Even in the first third of the game, you’ll find your items menu expands rapidly, full of various items within different categories. These items can be bought, found, or rewards for quests, but to effectively use them, you’ll want to know which are the ones to keep an eye out for. So, what are the best items in Metaphor: ReFantazio?
8Fairy Dust
Healer Substitute
In the early-game of Metaphor: ReFantazio, you won’t have access to all of the abilities you’d like since your party will be smaller, and you’ll be in the earlier stages offilling out the archetype system. This means that you might not have some pretty useful skills readily available, and one of the easiest to gloss over is multi-healing spells.
If you don’t have a built healer on your team yet, and you’re finding your team is struggling with enduring multi-hit attacks, then you’re going to want to stock up on Fairy Dust. This will heal a small amount of HP for all party members in one turn, but as you progress there are more potent versions that heal a higher amount which will be more useful as you progress later in the game.
7Ariadne’s Thread
Easy Escape
One aspect that helps Metaphor: ReFantazio stand out compared tosome of Atlus' other JRPGsis the focus on mini-dungeons. For each of the main dungeons you’ll explore, there will be a handful of mini-dungeons, and while these are smaller in scale, they tend to a be a lot more labyrinthian and harder to explore thanks to the occasionally obtuse map system.
In some of these dungeons there will be multiple tasks to complete, and when you’ve finally retrieved everything you need to, you might not always get the option to teleport to the start of the dungeon, so having some Ariadne’s Thread handy will often save a lot of time.
6Bath Salt
Soothing Stat Boost
When you first ride the Gauntlet Runner, Neuras will plainly mention that you’ll unlock more features as you progress throughout your adventure, and one of the first additions to your massive vehicle will be a bathtub that you have the option of using when camping in the evening.
You can get magla for simply resting in the tub, but if you want to better utilise this time, you can add some bath salts. These can be bought from different vendors with plenty of local specialties hidden in different towns and villages. On top of the magla, each of these salts will provide aunique permanent stat bufffor the protagonist.
5Binding Rope
Easy Targets
In the early-game of Metaphor: ReFantazio, you’ll often find yourself in encounters where one of your party members might not have any useful moves, but you don’t want to just keep passing over them every time it’s their turn.
One of the best uses of these turns is to use combat items, and one that can save some easy mistakes is the Binding Rope. This item slows the enemy and lowers their evasiveness. Missing your attacks can be a massive pain in Metaphor: ReFantazio since it will make you lose two turn icons, so using this item can avoid any wasted turns.
4Fruit Cordial
From Your Local Water Vendor
For a lot of the dungeons in Metaphor: ReFantazio, you’ll find that you can make a lot of progress in just one in-game day, but if you need to cut your journey off early, the main reason will nearly always be a lack of MP.
There are plenty of consumables that you’ll find throughout dungeons that will recover some MP, but these are unfortunately rare. One MP recovery item that you can manually stock up on without just randomly finding it in a dungeon is Fruit Cordial. It’s easy to miss since it’s only sold by water vendors who usually just sell cooking ingredients, but whenever you see it, make sure to invest.
3Corrosive Acid
Hard Hitting
One of the most useful combat items that you’ll want to have a healthy supply of in the early-game is Corrosive Acid. This item mimics later-game abilities that will lower your target’s defense, and because of this, it’s incredibly useful in early-game boss encounters.
These early bosses often have incredibly high HP bars compared to your usual targets, and this can make the encounters stretch much longer than you’d prefer, especially considering how tight MP is this early on. To make these encounters more efficient, getting one of your less effective party members to use this item early-on (or even multiple times to stack the effect) will make the bosses a lot easier.
2Incense
Quick Buff
One of the rarest consumables that you can find, but one that will be most useful in the early-game, is incense. These items are simple permanent stat buffs that you can activate by just selecting them from the item menu.
While you can save these for later in the game for when you know more about how you’re building your party, they can be even more impactful for the early-game, since the stat buffs will be a lot more noticeable when your characters have fewer stat points in total. If you’re unsure who to use them on, default on the protagonist since they can’t be removed from the party.
1Hero’s Fruit
Streamline Your Builds
One of the most rewarding, but often slow systems in Metaphor: ReFantazio is the archetype mechanic that lets you tailor each of your characters to fulfill a specific role in your party. To get the best results, occasionally you’ll want your characters to reach a certain archetype level to gain an ability, but this can take a while, and sometimes you don’t want your characters stuck in an archetype that is otherwise badly suited to their build.
To get through these necessary steps in the building process quicker, you’re able to use Hero’s Fruit to add archetype XP without having to carry them through countless battles. This resource is a common quest reward, so ensure to use it whenever you want your characters to not be stuck on a certain archetype for too long.
