A thing about me is I live according to bushidō, tempering the iron of my will against any enemy the world sends my way. At all times I am sharpening myself on the whetstone of my foes, fashioning my body into a missile which I can launch at the bourgeoisie. My entire life is agōgē, especially the bit where I spend eight hours a day writing about videogames for money. Seven, discounting lunch.
But not everyone has my dedication to martial asceticism. Some people just want to get on with things, and that's why Atlus—the guys who make Persona and Metaphor: ReFantazio—has been finding new ways to make its combat a little less of a chore in its recent games. In Metaphor, that experimentation took the form of a combat system that alternated between real-time and turn-based—letting you easily clear out low-level mooks but dropping you into a more traditional, RPG-esque squad combat mode for tougher enemies (Persona 5 had a similar system, mind).
The team realised they had to dial things back when they noticed players "felt that resorting to turn-based combat was a form of succumbing." Instead of using the turn-based mode to take out harder enemies, they were just whacking away at them endlessly in the real-time mode, even when the foes were a similar level to them. "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," said Goto.
So, well, Atlus shifted combat back to that style we're all more familiar with: "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." It paid off, in Lewis Parker's Metaphor: ReFantazio review for PCG, he scored the game 95% and paid it particular praise for combat that was "a huge step up from Persona 5."
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