For fantasy JRPG Metaphor: ReFantazio, Persona director gave himself a crash course featuring classics like The Lord of the Rings, but "if we tried to copy that it would just be a copy"

Metaphor: ReFantazio's fantasy world was created after director Katsura Hashino immersed himself in fantasy classics before designing it, although ultimately it sounds like this crash course had little impact on the final product.

In case you've missed the rave reviews, Atlus's new JRPG Metaphor: ReFantazio is one of the year's highest rated games on Metacritic currently, matching PlayStation's hit platformer Astro Bot for the top spot. If we're counting expansions, Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is the third game this year to reach that 94 Metascore. 

Talking to The Verge, Hashino said it was a challenge creating a fantasy world from whole cloth after spending so much of his time creating universes set in the modern age. Hashino previously developed Persona 3, Persona 4, Persona 5, and Catherine - all set in the modern day - at Atlus before he branched off and formed his own studio, Studio Zero, under the same publishing label. Metaphor: ReFantazio, by contrast, is set in a medieval fantasy realm called the United Kingdom of Euchronia.

In order to prep for Metaphor's development, Hashino studied classic fantasy IP by reading books like The Lord of the Rings. However, he ultimately decided that imitating other fantasy worlds wasn't the right direction for Metaphor.

"I realized that if we tried to imitate this in any way, in the characters or setting or world, it wouldn’t really reach the originals," Hashino said. "If we tried to copy that it would just be a copy. So I thought: let’s try to make a fantasy game that only we can make."

Ultimately, of course, everything Hashino and the team at Studio Zero did culminated in a new dark horse contender for Game of the Year. GamesRadar+'s Metaphor: ReFantazio review slapped a tremendous 4.5 out of 5 stars on the game and called it "a triumphant evolution of Atlus' best."

Persona director and JRPG veteran says the amazing menus in Metaphor: ReFantazio were "really annoying" to make, just as Persona 5's were "impossible to read at first".