just afew short days away from the long-awaited release of Atlus' next big RPG - Metaphor: ReFantazio. While there’s not all that long to go now, fans have been able to get their hands on the game a little earlythanks to a substantial prologue demothat has several hours of content within it. Well,that’s if you’re not replaying it for 60 hours like some fans.
Not only does this demo give players a very good idea of how Metaphor plays, but it also gives them all a glimpse of the surprisingly horrifying activation scenes. While Persona had characters shooting themselves in the head or ripping a mask off their face,Metaphor instead has its characters pull out their own heart to get their special abilities.
Engrave Thy Very Heart Indeed
It’s very in line with how Atlus likes to present its activation scenes, but it still comes as quite a brutal shock.As pointed out by GamesRadar+, if you’re wondering why your blue-haired protagonist and his friends are suddenly all about heart surgery, Metaphor: ReFantazio’s director,Katsura Hashino has explained the reasoning behind it in a recent interview with Gamer Braves.
Hashino explained that the big theme of Metaphor is “anxiety” and that, even though there are big cultural differences that change between countries about what that means, the team settled on the heart because it’s where anxiety is “felt the most”. That presented the developers with the idea of grabbing your heart and pulling it out.
The big theme of this game is anxiety, and so there might be cultural boundaries which might change from country to country, but what we were thinking about was ‘Okay, where is anxiety felt the most?’ And we thought of the heart. - Katsura Hashino
Although this isn’t the first time that Hashino has confirmed that Metaphor’s main theme is anxiety, it is confirmation that theming directly influenced how characters unlock their potential. In the same interview, Hashino went on to say that it plays into the themes of power struggles too, as you want whoever is in power to be able to fix your anxieties and worries.
