Finally I got into the city and the real game began with me being introduced to the calendar system. This was new to me, as I haven't played any of the Persona games. I was told that I had 10 days until some calamity struck, so I had to finish a certain dungeon by that time. No problem, I thought, as the preparation before that, including doing city quests to reach Wisdom 2, which opened up the purification feature and a side dungeon quest, only took a few days. So I entered the main dungeon, and was starting to have fun. 8 hours later I had finished both the side dungeon and the main story dungeon before the time limit, when the game decided to slap me in the face and told me that I did it wrong.

You see, these dungeons have "rest" areas called Magla Hollows. But you can't actually rest there, only save the game and do some dialogue. They don't fill up your magic points, which are the main limiting resource in dungeon runs. However, then the game introduced me to the option of using the Magla Hollow or other save points (in the form of a cat) to teleport back to the entrance. From there I could exit back into the city, rest properly in a tavern, and then get back into the dungeon, teleporting right back to the Magla Hollow. Great! Basically exchange a calendar day for a mana refill. Should be fine, as long as I don't need more days than the time limit. Wrong! It turned out after the dungeon that you get any calendar days not used in the dungeon as free days, which you can use to increase your virtues, bonds with other characters, do quests, or grind. These free days are extremely valuable, especially at the start of the game. And I had basically wasted them, by using the outside rest option whenever my mana was a bit low, instead of wringing the maximum out of each magic point.

For me, good game design has failing forward options: If you aren't doing that well, the game should help you along in order to not fail at later, even more difficult challenges. Metaphor Refantazio reminds me of Valkyria Chronicles in as far as these games have failing backwards systems: They make the game easier for you if you played in a specific developer-intended "perfect" way, and punish you if you play casually, try out things, and are "inefficient" by very specific metrics. That is especially galling if you either need knowledge from previous games or guides, or get the information about what you should have done later in the game, and should basically replay parts of it "optimally" to get the best rewards.

So I read some guides and tips about Metaphor Refantazio, and was told something I otherwise would have learned only much later in the game: Each character has an ultimate archetype, but you can only play that one, if you ranked up very specific archetypes throughout the game. If you are again playing casually, and try out a wide variety of archetypes on each character for fun, you might get to a point where you simply don't have the time to still level the archetypes you need high enough to fulfill the conditions for the ultimate archetype. Unless you use a very specific exploit that allows you to farm infinite amounts of archetype xp. So, hey, I'm kind of happy that my Game Pass subscription ends in a week, and I won't be able to reach the end of Metaphor Refantazio anyway. Because if I have the choice of playing a RPG either for maximum fun while trying out a lot of things, or for maximum efficiency, I'll always choose the fun. Even if the game at some point would tell me that now I can't finish the game, due to all the accumulated penalties for not playing perfectly. I call that bad game design.

Apart from the failing backwards design, Metaphor Refantazio is fun enough in a very classical way. It does look a bit old-fashioned, compared to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which I just played recently. But the archetype system and the turn-based combat are all very entertaining. The story and world aren't half bad, although again a bit more classical: In my 12 hours I did fight a lot of wolves, goblins, skeletons, and a minotaur, but also a few more original monsters, weirdly called "humans". I am totally fine playing this game for another week, and then stopping somewhere in the middle. I'm just not willing to restart it, and play "optimally" in order to be able to reach some end game goal.