Final Fantasy is in trouble. Does Metaphor: ReFantazio show the way?

As Polygon’s new pricing expert, I’ve seen something pretty interesting happen over the past month. When I started ranking the contenders for The Game Awards’ top prize, Game of the Year, I identified Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as a leader. It was a big game in a legendary series and a favorite genre, with high production values, a strong storyline and a Metacritic rating of over 90 – all historical indicators of success with The Game Awards’ large and diverse voting jury.

But since the beginning of October Rebirth has been completely overshadowed in Game of the Year conversations by another game that has its roots in the Japanese role-playing scene of the 1990s: Atlus’ Metaphor: ReFantazio. It has a weird title, relatively modest production values, and an old-school, niche ethos. But I’m confident it will surpass its fellow RPG in the Game of the Year stakes, and its critical reputation outshines Square Enix’s blockbuster more than its two-point Metacritic advantage would suggest.

Metaphor is an original title from Atlus’ in-house team Studio Zero, creators of the popular Persona series. Atlus, now a subsidiary of Sega, has enthusiastically touted the game’s success; the company announced Metaphor It sold one million copies on launch day, making it Atlus’ fastest-selling game to date. In contrast, Square Enix’s public statements are over Rebirth – and last year’s Final fantasy 16 – have certainly been bleak. That was during a financial briefing in May made public in SeptemberSquare Enix said profits from both blockbuster Final Fantasy games “did not meet expectations.” Rebirth sales were “not as strong as expected.” In April, gaming industry analyst Daniel Ahmad estimated that Rebirth sold “about halfThe same number of copies as its predecessor Final Fantasy 7 Remake did it in a similar time frame.

Neither Square Enix nor Atlus have reported hard sales figures for the games, and that’s entirely possible Rebirth has sold more copies than Metaphor – maybe even a lot more. But that’s clear Metaphor‘s publisher is happy with how things are going, and Rebirth‘s publisher does not. In fact, it’s clear that Atlus’ games are growing in importance in the culture, while Square Enix’s are shrinking.

Person 5‘s lifetime sales in all its editions are reportedly more than 8 million – a number that is in the same margin as Final Fantasy 7 Remake‘s sell. That kind of success would have been unthinkable in the early days of the Persona series, when each new Persona game sold in the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, Square Enix is ​​aiming for something similar to the Final Fantasy series’ sales peak: the original from 1997 Final fantasy 7. (To be fair, this discounts the best-selling Final Fantasy game, the MMO phenomenon Final fantasy 14which is still strong, but which is arguably active in a completely different gaming sector.)

One of the reasons for Final Fantasy’s problems is Square Enix’s anachronistic tactics to maintain PlayStation platform exclusivity, which the company has already promised to give up. But another could be that Square Enix’s strategy for the series doesn’t suit today’s gaming tastes.

Final Fantasy does one of the best-known brands in gamingand Square Enix management fervently wants the series to once again take its place in the top tier of gaming. To this end, it has configured its recent contributions to the series as mainstream blockbuster games, with huge production budgets and cutting-edge visuals that simultaneously reference the history of Final Fantasy and general trends in contemporary AAA gaming: generic open-world design, sprawling hierarchies of content , and – in a marked shift away from the series’ roots – real-time action combat.

Metaphoron the other hand, uses turn-based combat and visuals that combine strong character designs with anime stylization and sparse, functional environments. It doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of ​​a mainstream AAA game – and it doesn’t play like one. Instead of trying to combine a 1990s RPG with a 2010s open-world action-adventure, Studio Zero digs deep into its own niche. Metaphor creates a graceful, original setting as you explore the curious features of Persona games in a new context – features like the advanced social simulation and the daily structure that applies gentle time pressure and weekly rhythms to your adventures. And yet this very specific gaming taste seems to be increasingly resonating with critics and gamers.

There’s another example of this change in taste currently happening in Western-style RPGs. Dragon Age: The Veil Guard isn’t quite the open-world jamboree of its 2014 predecessor Inquisitionbut it does try to broaden the appeal of BioWare’s games with its easy, action-style combat. And yet it currently has fewer players on Steam than Baldur’s Gate 3a game released over a year ago, with a clunky, turn-based, tabletop-influenced game design that owes everything to the kind of hardcore Dungeons & Dragons simulators that BioWare (developer of the first two Baldur’s Gate games) used to make . Baldur’s Gate 3 It is estimated that it sold approximately 15 million copies. Sell ​​for The Veil Guard are not yet known, although publisher EA’s silence about this may be telling.

There’s plenty of evidence, at least in role-playing games, of a shift that elevates sophisticated, niche designs over obvious attempts at mass appeal. For proof, look no further than FromSoftware’s astonishing success Elden Ringa game that makes few concessions to accessibility, even as FromSoft’s forbidding Soulslike template expands across an open world. This could also mean that the epicenter of gaming culture is turning away from mass-marketed consoles and towards Steam, whose community tends to focus on highly specialized experiences.

Former Square Enix executive Jacob Navok has suspected that the publisher probably set the budgets and strategies for its recent Final Fantasy games a decade ago – the era of The Witcher 3 And Skyrim. Things looked very different then. If Square Enix wants to recapture the glory days of Final Fantasy, it may have to let go of its blockbuster envy and mainstream ambitions, embrace the niche, and get weird again.