Gruesome battles, bonkers lore, the power of friendship, and sword surfing: Metaphor: ReFantazio is here, and it has it all. And while the newest Atlus game is fairly beginner-friendly—as far as 80-hour JRPGs with dozens of interconnected systems go—there are still plenty of things that it doesn’t tell you but are super useful to know.
1. Character levels don’t matter much, gear does
Since Metaphor has a job system with classes that need to be leveled on their own, character levels matter less than they ever did in an Atlus game. Getting two stat points from reaching a new level won’t really move the needle if you’re stuck on a boss. Even leveling up five times may not do much in that scenario because most fights are closer to puzzles than stat checks.
What does matter is gear, especially weapons. Although none of the combat tutorials mention this, what I’ve discovered through testing is that the weapon ATK stat affects all damage, including magic attacks, which is completely different to how things work in modern Persona games.
A low Magic stat and high-damage weapon will produce more devastating spells than a low Magic stat and an early-game weapon, so don’t worry about chasing stats by leveling and just make sure you’re always using the best gear available.
Don’t grind levels until the very end
Since character levels don’t matter a lot and grinding gets less effective the more you do it, it’s best to keep it to a minimum. As long as you have enough money to purchase the best gear for your party at any given moment, it’s better to just move on.
Beyond that, the only thing overleveling does is make it easier to defeat mobs by hitting them in the overworld without initiating turn-based combat. So, grinding just begets more pointless grinding.
Since EXP gains fall off a cliff as soon as the party outlevels an enemy, grinding isn’t even effective. This only changes at the very end of the game, when you get an unmissable opportunity to quickly reach whatever level you want by fighting endless waves of high-level mobs.
2. Use A-EXP items as you earn them
Items for gaining Archetype experience cap at 99. The game absolutely showers you with them, so make sure to use them often, because the excess ones you earn will be gone forever without any indication that you’ve hit an inventory limit.
3. Retry button as a battle scout
Metaphor: ReFantazio introduces the Retry button as a quality-of-life thing that’s there if you make a big mistake. But what the game doesn’t say is that retrying battles doesn’t truly reload them, as all of your automatically tracked insights from the last attempt will still be there.
For example, say you start a fight by hitting a boss with an electric attack, but it turns out they resist it. You can hit the Retry button and then open the analysis screen to see the boss’s electric affinity no longer has a question mark but a half-shield icon below it. Use this to scout all the enemy’s affinities without wasting turns or MP like you’re playing a Persona or SMT game.
4. Prioritize companion bonds over dungeon trips
There are two reasons to prioritize companion bonds, with the more obvious one being that many companions have bond bonuses that make combat and dungeon crawling easier.
Secondly, every companion bond has at least one rank-up stage taking place on the Gauntlet Runner, which can only happen while traveling. Some have up to four. This is a problem because there are only so many occasions on which you’ll organically end up on a road trip.
Therefore, it’s wise to prioritize companion bonds over dungeon journeys until at least one person mentions they’d like to talk to you the next time you’re on the Runner. This will ensure you don’t have to waste time on aimless trips while trying to max everyone in the final stretch of the game.
The only exception to this approach would be the odd dungeon with a deadline, which should obviously take priority if its cut-off date is close.
5. Courage is the one Royal Virtue you can ignore
Royal Virtues are required for starting certain bond events. While this naturally means they need to be leveled, one that really doesn’t is Courage—because you’re likely to max it well before the end due to the massive number of quests that award points in it.
… except while you’re achievement-hunting
That said, there’s an achievement for doing a certain Courage-building activity in Martira on three separate days. So, once you reach this town, it’s a good idea to save, do it thrice to get the achievement, and then just reload the save.
6. Status ailment skills are useless
Very early on in the game, you’ll encounter mobs weak to paralysis. This might make you think status ailments are a viable combat option in Metaphor: ReFantazio, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
See, status ailments are only effective when used against you. Offensively, they proc ridiculously rarely even when combined with skills and items boosting their trigger chance. This makes them unreliable at best and a waste of skill slots at worst.
On the rare occasion that an enemy is weak to an ailment, you can always try inflicting it with a cheap item and save your skill slots for literally anything else.
… but don’t sleep on Sleep Shot
Sleep Shot and Poison Shot are kind of an exception to this. Not due to the effects they’re named after, but simply because they happen to hit super hard in the early game, when there’s no shortage of things weak to Pierce but a serious lack of skills that pierce. As for their status effects, they’re like winning a fiver from a scratch-off ticket: it doesn’t happen often but it’s cool when it does.
7. Check the Gauntlet Runner’s toilet every 5th day
As soon as you get the Gauntlet Runner, the game will advise you to check its toilet often. You’ll try that and get one free point in Luck, then naturally start doing it every day. Don’t. This stat boost is only available on Idlesday, which is any day divisible by five: June 10, July 25, etc.
9. No need to keep track of informants’ insights
Using informants to learn enemy weaknesses and dungeon tips in advance is crucial for overcoming Metaphor: ReFantazio with as little stress as possible, especially on higher difficulties. The game itself says as much.
What it doesn’t point out is that you don’t have to memorize or keep track of their advice because a useful summary of their tips can be found by scrolling through the Quest screen.
This is easy to overlook. Unlike informant dialogue boxes, the summaries don’t highlight keywords for enemy weaknesses and resistances in red, and the game’s UI can get pretty busy—to the point you might start tuning out certain elements.
10. Gauntlet Runner’s altar is a waste of time
The altar that you get on the Runner during mid-game is presented like it’s a pretty big deal. It’s not. Using it only generates a tiny max MP increase for a single teammate, so there’s always a better use of your time.
11. Cooking is a waste of time—until it’s not
Cooking is a source of some of the most powerful items in Metaphor: ReFantazio. The problem is that it takes time, your most limited resource. The solution is not to do it until getting Maria to Bond level 4, which lets you cook on the Gauntlet Runner once a day without time passing.
11. Purification serves two purposes
Metaphor: ReFantazio introduces Purification early on as a way of upgrading certain gear. But there’s a second use for it: It changes affinities of some rare and already purified equipment, like allowing a pair of gloves to go from reflecting fire to electric damage.
This can be done for a modest sum of 50 Reeve, making it immensely useful when preparing your team to tackle endgame bosses.
12. Don’t miss the game’s one unmissable book
Talk to Julian near the fountain at Angler’s Inn Square in Port Brilehaven between July 23 and August 12 to get Magical Future and keep your hopes of platinuming Metaphor: ReFantazio in a single playthrough alive.
