29th March
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week, Bertie finally tries Metaphor: ReFantazio and enjoys it, with some reservations; Tom Orry settles into adventuring in Avowed; and Ed finds time to connect with his Unicorn Overlord.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Unicorn Overlord, Switch
Whenever I go abroad, especially on flights, I like to treat myself to a new game for the journey. Usually that’s a Switch game and, for my flights last week to GDC in San Francisco, I started Unicorn Overlord to while away the hours between dodgy airplane food and failing to sleep.
And what a treat it is! Developed by Vanillaware and published by Atlus, it’s a neat little strategy RPG with a wealth of depth. Its narrative is a typical story of recovering a fallen kingdom from the grasp of an evil empire, all told via some colourful (and somewhat suggestive) anime characters. Battles, meanwhile, mostly take care of themselves after some prior organisation and a bit of prodding. To me, it feels like a mix of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy 12‘s gambit system – two games I love.
To explain further, your characters can be divided into squads arranged on a small grid, which are then directed across battles. The placement of characters is particularly important – you want your shielding tanks at the front and your mages at the back, for instance – and depending on their equipment they’ll unleash a string of attacks and buffs in a set order you can tweak. Then, when these squads meet others on the top-down battlefield, the view switches to a side-on spectacle of magic and animations that plays out automatically. Defeat enemies to earn points you can spend on special abilities; place characters together to deepen relationships; customise your characters with new weapons and accessories. It’s all here, with seemingly plenty of depth. And while, in the first few hours at least, it may not be the most original of experiences, it’s exactly the sort of game world to get completely immersed in and watch cute characters hash it out, even while bleary-eyed and desperately trying to ignore the snores and baby cries of those around you. Now I’m back, I’m excited to play more from the comfort of my sofa instead.
-Ed
Metaphor: ReFantazio, PS5
I’m intrigued by this idea that menus in games have become a kind of artform for Atlus, and that, because it has found success focusing on them – through the Persona series and now Metaphor: ReFantazio – it will probably push them in its games forever more. But how much can it push them before they become too much – before they intrude too much on the game itself?
I ask because for me, Metaphor: ReFantazio is on the cusp. Don’t get me wrong, I love a sense of style. I love the lavish cutscenes – I’ve taken scores of screenshots already and I’m only a few hours in – and I love the design of the menus. Why make them grey and functional when you can extend the immersion of the game to them?
But there’s a point for me at which the overt styling starts to intrude too much. There’s a sense in Metaphor that every moment has to be delivered with flair and that simply presenting action without adornment might become too boring or staid – a sense that Atlus might even be a little embarrassed of what the default moment-to-moment action looks like. So it dresses it up. It dresses everything up. And this leads to a rapid slideshow of perspective shifts as we jump between pre-rendered cutscenes, in-engine cutscenes, talking-head dialogues and various other things. There’s so much energy nothing ever seems to stay still for long.
I get it: that’s the vibe, that’s the style, and I much would rather a game have one. But there’s a point at which all this jumping around and overstyling starts to make my head hurt. There’s also a point at which I just want to play the actual game. And I hope it either calms down a bit, or that my reaction to it stabilises, because there’s clearly a lot about Metaphor to like.
-Bertie
Avowed, Xbox Series X
I’ve stopped messing about with settings and alternative ways to play Avowed, now, which means I am back playing the game properly – not that I don’t frequently grumble to myself about how much nicer the world would look if it didn’t turn into a jumbled mess every time I moved the camera. Look, get over it, I’m over it, just play the game!
Right, I love it in fantasy games when you walk into a vast area and the designers have done something super cool with the environment. This happened to me in Avowed earlier in the week on the way to talk to a Watcher about something (neat little Witcher nod in this quest, too). I walked to a cliff edge and the world stretched out before me, but seemingly embedded into the cliffface on the opposite side of a gorge was the bony remains of a giant beast. That kind of stuff looks awesome and also serves to help give the world some history. What is this beast? Are they still around? How did it end up there?
Anyway, I definitely haven’t got out my 5m network cable to hook my TV directly to the router in order to get Geforce Now running like I know it can, just to play Avowed with the pristine visuals it deserves. Absolutely not, so there’s no chance this will end badly for me.
-Tom O