One of Metaphor: ReFantazio’s best additions to the Atlus formula was real-time action combat that let you stun enemies or even completely take out lower-level beasties without ever stepping foot in a turn-based arena to avoid the grinding problem that’s all too common in the genre. But Atlus accidentally went too far with the action combat during development and almost lost “our way.”
In a panel from the Game Developer’s Conference 2025, Atlus veteran Kenichi Goto, who’s planned the battle systems for everything from Persona and Shin Megami Tensei to Digital Devil Saga, explained that the team wanted to “reduce the number of battles where the result of who would win was obvious from the beginning” in its newest fantasy epic Metaphor: ReFantazio.
That’s how its action combat was born. “One of the main reasons turn-based battles have become less popular is that battles start to feel like chores,” Goto said. “Our answer to this chore problem was the Fast and Squad battle system.” Essentially, instead of engaging enemies in turn-based combat, you could simply slash away at them on the field, but the entire system came from the need to solve the game’s grinding problem, “not as action for the sake of action.”
Things quickly got out of hand, though, and “losing sight of this fact is what led to us losing our way overall,” he continued, explaining that, at one point, you could defeat enemies who were around the same level or higher than you with enough time.
“Even for us developers, the highly interactive nature of action was undeniable, and it was also easy to come up with fresh new ideas,” so the team let playtesters try it out and things didn’t go to plan. Too many people “felt that resorting to turn-based combat was a form of succumbing,” which was obviously a huge problem for a game (and a studio) that prides itself on turn-based encounters. “Players complained that it was hard to decide whether they should go into turn based battle or put in the effort and defeat the enemies on the field alone, they couldn’t figure out which was correct.” Goto called the fan feedback “a critical problem”
That’s when the team scaled Metaphor’s action combat back and decided players should only be able to wipe out low-level enemies on the field. “We made it clear within the team that action only exists to smoothly get the player into the heart of the game, which is the turn-based battles.”
Metaphor: ReFantazio dev once thought turn-based JRPG combat “was starting to get outdated,” but now thinks the format has a “long future ahead”
