What I love about Atlus games is how much reverence they have for the medium. A menu is not just a menu in an Atlus game, it's a window into the game's core identity. In the Persona series, this is aided by deliberate splashes of color, though it's unclear what the green of Persona 6 could mean at this stage. Where many other games see menus as perfunctory features that maybe get some aesthetic touches now and then, Atlus understands that every part of the game is the game.
Metaphor: ReFantazio's Menus Show The Craft Involved In Game Design
For many games, there is the gameplay, and there is the story. Sometimes, games struggle to even match up these two concepts. We don't know how well Metaphor will yet either since no one outside of Atlus has played it, but everything we've seen of it is promising. The UI in Metaphor is art. It's not a feature you need to use before you get back to the art, it is art itself.
These are small features in the grand scheme of things - menus, ultimately, must work in a perfunctory sense before we can celebrate their artistry - but they make the game feel so much richer and make it easier to become engrossed. I know with an Atlus game that even when I may have critiques, every angle in the game has been made with deliberate creativity to emphasise the underlying feeling the game wants to leave us with.
Metaphor ReFantazio Wants Us To Know It's Not Like Persona
So far, that feeling seems to be that Metaphor is the anti-Persona. While Persona 5 was also heavily praised for its menu, the two feel like opposites. Persona 5's UI was cartoonish and spiky, relying on silhouettes and bold reds. Metaphor's meanwhile is drained of any distinct colour beyond the clean white of the text, to better highlight the far more detailed character models, refined curves, and paintlerly palette. Persona 5 was minimalist design with maximalist colours. Metaphor is reversed - minimalist colours inside a more maximalist, detail-heavy design.
This distance between itself and Persona extends to the game as well. While still a game about grotesque and mythologically inspired demons - both Persona and Metaphor are branches on the SMT tree - it handles everything differently. We're not high school students here, and there's a lot more high fantasy in the world with warring noble classes, twisted kings, and a castle on the rocks. We can't romance our companions in this one, and most of all, it's no longer just turn-based but mixes in a more action-oriented affair.
Atlus has an important decision to make with Persona 6. Persona 5 reached new levels of popularity in the West, but it has retained its core fanbase through this surge into a new stratosphere. That leaves a conundrum on whether to double down on everything Persona 5 did well to keep the momentum going, try to take the new Western audience into deeper traditions, or embrace the Western fans and hope the hardcore moves with them.
Metaphor faces a version of this dilemma too. Many, like me, will be interested in it thanks to Atlus, but as a new IP, it has more freedom. The fact it is action combat, full fantasy, no romance, clean UI all feels like it's taking the things that don't make up Persona and turned them into a video game. It gives me a lot of faith that Persona 6, whenever it arrives, will stay the course and be true to Persona 5 and the roots before that. In the meantime, Metaphor will provide for fans that want something kinda the same, but completely different.
