As a newly minted awards expert at Polygon, I’ve seen something pretty interesting happen in the last month or so. When I started evaluating the contenders for the Game Awards’ top prize, Game of the Year, this was clear to me Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as the frontrunner. It was a big game in a storied series and a beloved genre, with high production values, a strong storyline and a Metacritic score of over 90 – all historic indicators of success among the Game Awards’ large and diverse voting jury.
But since the beginning of October Rebirth has been completely overshadowed in the Game of the Year conversations by another game that has its roots in the 1990s Japanese RPG scene: Atlus’ Metaphor: ReFantasia. It has an odd title, relatively modest production values, and an old-school, niche ethos. But I’m confident it will outperform its RPG peers in the Game of the Year rankings, and its critical reputation will overshadow Square Enix’s blockbuster more than its two-point lead on Metacritic suggests.
metaphor is an original title from Atlus’ in-house team Studio Zero, the creators of the fan-favorite Persona series. Atlus, now a subsidiary of Sega, has enthusiastically praised the game’s success; the company announced metaphor sold one million copies on the day of its release, making it Atlus’ fastest-selling game to date. In contrast, Square Enix’s public statements are too Rebirth
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
Neither Square Enix nor Atlus have reported specific sales figures for the games, and that’s entirely possible Rebirth has sold more copies than metaphor – maybe even more. But that’s clear metaphorThe publisher is happy with how things are going and Rebirththe editor is not. More specifically, it’s clear that Atlus’ games are growing in importance in the culture while Square Enix’s games are shrinking.
Persona 5Lifetime sales of all editions are Reportedly more than 8 million – a number that is in the same order of magnitude as Final Fantasy 7 Remake‘s sales. Such success would have been unthinkable in the early days of the Persona series, when each new Persona game sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Meanwhile, Square Enix is aiming for the sales peak of the Final Fantasy series: the original from 1997 Final Fantasy 7. (To be fair, this ignores the actual best-selling Final Fantasy game, the MMO phenomenon Final Fantasy 14which is still successful – but probably operates in a completely different area of gaming.)
One reason for Final Fantasy’s difficulties is Square Enix’s anachronistic tactic of PlayStation platform exclusivity, which the company has already promised to abandon. Another reason could also be that Square Enix’s strategy for the series does not correspond to current gaming tastes.
Final Fantasy is one of the most famous brands in gamingand Square Enix management is desperate to see the series return to its place in the top flight. To this end, it has configured its recent entries in the series as mainstream blockbuster games, with huge production budgets and cutting-edge graphics that simultaneously reference Final Fantasy’s history and general trends in contemporary AAA gaming: generic open-world Design, expansive content hierarchies and – in a significant departure from the series’ roots – real-time action combat.
Image: Studio Zero/Atlus
metaphoron the other hand, utilizes turn-based combat and graphics that combine strong character designs with anime stylization and sparse, functional environments. It doesn’t look like what anyone would imagine a mainstream AAA game to be – and it doesn’t play like one either. Instead of trying to combine a 1990s RPG with a 2010s open-world action-adventure, Studio Zero goes deep into its own niche. metaphor creates an artful, original environment while exploring the strange features of Persona games in a new context – features like the sophisticated social simulation and the daily structure that brings gentle time pressure and weekly rhythms to your adventures. And yet this highly specific gaming taste seems to be finding more and more favor with critics and gamers.
There’s another example of this change in taste that’s currently taking place in Western-style RPGs. Dragon Age: The Veil Guardian isn’t quite the open-world jamboree of its 2014 predecessor inquisitionbut it tries to broaden the appeal of the BioWare games through its casual, action-style combat. And yet it currently has fewer players on Steam than Baldur’s Gate 3a game released more than a year ago, with a tricky, turn-based, tabletop-influenced game design that owes it all to the hardcore Dungeons & Dragons simulators that BioWare (developer of the first two Baldur’s Gate games) creates has . Baldur’s Gate 3 It is estimated that around 15 million copies were sold. Sales for The Veil Guardian are not yet known, although publisher EA’s silence on the subject is perhaps telling.
At least in the role-playing space, there is plenty of evidence of a shift that is prioritizing sophisticated niche designs over obvious attempts at mass appeal. For proof of this, look no further than FromSoftware’s astounding success Elden Ringa game that makes little concession to accessibility even as it extends FromSoft’s forbidding Soulslike template into an open world. This could also mean that the epicenter of gaming culture is shifting away from mass-market consoles and towards Steam, whose community tends to lean towards highly specialized experiences.
Former Square Enix executive Jacob Navok suspected that the publisher likely set the budgets and strategies for its recent Final Fantasy games a decade ago – the era of The Witcher 3 And Skyrim. Things looked completely different back then. If Square Enix wants to recapture the glory days of Final Fantasy, it may have to abandon its blockbuster envy and mainstream ambitions, embrace the niche, and get weird again.
