Metaphor: ReFantazio Does Personas Better Than Persona 5
improves on in many ways, perhaps most surprisingly when it comes to Personas. replaces Personas with Archetypes, admittedly a similar concept: whenever a character faces their internal anxiety and resolves to achieve their goals, they awaken to a sort of inner self called an Archetype. Unique to each person, Archetypes are powerful spirits that represent certain heroic virtues: the Healer, the Warrior, the Seeker, and so on. With the aid of the protagonist's mysterious ally Moore, player characters in can swap Archetypes at will, thereby changing their stats and abilities to suit the situation.
Besides their mutability, Archetypes work almost exactly like Personas as far as game mechanics go. But there are a couple of crucial differences in their story connections (and the new features they give rise to) that elevate 's Archetypes over 's Personas. As a result, they feel significantly more impactful on the game's story, and leveling them up is much more worthwhile.
Part of the problem is that there are just too many Personas, where there are only a handful of Archetypes. There are over 200 Personas in (and 173 in ), and only 44 different Archetypes in. Actually, there are even fewer: there are only 14 Archetype lineages, and most of the 44 are just simple variations on those basic types. Collecting all the Archetypes in a single playthrough is a much more feasible task than collecting all the Personas in any given game.
Metaphor: ReFantazio, Atlus’ brand-new JRPG, has one key advantage over Persona 5 and the whole Persona series that makes it the JRPG of the year.
A side effect of this restraint is that every Archetype feels noticeably different from the last one. Personas typically pick from a set menu of skills, resulting in each feeling like a variation on a theme, and not a wholly unique class. The fact that every single character can swap Archetypes at will, instead of just the protagonist, also makes the potential party compositions much more flexible, and
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