There are a lot of tiny details in Atlus’ new fantasy RPG Metaphor: ReFantazio that make moving through its world a delight. I love how Gallica, my fairy companion, sits on my shoulder as I walk through the streets of its fantasy setting. I enjoy reading all the chatter that pops up from the citizens as I make my way from one side of a city to the other. Metaphor isn’t an open-world game, but its towns are still decently sized and take a minute to get around on foot. Sure, you can fast-travel and miss out on all the ambient dialogue, but if you do that, you’re denying yourself one of the greatest simple pleasures of the game: skating around on your sword.
Yeah, swords aren’t just for swiping, slashing, and stabbing in Metaphor: ReFantazio. They can also be made into a magical, floating skateboard. Doing so gives you a boost in speed as you traverse the giant cities and small villages of the United Kingdom of Euchronia. But it also gives you some special dialogue from onlookers as you zoom past them. Some will remark in awe as they’ve never seen a sharp blade turn into a skateboard before. Others will choose not to mind their own business and claim that you’re trying to get attention and disrupt the peace. It turns out that being weird and annoying to the youth trying to skateboard is another part of the real world Metaphor manages to capture in its fantasy universe.
While the protagonist of Metaphor can use different weapons depending on which Archetype or class they’re using, the skate-sword is a mainstay when you’re running around civilized areas. This makes some sense, because if you were playing as the Gunner Archetype, skating on a floating crossbow doesn’t sound practical. But I do wish it were possible to skate in some of the wild areas and dungeons you come across throughout Metaphor’s 80 or so hours. Though you of course need your weapon in hand in those areas so you can stab or shoot an enemy as they approach, but it sure would make some of the backtracking you have to do in later dungeons a bit breezier.
As I reflect on my time with Metaphor: ReFantazio, it still strikes me how much Atlus was able to adapt Persona’s formulas but still iterate on them meaningfully when moving to a fantasy setting. While I walked through the alleys and streets of Tokyo in Persona 5, I always felt like my own two feet were enough to get me where I needed to go. But Metaphor’s world feels bigger than these discrete slices of the real ones, and so it’s only natural that we need a new way to move through it. The skate-sword may look a little silly out of context, and maybe more whimsical than fitting for the dark political drama of the rest of the game, but it is one of the biggest quality-of-life changes Atlus could have made for Metaphor. When you play the game on October 11, get in the habit of whipping it out every time you’re in its cities. There’s no drawback, and you’re walking around enough.
