Metaphor: ReFantazio Prologue Demo is available now for Xbox Series, PS4, PS5 and PC

[IcaroRibeiro]

I only prefer SMT combat, Persona 3 features terrible not controllable party, an abomination so many JRPGs tried during the 2000s. Persona 4 fixed this but came with a dumbed down version of P3 combat. PS5 added complexity layers and subsystems to make combat more interesting and less predictable than 4 and are genuinely fun to play if you go on Hard

One thing bothers me a lot in Persona is how only your MC is a wildcard and everyone else has a very clear role that you can't strain away. More like RPGs for dummies. SMT is much more cool with all demons being fully customizable, and having a huge number of demons can make you approach combat differently, this allows a simple set of mechanics turn into a very deep and varied system and the game is so unforgiven that you NEED to make use of it. Probably the best turn based combat we have atm

I hope they don't follow P4 missteps and make status effects and buffs/debuffs not only viable but essential. P4 combat was so dumb, spam AoE, get one more, dizzy your oponents and repeat. P3R was much better making non combat skills useful

P3R was nice because it added a more varied set of roles for each member of your party (specially because all them have different set non offensive skills such as buffs, debuffs, healing or effect status skills), so testing combinations and seeing how to tackle sessions of tartarus was fun, but after some time you could figure the Meta for each member and then it was just a matter of repeat. Since the game is no actually THAT long it didn't bother me


Now, seems like Metaphor will allow Archetypes to have branching class progression and they will not be fixed to any party member. This have potential to be their best combat system so far, as long they design good enemies, skills and fights