Well, well, hasn't Metaphor: ReFantazio done well for itself? In case you're completely unaware, Metaphor is Atlus' (creators of the Persona series) latest RPG, a turn-based fantasy adventure through Euchronia, wherein you must vie for the throne alongside other eligible candidates. You also tear out your heart so you can turn into a fantasy mecha, it's awesome.
The thing sold like hotcakes, shunting out over a million copies on its first day, and it's been critically well-received to boot. We gave it a sparkling 95 in our Metaphor: ReFantazio review—just two points off Baldur's Gate 3, an RPG that's likely to rule over our top 100 list forever (dethroning Disco Elysium in an act of pure regicide, even). Reviews from other outlets have been shiny as well—top marks all around.
Which might surprise you, because if you're listening to the reactionary content mills of the information highway at-large, you might be told time and time again that politics don't have a place in videogames (if you're currently ankle-deep in making a reaction video and about to call me cringe—hi! I hope you're doing well. Imagine me waving enthusiastically).
The strawman I'm constructing will tell you that we need to get back to a time when games weren't 'woke', and were instead about simple, grizzled tough guys tackling straightforward problems. Big dudes in armour! There ought to be a choir in there somewhere, and a badass one-liner that accompanies someone getting stabbed. That'll fix gaming, and then we'll never have to think about anything uncomfortable ever again.
But games like Metaphor: ReFantazio, alongside many others, really do show that gamers like politics more than you might think.
Politics, politics everywhere
Metaphor: ReFantazio is an extremely political game. It might not have you directly picking ideologies to cook in your mind palace like Disco Elysium does, but its politics are a mainline event—even elbowing out some other Atlus mainstays, like uncomfortable and thorny fanservice romances.
Euchronia, to put it bluntly, sucks. No-one is happy here. The game's "tribes" are all some degree of oppressed or oppressing, and you, an Elda, are the most oppressed boy of all. You're met with open superstition and fear, only protected from having your ribs kicked in an alleyway by some horned turbo-racist because you happen to be the protagonist of a JRPG. Even when your political candidacy is going well, there's a strong undercurrent of 'egads, an Elda! I guess he's one of the good ones' going on.
A lot of the game is also spent discussing a fictional utopia in a book owned by Will, the canon name for your Elda and Euchronia's most unexpected frontrunner. The utopia itself scans as an overly idealised version of our own society—it's a democratic meritocracy where all ideas are welcomed, no belief is suppressed, and political corruption is regarded with disdain. And while this seems kinda like Atlus bloviating from a soapbox about how democracy and freedom is good and racism is bad (both things I entirely agree with, to be clear), what really surprised me is how methodically the game picks the idea of a perfect society apart.
Heismay, your Eugief companion from a 'tribe' that consists of small, bat-like humanoids, has one of the more scathing views of this utopia—which makes sense. He's from one of the more distinctly non-human tribes, and is arguably even more discriminated against than you are. As he puts it, "we're nocturnal, we look worlds apart, and there's so few of us. Not enough for any political sway."
These themes of inequality and injustice aren't just in the margins of Metaphor's story—they're front and centre.
His opinion on the book itself directly touches on a super hot-button topic—that is, the politics of disability (and a whole lot of other spheres like class, income, and so on. Intersectionality is like that), using the Eugief people as a frame of reference. While the book goes on and on about how everyone in this utopia can reach the same heights as another, Heismay takes one look at it and says:
"You cannot pretend at diversity without acknowledging individual differences … Equal opportunity doesn't mean equal footing. Their very aims of freedom and balance could spell doom for the striving weak." Resonating words for a lot of situations—like, say, being immunocompromised, and feeling powerless as the world moves on from Covid safety measures. While my full opinions on the politics of Metaphor could fill several articles, this was the exact moment where it clicked in my brain that this game was taking itself, and its themes, very seriously.
These themes of inequality and injustice aren't just in the margins of Metaphor's story—they're front and centre. You spend most of your time trying to get votes on a campaign trail and fighting a might-makes-right populist twink. So, y'know. The politics, they're there. Which begs the question: why hasn't ReFantazio become the bad guy of the month in any meaningful way?
Clicks and baits
It might be the obvious assessment to make, here, but I'll make it anyway: Metaphor: ReFantazio probably doesn't draw ire from the "anti-politics" crowd (even if its politics are distinctly anti-fascist) for a couple of reasons. One, it's a banger fantasy story. I don't think anyone could consider this game poorly-written. A little long-winded, maybe, but that's just how JRPGs work.
Two, there's a thick enough filter here that people with an axe to grind don't have much of a grindstone with which to do so. For these content mills, any issues they yell about must be easily-recognisable enough to get their audience engaged immediately. Anything else is ineffective—people want to be mad, not listen to a lecture.
There's an often-cited meme that more-or-less puts identities into two categories—for example, in the case of gender, there's "man" and "political". If a woman does something in a game, it's suddenly politics, if there's a non-binary character, it's suddenly politics. Meanwhile, anyone trying to tell you how Heismay, a little sugar glider ninja, is "forcing politics down your throat" because he's talking about a book in an interesting way? They're going to sound more unhinged than usual.
That's not to say there aren't critical and nuanced ways to talk about representation in games like Metaphor, and how effective it is—as a matter or fact, I think it's super important and interesting. But it has to be emphasised that, in our current media landscape, junk food outrage pulls numbers. And Metaphor’s fantastical dialogue is just a little too obfuscated to be an unhelpful target for the angry machine.
The wokeness threshold
At the risk of being more of a grump about Dragon Age: The Veilguard than I already have, it's actually a good example of some content creators cynically picking easily-identifiable targets with obvious things "wrong" about them. The game's politics are pretty perfunctory, uncomplicated, and broad. Our online editor Fraser Brown was pretty spot-on when he likened it to Marvel's Avengers. However, it's already being seen as "political" because, like, there's a non-binary character in it who uses they/them.
As someone with weird gender stuff going on myself, I've got my own opinions about it—but the game's discussion of gender is, genuinely, very cookie-cutter. That's not inherently bad, and I know trans people who feel represented and affected by it, but the actual politics of gender in real life get weird and spicy and gnarled and complex—and Veilguard doesn't really care about them.
If anything, the major problem is that it reads too much like a "101 guide to not being a jerk to your trans friends". There's a place for that, and I'm glad people feel seen by it, but its delivery doesn’t approach Metaphor’s overall level of political nuance—a nuance which, ironically, protects it from being pulled into the culture wars.
There's a kind of "wokeness threshold" going on here, where the simpler a game's politics are, the more likely it is to be deemed as political—whereas intensely political and complicated games like Metaphor: ReFantazio and Disco Elysium mostly get a pass. Whether a reactionary finds a game "too political" actually has little to do with how political it is or isn't, rather, it's all about whether it tries to vouch for the reactionary's villain of the week—and how upfront it is about that.
I also wanna emphasise that politically-charged games have always been a thing. Spec Ops: The Line, BioShock, Fallout: New Vegas, Deus Ex, the Metal Gear series—even back in the days of Pong, there were games that tackled political problems. Missile Command, a popular arcade game from the 80s, paralleled the cold war anxiety over nuclear weapons. In an interview, the game's creator Dave Theurer said:
"Working on the game for six months—I internalised a lot of the stuff. I had nightmares about nuclear attacks. In my dreams I'd see a white streak go across the sky just like in Missile Command, and I'd be up hiking in the mountains, and I'd see it hit in the Valley … I'd know the blast was gonna hit me in like 15 seconds, and I'd wake up in a cold sweat. And this happened quite frequently while I was doing the game."
Point is—politics have always been a part of games, because they've always been a part of people, and people make those things. Theurer's confessions about nightmares seem intensely personal, but I think that's actually the point—our politics are personal, because the ideologies that do or don't succeed have concrete results on our lives. It’s more than just someone happening to be trans a bit too loudly in your videogame, and besides—I don't know about you, but I want my videogames to have ideas in them. I want them to be about things, and say stuff, on occasion.
Politics is the mechanism by which we are impacted by the powers that rule our daily lives, and there's nothing that's more personal, or human, than that.
I'm aware that I'm writing this in the wake of a very turbulent US election that has a lot of people scared. The anxiety I've seen hasn't been surface-level raging about pronouns, but about real, material things. Problems like 'what if I can't get my meds', and 'my state might not be safe to live in because I'm gay', and 'I need to figure out how to help my partner leave the US'. Politics is the mechanism by which we are impacted by the powers that rule our daily lives, and there's nothing that's more personal, or human, than that.
At the risk of sounding blithe, here, Metaphor: ReFantazio understands this same problem very well, even if it's not dealing with the existential dread of nuclear annihilation (well, sort of, anything else I could say is a spoiler). All of the companion characters' political situations impact their own lives in tangible ways. Strohl wrestles with the duty a noble has to their people, Heismay struggles to bury his son because his entire tribe is afraid of the outside world, Hulkenberg comes face-to-face with discrimination in an order she exalts, and so on.
And you know what? People like that. It's obvious they do. They enjoy when a game speaks to real issues they experience—in other words, they like it when games have politics in them. Metaphor: ReFantazio succeeded because politics are an important part of videogames, a medium that's used political themes for over four decades. And if politics haven't "ruined games" in 40 years, I doubt they will tomorrow.
