If I had to describe this game in any one way, I'd say it's a melting pot of Persona, SMT, and funny enough, Digital Devil Saga specifically. Right away, I do like how Metaphor is a change of pace from the usual Atlus fare. You can only get so much out of playing as a second year high school student before it honestly starts getting a bit old. Euchronia is honestly a pretty abysmal place to live, what with the discrimination between tribes, monsters roaming about, and the general corrupt church, which is a pretty standard thing in RPGs, but still. Even so, there is good in that place, even if it's not totally in the limelight. Moving to the gameplay, this game has, yes, a job system, and you know what that means. The main goal of the gameplay is abusing the systems given to you to utterly smash the kneecaps of your enemies. Archetypes are like having the demon forms of Digital Devil Saga both without the Human Form, a gun (besides the Gunner line), but also the ability to inherit skills from other Archetypes to use in strategies, at a fee, naturally. Unlike Persona as well, after the first dungeon, you can go learn Archetypes or inherit skills with the press of a button instead of having to constantly visit Akedemia. The one main complaint I do have about the Archetypes, however, is their availability, namely in one particular example. If you're running a magic build, you're likely putting MC on the Mage line with maybe some diving into Healer line for light magic. Wizard is given fairly early and is a decent magic class, but as you progress and start acquiring more Adept Archetypes, Wizard starts to feel a bit lacking on it's own. The problem is just how late the Elite Mage classes unlock, because by the time you get them, you get MC's best Archetype, which is so powerful that you'll likely never switch off it. Sure, another character can get value out of it because of her high Magic stat, but it's a real shame you never have a reason to put MC on Elemental Master. I did like how the game encouraged the player to diversify the party's setups, as some enemy formations react differently depending on certain factors, like Goborns going berserk if anyone's a Mage or Healer or the birds that instakill anyone without a defense buff. I feel like these kinds of scenarios where Archetype diversity did fall off in the lategame, but by then, you're likely destroying random encounters in the first turn with no effort, so they have no time to deploy their tactics because they're already dead to your hyper efficient combo. In a way, it does feel like the Archetype system does fall to the wayside a bit once you have your two big setups: your "destroy mobs" squad and your "obliterate the boss in as few turns as possible, and in some cases, before they even get a turn" squad. This is especially a thing that can happen in the last couple of dungeons with the right setup. Similar to Trails through Daybreak, Metaphor has a hybrid system of field combat and turn based combat. Unlike Daybreak, however, enemies weaker than you can be defeated with ease in the field with a couple of hits, with no need to bother engaging them in turn based combat. You still get all the rewards, but don't have to waste time and it kept the flow going when you were farming weak enemies for money and Magla with Merchant. Even so, you could still engage with enemies in turn based combat with a simple button press. For the stronger enemies, it's a similar deal to Daybreak, stun them, get into a Squad Battle, and you'll have the advantage to lay the smackdown on them for free. While I did enjoy a couple of the dungeons, I will admit a lot of the side dungeons are not great. There are a bit too many samey looking caves, forests, and three towers with mostly similar layouts for my liking. They do step it up in the main dungeons, but one in particular, the Dragon Temple, does feel like it overstays it's welcome a bit. Then again, I also did an unhealthy amount of grinding in there before the boss, so that could be why I feel it overstays it's welcome. Before I get to one other thing, I need to address one thing. Synthesis Skills, namely how utterly broken they are. Similar to Digital Devil Saga, you have combo moves that require using more than one of your press turns to pull off. You don't get many AOE magic attacks without using this system, but as soon as you gain the ability to purchase a certain accessory, the floodgates of pain open. Two turn moves turn into one, and quickly open the door to utterly slaughter enemies with the most powerful skills in the game. Peerless Stonecleaver and Royal Sword are so incredibly fair and balanced, I killed three of the final dungeon's bosses with just one use of Royal Sword and a Masquerade Charge powered Peerless Stonecleaver. The Dragon Trial bosses? Didn't last one turn. It is absurd just how powerful these skills are with the ability to use them like regular moves. I barely needed to use a regular skill in a boss fight on anyone not names Heismay aside from Hero's Cry, which just gives you 4 half press turns for a measly 99 MP, in the lategame when you're swimming in MP restoring items. Anyway, I will say the characters are...well, they're alright. The real star of the show was the antagonist, Louis. This isn't even a spoiler since the first scene you see when you boot up the game is literally this dude stabbing the king. I do like a villain who sticks to his ideals to the very end, even if the endgoal was hyper extreme. Now before I end this, I need to add one thing. Lots of people are likely coming to this game from Expedition 33, and while I have my personal opinions on the...opinions people have with that game, making comparisons and acting like this game is bad because "it's not Expedition 33" is not a mindset you should go into playing this game. Enjoy the fantasy as it is. Don't go comparing it to what's apparently god's gift to RPGs and apparently the greatest video game to ever exist. Play Metaphor as it is. Not everything needs to be Expedition 33, and this game predates that anyway, so I fail to see the constant comparison. Anyway, it was a fun game, and now it is time to close the book on this fantasy. As the new king and his companions embark on a new journey, fantasy lives on.

Out of all the Ys games I've played so far, I will be brutally honest, I liked this one the least so far, and it's not even a contest. The story didn't get me very invested aside from one sequence halfway through, then another part later on torpedo'd my opinion of the story into the dirt, I didn't care much for many of the characters since most of the main cast barring Adol and Dogi are temporary until halfway through the game (and even then, we have moments of characters getting replaced, thus giving me even less incentive to care about a couple of them), and the less I say about some of the gameplay choices, the better. Actually, you know what, let's talk about the gameplay. This game predates Memories of Celceta, and it really shows. I get that, being the first game to implement the party member system, it had some growing pains to get through. Ranged characters are easily screwed the hardest by having their attacks being totally ineffective on hard shelled enemies, and oddly enough, they're the only ones this happens to. Strike weapons are VERY slow, which screws over Dogi very hard since the other Strike character gets a skill that's incredibly powerful and has range, and that's Dragon Blaze. Slash characters got the gold standard treatment overall. Elk's party ability gives you more money, of which you'll need a lot of since you have 7 characters to maintain, Geis, who's back with his new fairies, gives more experience, which needs no explanation, and Adol has the usual main character benefits, of which this time, it's getting weapons that can change his damage type to Strike or Pierce. The problem I have with this is two parts. Elk and Geis' party abilities are so useful, you have borderline no reason to use anyone else aside from boss fights once you get the Strike and Pierce weapons. Part two is simple, and that's having to constantly open the menu to change weapons around on Adol. This game really would've benefited from having a weapon switching system like the one Sora got in Kingdom Hearts 3. Being a game that predates Celceta, the synthesis system isn't as robust as it was there, but holy mother of grind. You need a lot of materials to synthesize new items. Sure, you're likely to do laps around the local areas to farm levels, especially early on, but these exact same items you use for your synthesis may also be needed for the frankly very few sidequests, a number of them being missable due to plot events that occur after a certain point of the game. One in particular involves going back and forth to the quest giver 3 different times. This happens twice, by the way, and if you're doing the quests as they become avaliable, you can't teleport yet during the first one, so have fun mashing that B button (or whatever your controller/keyboard of choice requires you to roll with). Did I forget to mention the final boss mandates all 7 characters be used? Because if you're like me and didn't put good accessories on the characters you never use, you're gonna have a bad time. Making their ultimate weapons requires 50 SOUL STONES, which don't come by easy in the final dungeon, either, which goes right back to the grind issue. As a positive, however, I do like how a few of the items you get aren't just a "use this one time and let it collect dust afterward" case. A couple do fall into that pit, but a few others still get utility later down the road. The one in the final dungeon, however is used...one time. Literally. Maybe two if you're backtracking, but it baffles me a bit why they bothered putting an item in the final dungeon only to nearly never use it. On another subject of "things they improved in Celceta," the EXTRA skill gauge, at least to me, feels like it took an eternity to fill up. More often than not, until probably mid to lategame, you'll likely only get to use your Extra skill once per boss fight unless you do a dumb like me and press the button by accident against regular enemies and waste it, which did happen more than once. Having to build up SP faster with slow charge attacks also didn't really help my experience much, and combine that with the previously mentioned fatal flaw of Pierce characters against hard shelled enemies since all their attacks do 0 damage to them and therefore give you 0 SP. Honestly, when it comes to the story, maybe they should've just let the Wind of Destruction do what it's name implies. A large number of the folks in Altago City are, frankly, pretty abysmal people. Soft resetting the place probably would've been a mercy, especially since the whole Dragon Warrior thing was pretty much just a death wish, anyway, thus making the whole "fight 5 dragon bosses" thing feel like a waste since losing was supposed to be the endgame anyway. I don't know. That part of the story really bothered me and is what primarily ruined my opinion of the story. Also, is it just me or is it a theme that this game, Celceta, and Ark all have very weak antagonists? I get these games aren't as about the story and characters as Trails and more about the adventuing and locales Adol visits, but a good villain you want to defeat would be nice. Dark Fact may have been on screen for 5 minutes, but at least he had presence in the story. Anyway, I hear people sing the praises of Ys VIII a lot, so when I get around to playing that, I guess I'll finally see what all the hype is about.