
Metaphor: ReFantazio omits romance for an "experience unlike any you have had" in previous Atlus games.
Atlus has been pretty forthright in Metaphor: ReFantazio going in a hugely different direction than the Persona series and throwing out romance entirely. It's partly because Metaphor: ReFantazio isn't a game about flirty teenagers, and so romance being omitted is "part of the realism of the setting." The new JRPG still has a traditional 'bond' system though, and director Katsura Hashino has elaborated on it in the video below.