Thoughts on Metaphor:ReFantazio now that the community has had space from it's release?

Spoilers within, though tagged. Selfishly, I finished the game this week and wanted to talk about it, but I thought it might also be nice to have a wider conversation now that the 'honeymoon' phase is past most.

TL;DR: Story was solid, themes were great, characters were individually incredible but lacked inter-party scenes to build chemistry, best implementation of press-turn combat ever, great villain, uneven but mostly brisk pacing, and one of the worst implemented 'job' systems I've seen.

To lead, I think the game is a solid 8/10.

The story is good but not great for a few reasons. I think that it played a bit too close to very common fantasy JRPG tropes, which while I believe intentional given the narrative, was still a bit disappointing. Having one of the major twists being that it was a post-post apocalyptic society born from our world finding magic is perhaps one of the most overplayed plotpoints in all of JRPGs but particularly Atlus's, the Dragon Shrine revelations all felt super flat. However I really, really loved the political bend and while it engaged with a lot of themes just at a surface level I enjoyed that it really approached the whole gamut of issues that a ruler might face and the challenges of leading a society towards the ideas of a utopia. The themes of anxiety and the role of fantasy in our collective consciousness was a cool one, if not incredibly heavy-handed in the last 15% of the game. The main cast was also incredible, and probably my favorite collectively of any Atlus game. Heismay is one of my favorite characters in JRPGs period, I loved every last thing about him from his design to his voice to his character story and role as the level-headed eldest of the party. Eupha definitely felt the weakest, a bit too vanilla and uninteresting, but that is partially because of how little time they gave her in the game being introduced so late in the story. I do wish they all had more scenes together. Scenes like when the party first engages with Heismay and uses pots and pans, it was a charming party chemistry scene that you just don't get much of in the game unfortunately.

There were clearly some narrative threads left on the cutting-room floor, and the pacing was uneven throughout though overall I did think it was paced FAR better than P5 which I could never get through. They did a much better job of giving you a goal to work towards and feeling like you had momentum, and there never felt like there was massive gaps between main narrative beats like Persona. The story did sag at parts particularly after the opera house.

The combat was incredible, I think the elements of half-turns, the abilities and the overworld combat all coalesced into probably my favorite version of the press-turn system so much so that I don't think it can be improved from here, outside of my major annoyance of missing/repels/blocks dropping turns which feels incredibly frustrating and overly punitive.

However my biggest negative with the game is the "Archetype" job system in the game... definitely the worst implementation of the job system I've personally seen. Characters are naturally pigeonholed into their given roles. Advanced archetypes have extremely high requirements to unlock requiring you to be intentional in the job classes you unlock and level (while also being a bit non-sensical), while the synthesis and gimmicks seem to want you to be more flexible in your archetype choices. Then the two last companions you get, if not the last 3, are basically locked into their starting archetype lines in their entirety as you have nearly no options to branch out before you're at the end of the game. Combined with the limited dungeon-delving via the calendar and MP systems means that your grinding options are a bit hamstrung unless you cheese the game fairly heavily and grind extremely heavily.

Then, the cherry on top, is the ultimate archetypes for each character are SO incredibly good that you really need to unlock them - but that comes with their own massive archetype requirements. This all adds up to characters being forced into their roles given to them by the game, with very little freedom to play around with builds or archetype lines particularly with the last 3 characters, until the VERY end of the game. By then, the Royal Archetypes are better anyways. Its a very poorly thought out system IMO that is not only frustrating but incongruent with other prominent design elements of the game.

However, once you're actually IN combat that all kind of melts away because the combat is so great to experience. I just am frustrated by how interesting the job system could have been with a few tweaks (remove alt archetype requirements entirely, severely reduce needed mag investments for archetype unlocks, tie stats to equipped archetype, remove concept of 'royal archetypes').

Anyways, curious on other's thoughts!