JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Hello, and welcome to the Official Xbox Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from Inside Xbox. Now, if you're fan of RPGs, this is the week. Metaphor: ReFantazio, from the creators of the Persona series is out October 11th. But you may have seen the reviews. This is shaping up to be a real game of the year contender. As an RPG fan, I got to say, love to see it. Now, we talked about Metaphor: ReFantazio on the podcast before. But this week, we've got something pretty special. Calling him from Japan, we have Atlas' Katsura Hashino. He's directed or produced a few things. You may have heard of Persona 3, 4, 5, Catherine, 13 Sentinels, Odin Sphere, and Metaphor: ReFantazio. Quick few notes about this conversation. We're going to stay away from spoiler territory. We don't get too much into the story of the game and all the video that you're going to see is from early parts of the game. Now, with that, let's get to the chat. I am incredibly pleased to welcome Hashino-san to the official Xbox Podcast. Hashino-san, thank you so much for joining us on the eve of the worldwide release of Metaphor: ReFantazio. How are you and the team feeling?
KATSURA HASHINO: Right now, we're really happy. There's nothing left for us to do. All we have to do is wait to see how the users react, and we're excited to see what they feel.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Very cool. Let's talk a little bit about your time at Atlas. You've been working at Atlas for about three decades now going back to the mid-90s, which is incredible longevity in a fast changing industry. You've got a string of successes to go with that. I was thinking back, what were games like 30 years ago? Fighting games and FPS. Fighting games were like the King. FPS titles were just getting started. Arcades were like a huge part of gaming life. But RPGs, even the ones that came out during that time, have endured and if anything, it become more mainstream than ever, more global than ever. So why do you think these games continue to resonate so strongly?
KATSURA HASHINO: That's a very interesting question, and it's almost hard to say, but I think you might have to ask the fans of RPG games first to really find the right answer. But in my opinion, I would say RPGs are role playing games. It's a game where you play a role. There's a story and you put yourself in the shoes of the protagonist. That's like a very basis of this experience. It's not something you see too often in other genres to the same extent. I feel like that's why we make the RPGs that we make and why I personally like RPGs because of this experience that you get out of them.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Something I've come to appreciate personally in playing Persona 3, 4, 5 and even other Atlas RPGs like Soul Hackers 2, there's a real element of familiarity for me. Familiar enemies, familiar systems, elemental weaknesses. It's a bit like riding a bike where I'm immediately comfortable when I start a new game in the series. In Metaphor: ReFantazio, I'm now about 50 hours in and I'm very much enjoying it. But I keep having a feeling of unfamiliarity, which is keeping me on the edge of my seat as I play. Was it a goal of the team to really just shake up expectations?
KATSURA HASHINO: First of all, I'm really happy to hear your thoughts from playing the game. It's really nice to hear. I'm not sure if we like 100 percent had that in mind when we were making it, but we recently released the prologue as a demo. The story after the prologue takes you to a bunch of different areas in the world. I think the prologues in one area and then you go on a journey to a new area once you start playing the full game. Once you do that, more places open up and the story also opens up and you see a lot more about the world and a lot more about the game as well. We really hoped to keep it very exciting. We didn't want to bore our players by keeping the same, the entire time. So by the time it takes you to beat the game, which is going to be a fair amount of your time, it's a pretty voluminous game. We've tried to continue to surprise our players in both the system and the twists and turns the story takes. We really hope that. It sounds like it might be alive and well from what we're telling you, so we're really happy to hear that.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Something I'm curious about. The Persona series it's so popular. It's loved by millions. Does creating a new IP, this new world, allow for experimentation or wild things that you've been wanting to try for a while, but maybe you couldn't fit it within the Persona series because it's a more grounded, more realistic setting with fan expectations.
KATSURA HASHINO: I think yeah, we tried our best. We really had ideas that we wanted to put this game that we couldn't put into other games. Most of, for example, the Persona Series, Persona 5 is set in the real world. Persona 5 specifically in Shiba and Tokyo. That means the story we want to tell become slightly limited to the place that we're building the story within. It also means it's a little bit easier for us to work with because we know the place we have that baseline to work from. But once again, it does limit our options. Whereas in a fantasy world, in an entirely new fantasy world that we create, we have the freedom to explore all these ideas and things that we weren't able to do in the past. In the Persona Series, the characters, the story itself is based around a single location, a single hideout, usually, or a single place where all the characters hang out. The world that they're working in or they're living in doesn't change, but the way that they perceive the world that they're living in changes. That's one of the maybe major parts of the Persona Series that's really interesting in its own way But in Metaphor, we don't really have that one spot, that one place where everybody is based out of. So we don't have that, like, one single location to work with. In a way, we do have one country that characters are traveling through. So they do have that connection to a country instead of a very specific place. But the scale is much larger. Instead of being, for example, in Chibi or something in one place, we're instead traveling to all these different places within this country, within this world. So you get a chance to see a broader perspective.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I would love to talk more about those places and maybe the inspirations that they came from. Looking at the world of Metaphor: ReFantazio, the way people are dressed, how they get around. there's a feeling that I personally talk of, like, Belle Époque Europe where new technologies were mixing with the old world, and of course, the architecture as well. But then there's a lot of fantastical elements, like, yeah, magic and ignitter. I'm actually just very curious what you were reading or what you were watching as you dreamt of this world.
KATSURA HASHINO: At the very beginning of the development of Metaphor: ReFantazio, we were locked into traditional fantasy culture, like for example, Toki, Lord of the Rings. We researched not just what the traditional fantasy was, but why it was written the way it was, what inspired it to be written in the way it was. So we did a of a lot of research. We found a lot of very interesting background to it. But while we were trying to bring this aspect into our game, we threw out all of these different art ideas of it. We realized we couldn't really make a game that was in the traditional fantasy mode. It wouldn't really feel original to us. It would lack that originality that defines us. We're also finding that it would be hard for us to bring out the creativity that we wanted to in this more traditional fantasy world. We decided part way through that rather than, so you'd asked us about the inspirations that we had. So part way through, we decided to just abandon all of the inspirations that we had and just create something new. Then we took things just that we personally like and we tried to find ways to bring it into the game. So there was a stopping of a research and just a starting of this original creative endeavor.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Could you talk about the design of the humans in this game? Cause there's definite inspiration here, a definite wildness here. Humans are the most bizarre monsters in this world. The designs, I personally find very disturbing, almost reminding me of the work of the Dutch artist, Hieronymus Bosch. Are you a fan of his work?
KATSURA HASHINO: We really do like him, but we're more like casual fans, if that makes sense. In that search to find out the origins of the fantasy genre and in the initial search that we did. We did find out this theory that Hieronymus Bosch was the first person who drew fantasy monsters. We definitely were really curious about what things he drew. I think we as a whole team went to the a museum and checked out his artwork and checked out a number of other kind of peoples. I think Bulger, I think is the name of it. I'm not quite sure about the name of the artist. But basically, rather than saying we looked at, like 100 Hieronymus Bosch pieces of art, and we tried to combine that style into arts. It was more like we were in this process of examining and researching, we looked at it and looked at other artists and tried to see what we can combine into our game.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I feel like I'm going to want to go to a museum at some point, just to look at more art after playing this game and just seeing some more of this stuff because playing through, I actually was like going online and looking things up, which is not something that happens a lot after playing a game. I want to talk about the mechanics of the game just a little bit. As I mentioned earlier, this was playing through Metaphor: ReFantazio was the first time in a long time and in Atlas RPG where I felt on unfamiliar ground the rhythm of breaking enemies through elemental weaknesses and all out attacking. That's gone in place of the new turn system. I'm just curious as you were building out the new combat system. Where did you start and what were you hoping to accomplish?
KATSURA HASHINO: It's hard to know where to start when talking about the battle system and what we were trying to achieve. But something that we can refer to is in the Shin Megami Tensei Series, especially III, we have this press turn battle system where if you know your enemy's weakness, and you can constantly attack it, you're able to just prevent them from taking a turn, so this is overwhelming attack, but you have to know what you're doing. The reason why we did that was in Manga and so on, there's always these moments in fights where people each get their turn, you get to put out their powerful attacks and see what happens. But in a real fight, that absolutely doesn't happen. The weaker gets pounded until submission. I really wanted to put that aspect of fighting into our Ames, and that helped weed into the system that you see. But in Metaphor as well, there are remnants of this idea that are in there as well. If you're fighting a really weak enemy, you have this option to use a completely action-based system, where you can just knock them out of the park and move on. But if you face off against more powerful foe, you enter the command battle system. This is going back to the idea of Banga and movie-style combat, where you see the main character running around, beating up all the little the weak, what do you call them? Medians, maybe the henchmen, just running around, knocking them down left or right, but then they face off against a more powerful foe. There's suddenly this face off. Everything slows down. It goes from fast to slow. There's this face-off, there's a moment of face off, and maybe the character will call in their friends to help them and use all their power at their disposal to defeat them. That balance of the temple of fast and slow was something that we really, I wouldn't say powered up, but brushed up in terms of the combat system from our previous games.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Something interesting you do at the beginning of the game is you ask for the player's name, not the protagonist's name, but my name. I think a lot of people use their own name as the protagonist name, but you don't get to do that because you're giving your real name at the beginning. I'm curious if there is a cannon name for the character. I know people and I'm one of these people who used Makoto for Persona 3 or ran for Persona 5. I'll be honest, I spent a long time thinking about what to name my character and maybe I just want to know if there's what you picked.
KATSURA HASHINO: Sorry, this is a really answer, but in the system itself, we do have a default name that we had used for it. But when we created this game, we really wanted everybody to come up with their own names and put themselves in the game. We never bring that out to the front.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That's fair. I know there's a lot of conversation about it online. So everyone get creative out there. You begin by the game by actually asking the players a question, and I want to ask that question to you. Is fantasy limited to the confines of imagination? Would you call it a powerless creation?
KATSURA HASHINO: As gamers, that's something that we always have trouble with as well. Question we ask ourselves. We don't want to be powerless. We want to have the power to create. But It's something that we always have to face whenever we're creating something ourselves. When we initially started this project, we asked ourself this question. We asked ourselves, can we make a fantasy game? Do we have the power to do so? As part of that journey, we decided to look into, as we said before, we decided to search for the roots of fantasy, understand what the definition of fantasy and what makes fantasy so appealing. I was looking through a number of books that were written a long time ago, examining this and coming up with hypotheses and theories. There's one that really stuck out to me. It said that fantasy is not something that we engage in to forget real life, but to realize that the real world has a potential to be something different. When I read that, I thought, wow, this is a really romantic view of fantasy and a really wonderful idea. The reason we focus on fantasy is to not let it just be an escape from reality, but a way to bring power back into reality. That was one of the major impetuses for what inspired this project.
JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Hashino-san, thank you so much for the answers. Thank you so much for joining us here on the official Xbox Podcast. Congratulations on launch.
KATSURA HASHINO: Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
