zoroa's recent activity

  1. Comment on Avatar: Seven Havens | Official trailer in ~tv

    zoroa
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    I remember really disliking the art direction in the key art they released a few months ago. None of those feelings returned watching this trailer, and I'm fully onboard with how the show looks. I...

    I remember really disliking the art direction in the key art they released a few months ago.

    None of those feelings returned watching this trailer, and I'm fully onboard with how the show looks. I can't tell if it's an issue with my computer, but the animation looked a little choppy at times. Especially in comparison to the new Avatar movie, or even to Korra from 14 (!!) years ago. But that's easily forgotten if the story is good.

    I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "hating the avatar" thing (even if I do agree that Korra was pretty meh). The feelings of hope and reverence the Avatar inspired in the first show were often really effective character building moments, since they either highlighted something about the character or about the Avatar that inspired the feelings in the first place. Unclear if I should put much faith in the showrunners sticking the landing, so I don't know that I'll be buying a Paramount subscription to find out.

    2 votes

  2. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    Android UI Automation with ADB I use a Hacker News client called Glider on my phone. It's my favorite client, and seemingly one of few that lets you bookmark comments. But weirdly, despite letting...

    Android UI Automation with ADB

    I use a Hacker News client called Glider on my phone. It's my favorite client, and seemingly one of few that lets you bookmark comments. But weirdly, despite letting you export your bookmarks, there's no way to restore backups of your bookmarks.

    That hasn't been a problem before, since Android's "Use Your Old Phone to Setup Your New Phone" feature would carry the data over. But I couldn't use that approach the latest time I had to setup my phone anew. A feature request would've fallen on deaf ears, since Glider was abandoned shortly I started using it. And despite how simple I imagine the implementation would be, I had no interest in rebuilding the app.

    So I started doing it manually, and after only a couple minutes I was researching how to automate the manual tapping I was doing in the UI.

    Unsurprisingly, adb can do that. It just takes enabling Show Pointer Location in Developer Settings so you can see the coordinates of the UI you want to hit. Then you can use adb to programmatically send touch events.

    So after only an afternoon debugging a surprisingly long Python script, a detour into a hackernews api, and another detour in programmatically clearing my bookmarks from the app, I successfully automated restoring my bookmarks. A process that probably would've taken an hour max if I just did it myself :)

    This exercise had me go through those bookmarks for the first time in a long time, and I was surprised at all the interesting stuff I had saved. A lot of it would be useful to me right now, but I only happened to look because I was setting up a new phone. Maybe its time to start using an actual bookmarking system.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on GPS tracker for an interstate move in ~life

    zoroa
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    Airtags are almost certainly enough on their own. I regularly read about journalists using airtags to track things in the same way you're trying to, often across the planet. Unless you're...

    Whatever I get, I also plan to get two airtags as backup. Maybe that's enough by itself, but I like the idea of having an active option, even though I know they could all fail for different reasons.

    Airtags are almost certainly enough on their own. I regularly read about journalists using airtags to track things in the same way you're trying to, often across the planet.

    Unless you're expecting your parents stuff to somehow end up away from anyone with an iPhone, Airtags seem to have the edge in almost every way:

    • Way better battery life
    • Integrates into a software ecosystem your parents already use and understand (?)

    The one advantage a dedicated GPS device would have is real time information, but that doesn't sound like what you're looking for in the first place.

    9 votes

  4. Comment on Who’s making these AI copies of my work? in ~tech

    zoroa
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    Video from fern on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gnrp_caPvo This video adds additional perspective: Many faceless educational channels, who rely on narrated and human animated...

    Video from fern on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gnrp_caPvo

    This video adds additional perspective:

    • Many faceless educational channels, who rely on narrated and human animated videos, have had their style cloned by AI slop to the point where they are now getting accusations of being AI themselves.
    • In addition to how lucrative fully automated viral videos are, many of the people running these grifts also sell courses on how to start.
    • The resulting content often has egregious misinformation, which is especially damaging in the context of educational videos
    5 votes

  5. Comment on Stalking the wily hacker: forty years later | DEFCON 34 in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    I only knew Cliff Stoll as the Klein Bottle guy. He's been a beloved recurring guest on Numberphile over the years, with hugely a popular videos on the topic that show off his humor and teaching...

    40 years ago today, I tripped over a 75-cent accounting glitch in a Unix system. That tiny clue led to a year-long chase across networks, modem banks, and international borders, ultimately uncovering a crew of German hackers working for the East German Stasi and the Soviet KGB. We had no budget, no roadmap, and no “cyber” anything. We improvised with soldering irons, shell scripts, logbooks, curiosity, and far too much coffee. Let’s revisit the chase – not just to remember, but to ask what changed, what didn’t, and why it still matters.

    I only knew Cliff Stoll as the Klein Bottle guy. He's been a beloved recurring guest on Numberphile over the years, with hugely a popular videos on the topic that show off his humor and teaching skills. But that characterization ignores all the other things he's done.

    I found this video worth sharing because its a joyous dose of Cliff Stoll, an engaging retelling of his adventures in cybersecurity in the 1980s, and a reminder of how much has changed in the last 40 years and will change in the next.

    7 votes

  7. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    Unfortunately, for most of the apps I use, its either: Not an option Such a massive UX downgrade that the tradeoff isn't worth it

    Unfortunately, for most of the apps I use, its either:

    • Not an option
    • Such a massive UX downgrade that the tradeoff isn't worth it
    5 votes

  8. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    zoroa
    Link
    "Operation: Paperthin" hits the presses My last phone died suddenly at the end of last year. Despite knowing better, I had no backups, losing ~15 years of messages, contacts, and other data from...

    "Operation: Paperthin" hits the presses

    My last phone died suddenly at the end of last year. Despite knowing better, I had no backups, losing ~15 years of messages, contacts, and other data from my phone. I was somewhat lucky that recovery was possible (but costly).

    Given that I might not be as lucky in the future, I need to make the sudden loss of my phone as painless as possible.

    Goals

    Make my phone a "thin client" (I know I'm bastardizing the term, but it's a useful north star).

    Data should not only live on my phone; my phone should never be a singular point of truth for anything I care about. Either:

    • Synced from a remote
    • Backed up frequently

    As a byproduct, I hope this also makes the process of switching phones easier

    Requirements

    • Self-Hosted
    • None of the following should only be saved on my phone
      • Contacts
      • SMS and Calls Logs
      • App Data
      • Files in /storage/emulated/0/

    Challenges

    We're almost 20 years into Android, and its backup story is still dogshit.

    The best option on stock, non-rooted Android is Google's backup system which I don't think is great:

    • It's cloud-only. So you have to pay a subscription, unless you have less than 15GBs to save
    • It isn't guaranteed to be end-to-end encrypted

      • Google says, duplicitously:

        How your data is protected

        To help keep your data safe and secure, it’s encrypted.

        All data, including photos and videos, messages and more are encrypted as they move between your device, Google services, and our data centers.
        Some data is further encrypted with your device’s screen lock. Photos and videos in Google Photos, and MMS media received from your carrier aren’t encrypted by your device’s screen lock.

        • "Are encrypted as they move" is just standard https
        • There's no clarity about what data is encrypted at rest, so it's only safe to assume that none of it is.
    • It isn't a true device backup
      • Contacts, SMS, Calls, and Files are saved
      • App Data is best effort, since individual apps must opt-in.

    Apple was doing full, offline backups of their devices back in the late 2000s!!

    Solution

    Contact syncing was pretty painless. I set up radicale a couple months ago and its been rock solid.

    Initial Plan

    For everything else, I initially planned to reduce the problem to a file sync problem:

    • I don't use RCS, so I could use SMS Backup And Restore to make periodic backups of the SMS database and Call Logs
    • Most of the non-SAAS apps I use support dumping backups to disk, either on a schedule or manually, which was good enough for me.

    This transformed the backup problem into "how do I mirror files from my phone to my backup location".

    Syncthing seemed like the solution that most people used. But I wasn't filled by confidence seeing how the official Android client was discontinued, or the seemingly fragmented stewardship of the community fork.

    What I Actually Did

    In comes Seedvault. It's essentially Google's backup system, but backups are incremental, encrypted and stored on your own storage. That means that it shares the same limitations with respect to app backups, but it was good enough for me.

    The real catch is that Seedvault needs to be integrated at an OS level, which practically means that you need to install a custom ROM to use it. Luckily, I'd been somewhat interested in doing that since the Cyanogenmod days so I spent an afternoon prepping the swap and installed a new ROM on my phone.

    From there, it was just a matter of configuring which folders and apps I want to backup, and it's been running daily ever since.

    Epilogue

    I do have some concerns about this solution...

    I've read that some people have had reliability issues with Seedvault. I'm currently unsure whether its SMS backups are actually doing anything for me right now, since it claims to have backed up 1.0 MB of data for a corpus of messages I know is substantially bigger.

    The right thing to do would be to reset my phone again and validate the backup, but I have yet to summon the willpower.

    4 votes

  9. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    I don't know that I was expecting this one in the thread. I feel like I've been having the opposite experience; a crisis of trust and companies sequestering their data from LLM crawlers has me in...

    I don't know that I was expecting this one in the thread. I feel like I've been having the opposite experience; a crisis of trust and companies sequestering their data from LLM crawlers has me in a dark age of asking questions.

    I've largely abandonned my reflex of using search engines like Google. When I try, I'm hit by articles that feel sloppy or bot challenges that don't run because I haven't whitelisted cookies for that domain yet. Repeatedly watching LLMs (including frontier models I have to use at $JOB) confidently lie to me has made me deeply skeptical of their output.

    I'd be interested to hear more on how you've been finding good information lately. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

    28 votes

  10. Comment on What are we in a golden age of? in ~talk

    zoroa
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    Cinematic Youtube Videos about Hiking, Thru-Hiking, Bikepacking, or, more generally, long distance self-supported (i.e. not a car) journeys. On their face, they're really interesting to watch...

    Cinematic Youtube Videos about Hiking, Thru-Hiking, Bikepacking, or, more generally, long distance self-supported (i.e. not a car) journeys.

    On their face, they're really interesting to watch because they're often shot beautifully, show really beautiful views, and follow someone on a really interesting journey where they're pushing themselves through an experience most people wouldn't dream of doing.

    Unexpectedly, I've come to love this genre because of how often the films reaffirm how many good people are out there. So many times, you'll see examples strangers maintaining food and water drops in remote places, welcoming travelers into their homes for free, or spontaneously sharing a convivial moment. Especially now, when it can be easy to get trapped in negativity about our communities and neighbors, I value the reminder of the kindness that's still out there.

    A couple of my favorites:

    Though, one of the great things about this genre is that the content is so compelling that's lots of really small videographers on the platform that make great stuff

    12 votes

  11. Comment on Replicating Reddit's best feature on other forums in ~tech

    zoroa
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    Pretty sure you can achieve something similar with Tildes ReExtended

    Pretty sure you can achieve something similar with Tildes ReExtended

    Assign custom colors to usernames.

    You can enter multiple usernames separated by a comma if you want them to use the same color.

    If randomize is enabled then all usernames will be given a random background color based on a hash of the username. Manually assigned colors will be applied normally.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on Ploopy A+ | Open source trackball in ~tech

    zoroa
    Link
    Thought this was worth sharing because it's cool and comes from a company I think is cool since they open source all their work I have no affiliation I'd been thinking about getting a trackball...

    Three years ago, we released the design for the Adept, a unique trackball perfectly suited for the use of QMK, for 3D-printing, and for ambidextrous use across a wide variety of applications.

    The Adept has been consistently popular ever since we released it. It’s been used by people for many different purposes, and spurred many of our community’s members to make innovative modifications for it, taking advantage of it’s open-source nature.

    Today, I have the privilege of sharing the next iteration of our Adept design. It’s been improved in every way we could think of, leveraging the enthusiasm that we’ve seen for the design in our community.

    Here it is: the A+.

    Thought this was worth sharing because it's cool and comes from a company I think is cool since they open source all their work I have no affiliation

    I'd been thinking about getting a trackball for a while as an investment towards wrist health as I get older. Ploopy's hardware checks a lot of boxes for me that other devices don't. I can avoid being locked into manufacturer software for configuration (it uses Via). I have access to the design files, if I ever want to mod or repair the device.

    And I like a lot of the design decisions they made. I'm weirdly excited that it has knobs.

    4 votes

  14. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    zoroa
    Link
    Now that this monstrosity is done, I'm back catching up on some games I missed and grinding through demos. Ithaca This was featured during Day of the Devs 2026. The pitch seemed interesting so I...

    Now that this monstrosity is done, I'm back catching up on some games I missed and grinding through demos.

    Ithaca

    This was featured during Day of the Devs 2026. The pitch seemed interesting so I requested access to the playtest, but only got to it the past week. I wish I got to it sooner, I really enjoyed my time with it.

    It's a narrative RPG. The playtest is spent in your car, while you're on a roadtrip, and you pass the time calling and texting people in your contacts list. This sounds really boring, but the fun is in the execution. Your gameplay isn't mediated by an objective tracker, quest log or HUD. The game leaves you with just your curiosity to drive you towards the answers to the questions the game presents.

    Light Premise Spoilers What's the deal with the dude in the trunk? What's the deal with the family dynamic? ... boyfriend? ... politics? ... Greek Mythology?!

    That curiosity is constantly rewarded by interesting developments in the story and world building. Which is delivered through great voice performances from the entire cast.

    I was taken by the mood the game sets. In the background to the conversations, you can enjoy a first person POV of your car ride. Something about the muted hum of the car and landscape drifting by really transports you back to being lost in your thoughts on a long car ride. A feeling mirrored by the storytelling when the protagonist lets her mind wander and reminisces on her past. Even the radio shows and the music capture what you might be listening to on the road.

    I'm not really a narrative RPG guy. The only other one I've played was Pentiment and it set a high bar. Ithaca so far has met that bar for me.

    Disco Elysium

    Starting this after Ithaca just made me realize that narrative RPGs might be one of my favorite genres.

    What I'm often looking for in games is meaningful self-expression that the game responds in satisfying ways. Disco Elysium is that idea on steroids. There's so many ways to engage with it, and the game always seems to respond with something satisfying, even to the most innocuous action

    Despite spending years hearing how good Disco Elysium was, I'd never heard how funny the game is. It oozes a sardonic humor that complements the otherwise dreary world.

    I'm still really early (~15 hours) but I'm having a great time. I will admit the political side to the game is going over my head, but even so there's still so much to enjoy in the experience.

    Demos

    Broken?

    • Brekekekekex: Art is fun, humor is fun. It felt unplayable on controller; it's a 1v1 arena fighter with no lock on, so you're constantly trying to track with an imprecise right stick. Feels better on a mouse, but you need to be able to track like you would in Counter Strike or Valorant.
    • Loading...: I don't know what this demo was supposed to be. I couldn't find anything to interact with, and the most interesting thing I found was the demo's game asset disclosure and a TV with the game's trailer.

    Seems Good, Not For Me

    • Never's End: Art is beautiful, combat felt clunkier than I'd like, and I didn't feel like the demo was showing me where the fun was.
    • Titanium Court: Love the humor, love the art. I did not latch onto the gameplay at all.
    • Corebreaker: It looks gorgeous and plays beautifully. I wasn't finding combat satisfying, and the roguelite upgrades weren't helping. Might revisit.

    Meh

    • NOIR BLOOM: This demo felt like the devs pulled from Katana Zero in the most distasteful way they could. Same aesthetic, down to the chromatic aberration in your roll's motion trail. Same tone. Same camera in gameplay. Same level design. I'm pretty sure I saw slightly different version of a Katana Zero boss in the trailer. But the combat feels so much worse. Playing this demo just made me hungrier for the Katana Zero DLC we've been waiting for since 2019.

    Want to play

    • Digimon Story: Time Stranger: Story seems like a basic anime story. Environments look and feel really really bad. But god does this blast me back to loving the Digimon anime. The battling and team building is fun!
    6 votes

  15. Comment on Test 3 in ~test

  16. Comment on Look Back | On 4K UHD and Blu-ray September 8 in ~anime

    zoroa
    Link
    The period between Chainsaw Man Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 felt like such a special time in the manga world. I didn't even know a popular manga could just end itself midway through and comeback almost 2...

    The period between Chainsaw Man Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 felt like such a special time in the manga world. I didn't even know a popular manga could just end itself midway through and comeback almost 2 years later. And instead of relaxing, Fujimoto drops 3 banger oneshots.

    This post reminded me that I'd been meaning to read through Fujimoto's anthology of oneshots from before Chainsaw Man. Turns out, those got animated last year. I'll need to spend a day binging the anime for those and Look Back.

    2 votes

  17. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

  18. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    zoroa
    Link Parent
    TIL Tildes has a character limit Addendum cont. Random Thoughts On Combat Status Effects are essentially useless. Game goes out of its way to make status effects the strategy for an early boss....

    TIL Tildes has a character limit

    Addendum cont.

     

    Random Thoughts On Combat

     

    • Status Effects are essentially useless. Game goes out of its way to make status effects the strategy for an early boss. But you can't repeat that success, since status effects proc so infrequently.

    • Weirdly, some of the most broken builds in the game revolve around running the same archetype on your entire party

    • Realtime combat in the Overworld sucks. Attacking locks you into animations, which can make certain enemy attacks frustrating when they catch you mid swing. In normal play, this isn't really a problem because of how little time you spend doing this. But if you ever end up needing to farm, you're in for a frustrating time.

    • Metaphor is Pay to Win*

      The Merchant lineage is a class where skills cost money. It's extremely broken, managing to side step many of the game's systems:

      • Breaks the resource economy: Metaphor: ReFantazio designed MP to be intentionally hard to recover, as a pacing mechanism in dungeons. None of the Merchant's attacks cost MP, and attack costs are negligible in the long run
      • Breaks the turn economy: Hitting a crit gives you an extra turn, and it's somewhat trivial to always crit with a Merchant
      • Breaks the equipment economy: You're meant to regularly cycle through equipment in Metaphor. The Merchant can equip a weapon that doubles the strength and costs of his attacks. I had this weapon equiped for a most of the game, because its damage somehow scaled well, until I found an upgraded version with the same effect.
      • Breaks role separation: The merchant can clear debuffs, is the most efficient healer in the game, has one of the highest damage ceilings, can bypass most defenses, etc...
      • Break the progression economy: Merchants have a skill that let you farm one of the game's progression currencies.

     

    Fast Travel Doors

     

    You get fast travel early and use it often. You'll frequently teleport in front a door, that you annoyingly can't interact with unless you move your camera a tiny bit after arriving.

     

    There's Still Juice in the Lemon

     

    The conflict of most stories in the game, from the main quest to mundane side quests, unfolds against a backdrop of the "systematic mistreatment of groups".

    But I don't think Metaphor: ReFantazio really contends with any facets of this mistreatment.
    The game limply uses it to justify the violence and societal harms seen throughout the game, in ways that only leave players with the takeaway that "mistreating people or groups is bad".

    There's so much juice left to squeeze out of this theme, but Atlus never goes deeper than "thing bad". It doesn't help that some of the deeper explorations are undermined by fantasy elements in Metaphor: ReFantazio's world. The worst of it, however, is that Atlus' mishandling of the theme suffocates the genuinely interesting ideas the game presents about anxiety, self-actualization and the power to effect change.

    7 votes

  19. Comment on Test 3 in ~test

    zoroa
    (edited )
    Link
    Bug: A line with a leading HTML comment breaks line wrapping on wide displays (i.e. desktop). Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et...

    Bug: A line with a leading HTML comment breaks line wrapping on wide displays (i.e. desktop).

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

     

     

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

  20. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    zoroa
    Link
    tl;dr - Booted up the game expecting the Second Coming of Christ. He didn't show up. Dismay ensues. Metaphor: ReFantazio Developer: ATLUS I started Metaphor: ReFantazio back in December, playing...
    • Exemplary

    tl;dr - Booted up the game expecting the Second Coming of Christ. He didn't show up. Dismay ensues.

     

    Metaphor: ReFantazio

    Developer: ATLUS

     

    I started Metaphor: ReFantazio back in December, playing it pretty consistently through the holiday season (see posts one, two, three). My progress slowed way down after the new year, but I finally ended up finishing it on (2026-02-09). My "game clear" save clocks in at 89 hours, but I suspect my actual playtime is closer to 110 since I don't think the game tracks time when you game over, or otherwise reload a save.

     

    My Playthrough

     

    Act I: Woe Is Expectation

     

    I was excited to start Metaphor: ReFantazio. Passively absorbing the excitement of Atlus fans over the years built up the developer as one of the best JRPG studios out there. Their UI design is legendary, they have great art direction, they go the extra mile with anime cutscenes, and their storytelling seems to really connect with their fans. My interest was piqued after Metaphor: ReFantazio released to critical acclaim, applying their Persona formula to a mature fantasy setting that I found more compelling.

    Its incipit is strong: the inciting regicide whet my appetite for the mysteries surrounding the crime, the perpetrator, and politics. Mysteries the game immediately zooms out from, using a fourth wall break to frame game through its central question: "Is fantasy limited to the confines of imagination?". Just a couple minutes with Metaphor: ReFantazio was already showing a deftness that I don't typically see in JRPG storytelling. Which made me excited at the thought of a JRPG that would deliver in gameplay, while taking an ambitious swing to fully engage me with its storytelling. If it delivered, it would surely become one of my favorite games ever.

    That did not happen.

    My excitement dimmed in the very next scene. A sequence of clichés common to shonen media introduces the main character: a bandit ambush is thwarted by a mysterious stranger whose design is too elaborate to not reappear later, which climaxes in a fall down a sheer cliff and a subsequent chase sequence. Drawing from clichés isn't inherently bad; part of the appeal of JRPGs is how much they borrow from shonen storytelling. But clichés also leave an aftertaste from other media they've been in. Their overuse muddies emotional impact and can create tonal dissonance that makes the story harder to take seriously. I was looking for Metaphor: ReFantazio to stand with works like Pluto, Monster, or Vinland Saga. Stories where the occasional indulgence in genre cliché works in complement with the strength of their storytelling. Metaphor: ReFantazio establishes a premise and collection of themes that warrant exploration, posturing as though the playthrough would meaningfully examine them. But Atlus continually undermines that foundation with a "teen anime bullshit" approach to storytelling that is ingenuous, seldom entertains nuance, and often crutches on clichés. The first act of the game is marred by moments like this that pulled me out of the otherwise serious story because of how dumb it could be in the moment.

    It's worth stressing that Metaphor: ReFantazio was still telling a perfectly competent story at this point. But the gulf between my expectations and reality spoiled my appetite for what the game had to offer. And unfortunately for me, Metaphor: ReFantazio's poor first impression did not stop at just the storytelling.

     

    My first moment out of a cutscene started me in an area that looked a little off-putting. Definitely not bad, but not as good as I'd expect a AAA game from 2024 to look. I pushed that nitpick to the back of my mind, but it kept resurfacing as I noticed more technical issues with the game's graphical presentation. Muddy looking textures. Weird aliasing issues. Basically unfinished landscapes (one, two). Lighting that looked straight out of an early PS3 game. Odd NPC animations: walking with the exaggerated swagger of a fallen noble or the dog who spins like a beyblade to turn around (which made me notice that every NPC does this). These are issues that I usually don't notice or care about. But it wore me down as moments showcasing the game's world-class art direction were held back by technical competence frozen in the PS3-era.

    The royal capital Gran Trad is the first major area in the game. A sprawling city where the wealthy luxuriate in gilded indifference to the suffering and persecution of the poor. Its introductory cutscene teases a broad possibility space to experience, that is flattened as soon as you see Gran Trad in-game. The image of the vast capital is betrayed by the in-game reality that the city is just a main street, a back alley, and a plaza split in half by an invisible wall. Every building is locked, except for locations essential to gameplay. NPCs mostly bark inanities that do little to further the player's immersion in the world, or even the quotidian. Which results in a city like a bad stage set, enough to set the scene but not to draw you in. Atlus' singular focus on function over form robbed my time in the city of any emotional texture, quickly teaching me that progressing the story was the only value the city had.

    This austerity of purpose shapes the design of the game. Core systems like Side Quests, Follower Bonds, and Royal Virtues each felt like Atlus refused whenever presented with opportunities to make them meaningful and not just functional. Side Quests are little more than vehicles for exp and items. Their narrative framing is paper-thin, really only bookending the quest in conversation with the quest giver. The trite storytelling of Follower Bonds, quest lines that deepen your relationships to unlock abilities, delivers shallow character development that Atlus can't even carry back into the main story since the system is technically optional. Royal Virtues, social stats increased primarily through short in-game activities, left me with the impression that Atlus struggled with finding activities that were compelling and thematically relevant, to the point that they gave up and also had some cutscenes and quests raise virtues. Metaphor: ReFantazio fails to redeem these with moment to moment gameplay I enjoyed. Both Follower Bonds and Royal Virtues are almost exclusively experienced through short, low-budget, partially-voiced cutscenes with inconsequential dialog choices. With Side Quests, you're at best raiding a dungeon that feels like a palette swap of a previous side dungeon (hope you like caves and spiraling towers). At worst, you're buying someone a toothbrush.

    I've enjoyed plenty of games with gameplay elements shallower than Metaphor: ReFantazio's, where I can usually get away with ignoring the stuff I don't like. But Metaphor: ReFantazio's design held my fun hostage by forcing me to engage with systems I disliked to make progress in the ones I did. The gameplay loop is structured around a calendar system, where time slots are spent building Follower Bonds, increasing Royal Virtues, completing Side Quests, or traveling, all in preparation for the main quest. You can't just indulge in the activities you enjoy. You'll miss out on most of the Archetype tree (the game's job system) without advancing Follower Bonds, no Follower Bonds without Royal Virtues, and main story quests will be really hard without the experience and equipment from side dungeons. Unsurprisingly, the calendar system continues the trend of core systems disavowing their primary strength. Time is a compelling mechanic because it's limited, adding weight to your choice on how to spend it. Games like Pentiment and Seance of Blake Manor exploit this to great effect. Metaphor: ReFantazio serves up a double whammy: there's an excessive amount of time to complete every activity, and the activities often aren't fun. Which leaves the calendar system as a source of friction. I spent my time on the things I felt obligated to do, while stewing in my desire to play the parts of the game I actually enjoyed.

     

    In spite of my disappointment with the core of the game, I still found elements to enjoy.

    Atlus has masterful (2D) art direction. Their anime cutscenes are well produced and high quality. Playing Trails in the Sky FC planted in me an appreciation for character portraits during dialog, and I loved seeing them here. Some locations you visit in the game are represented by "animated paintings". Initially a mechanical letdown, they gradually became moments I enjoyed because of how beautiful they were, consistently the most arresting visuals that the game presented me with. I would love to see a game from Atlus where they ditch 3D entirely and just make a sprite-based game or a visual novel, anything that highlights their artistry with a flat canvas.

    Combat was the antithesis of the shallowness I felt in other areas of the game. Right from the start, it felt like Atlus delivered a turn-based battle system that was polished in every area. Battles showcase the best 3D animation the game has to offer. Atlus went so far as to make custom weapon models, with special effects for special ones. The music is awesome. Many of the most important tracks in the game are led by the chants of a priest, including on the main battle themes Warriors in Valour and Warriors in Arms. Even with the limited options available early on, combat already provided enough depth to let me have fun expressing myself in the combat framework.

    Even in my disappointment with the calendar system added to the core loop, I found some of its secondary effects cool. The game goes out of its way to ground you in the passage of time, to the point that I felt as anxious about in-game deadlines as I do with real life ones. The simulation of time also presents an opportunity to depict a living world. The country celebrates "Forgiveness Day" early in the game, which mainly is used as an opportunity for shop discounts, but I appreciated it as a rare moment where the world didn't feel like it was a spectator to my playthrough.

     

    Act II: Wait... This Game Is Actually Good?

     

    32 hours brought me a third of the way through the game, and I was not having a good time. The bright spots weren't enough to overcome how little enjoyment the core gameplay loop provided me. So why keep playing?

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    Maybe a misguided hope that I'd find the game I was excited about if I just stuck through the bad parts. It was a hope that carried me through a playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, but never bore fruit.

    That hope was barely hanging on as I made it through the second major area in the game. A story mission whose twists you see coming a mile away, leaning on tropes rather than meaningful storytelling, while introducing a new character that I could not stand.

    But then the mission hit its climax and the story started to click for me. The villain's monologue cut through the clichés, and got me thinking about the questions the game was raising about grief and our reactions to it. A train of thought that led me to notice how Atlus had spent this entire mission building up two characters as foils, which, through the structure of the comparison, also tied back to Metaphor: ReFantazio's central question. Suddenly, I found myself engaging with Metaphor: ReFantazio's story in the ways I had hoped it would've challenged me to from the start. And somewhere in the middle of this, the new character I disliked dropped my favorite line in the game and became my favorite character.

    This was a watershed moment for my experience with the game. Metaphor: ReFantazio's second act was a marvelous crescendo, whose fresh-feeling narrative beats built towards a climax that paid off most of the narrative threads the game had woven from its start.

    Atlus' writing felt fresh out of High School English class; anywhere you found a pair of characters, Atlus was probably setting them up as foils. But I never found it repetitive. It was refreshing to play a JRPG so committed to its themes that they seeped out of the storytelling.

    The game's combat hit its stride as the story got good. I played the game on Hard mode. Enemies hit hard, owing to increased stats and an extra action per turn. The extra action elegantly heightens the danger they pose, by making it easier to pull off devastating sequences. The result is combat that pressures the player to continuously adapt, or risk a party wipe even from an ordinary encounter. That pressure provides a strong incentive to explore all options in combat, options that opened up fully as the story clicked with me. The game finally fills out your party, which gives you an extra action per turn. You start getting access to more advanced archetypes and interesting items, which let you start leveraging game systems in more interesting ways. Experimenting in Metaphor: ReFantazio is fun, and Atlus made sure to sand away any friction. There are few restrictions on how you build out your party, and you have the freedom to switch at any time. The game never asks you to grind; playing through the game normally always rewards you enough to comfortably proceed. You are free to inspect late game unlocks, which made me excited to plan for late game builds. The polish extended even in battle, where Atlus let you restart battles at any time and even optimized the button presses it takes to input your commands. For all of this streamlining, "solving" the combat puzzle doesn't trivialize the experience. At its best, combat in this game feels tense. Like you're walking a tightrope as you execute your plan, hoping that the enemy isn't blessed by RNGesus and wipes your team.

    This is not to say that Metaphor: ReFantazio's second act is perfect. Far from it. I will think back on Metaphor: ReFantazio and remember some of the stupidest moments I've experienced in media. The ancillary content was still as vapid as it was at the start of the game. And the major locations and cities were as soulless as Gran Trad. But the good outweighed the bad. The story and the combat was more than making up for the fun I was missing from the rest of the game. Surely Atlus would carry this momentum into a strong finale...

     

    Act III: Despair

     

    Everything I was enjoying about the game was systematically dismantled.

    Every narrative thread that had captured my interest was unwound, only leaving space for a clichéd conclusion that I no longer wanted to see through.

    Major Spoiler: Second Act Denouement

    Metaphor: ReFantazio's second act builds towards the reveal that the Church had a major role in driving the antagonist to commit regicide at the start of Metaphor: ReFantazio. A reveal that humanizes the antagonist's motivations, and establishes the Church as a tertiary member of the game's central conflict, narratively and thematically . Atlus could've leveraged this setup into some interesting nuance in its conclusion, developing the protagonist's eventual victory over the Church and Antagonist into an ideological one that argues the game's answer to its central question. Instead, Metaphor: ReFantazio unceremoniously topples the religious faction, thereby reducing the antagonist to a comically evil villain whose genocidal master plan perpetuates the injustice that originally inspired him to act.

    The entire last act of the game is dedicated to the final battle, giving you a full 30 days of prep time before the point of no return. Even with my souring on the story, main quests still were the most engaging content the game had to offer. These 30 days were the longest period spent outside of one, a period that was unreasonably good at highlighting all the ways the game grated me. Blitzing through my remaining side quests really reinforced how samey the dungeons felt. Man was it annoying to max out my remaining Royal Virtues just so I could complete my Follower Bonds, only to be underwhelmed by the conclusions to most of those questlines. At this point, even the NPCs were getting on my nerves (I'm looking at you parishioner who complained that my presence was interrupting her prayers every time I entered the church).

    Atlus did invest a bit more into the production of some late-game side quests, which broke up some of the monotony. One quest chain in particular ends up leading to some of the hardest boss fights in the game, that were lots of fun to figure out strategies for. But that wasn't enough to redeem the prep period.

    With only a few days left of prep time, I realized there was no chance I would finish unlocking the remaining Archetypes in the tree. I was rich in every resource, except for the two that would actually let me make progress. I had been looking forward to these Archetypes since midway through the second act. But it seemed like I would be locked out of every late-game build and strategy, unless I suffered through a second playthrough in New Game+... or started farming. So farm I did. For 10 hours. Mindnumbingly fighting the same two enemies, sustained only by my defiance of Atlus' progression system. But my hubris in resisting the game's intended path would prove costly.

    Spoiler: The Final Battle Experience (Music, Enemies, Design)

    The final battle was broken across two dungeons. The first felt really ordinary, like every other main story mission. It just led to a verbal confrontation with the Antagonist before the final final dungeon.

    The actual Final Dungeon managed to be the most underwhelming environment in the entire game.

    I was baffled as I entered it and heard the main menu music. This wasn't a case of a musical theme that's recontextualized throughout the game's runtime to make its eventual payoff more powerful. This was Atlus taking the exact same track that you'd only ever heard while turning on the game, and plopping it right into the finale. Instead of a song that heightened my emotional connection, Atlus hit me with a track I more strongly associated with "▷ Continue Save".

    The visual design just looked like Atlus took one of their uninspired side-quest cave dungeons, put it in the sky, palette swapped to imperial red, and called it a day.

    Every enemy, including mini-bosses, was just a palette swap of an enemy I'd fought before. Even though there was a weak narrative explanation, it was hard to be excited to fight enemies that were on their 4th or 5th color change during my playthrough.t

    I was sure that the finale would be a place that Atlus poured in their talents and effort to make great. Instead, it was another revolution of the cycle of disappointment I'd put myself through the entire game.

    The fun in Metaphor: ReFantazio's combat relies on good balance. If the enemies aren't threatening, then combat isn't rewarding. My tunnel-visionned grind to unlock all the Archetypes I wanted blinded me to the fact that I was overleveling myself out of the fun. I managed to trivialize the entire final battle, mowing down everything, including bosses, with mindless attack spam. It was so bad that I don't even know what the final boss' gimmick was; I somehow interrupted it every turn by just attacking it.

    What a deflating way to end the game.

     

    Conclusion: The End Does Not Justify the Means

     

    I felt empty finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Not the emptiness of having lost something cherished. The emptiness you feel after losing an afternoon to a TV show you barely like.

    This was the second time that I've pushed through to credits, for a game I was convinced I'd love, and came away only being able to say "I beat it". Is that conviction enough to justify the 100+ hour commitment, for games I dislike more as I play? Up until now, yeah. The hope being that the game I was excited for would materialize if I just pushed through the bad parts. And that almost happened here; Metaphor: ReFantazio almost had the sauce. Top tier art direction, music direction, combat design, and an above average plot, all standing on top of a rich foundation of literary and artistic inspirations (e.g. Thomas More's Utopia + Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights). Yet, packaged as Metaphor: ReFantazio, these elements meshed so poorly for me that I wince at the thought of playing another Atlus game.

    I do recognize my fault in this. Bloated expectations set an impossibly high bar for the game, one it was bound to fall short of, reinforcing a cycle of frustration. But I don't want my takeaway to be that I should stop being excited. Anticipation is part of the fun, and makes the experience that much better when your expectations are met.

    I probably need to stop forcing myself to roll credits on games that I like more in theory than in practice. Or at the very least, I should've just played Expedition 33 instead.

     

    Addendum

     

    Ideas that I'm not a good enough writer to integrate into the above

     

    Game Feels Cheap

     

    There's a thin line between cheap and clever. Compromises that scream lazy in one game can read as elegant in another. The difference lying in whether the compromise is a weakness the game must overcome, or something it leverages.

    Example (Spoiler: Pentiment's structure)

    In Pentiment, its rare that your choices/dialogue meaningfully branch the narrative. But the game masks that convincingly, conjuring an illusion of choice that still succeeds in making your playthrough feel more personal. Metaphor: ReFantazio is overt about the linearity of its narrative, its token attempts at presenting choices in the story only detracting from the experience.

    Metaphor: ReFantazio constantly presents me with experiences where the individual pieces feel compromised. Cutscenes with poor production quality, uninspired quest design, obvious asset reuse, to name only a few. Where I'd hoped to see these trade-offs enable another part of the experience to shine, my disappointment was only compounded by finding additional lackluster elements. Together, these issues formed a pattern that felt less like resourceful development and more like Atlus cutting corners even at the cost of the final experience.

    There's a moment at the end of a Follower Bond where you go support a singer at their performance. This is the emotional payoff of the entire questline, that to this point had been middling. The game cuts to the singer performing... and it's completely silent. So silent that I thought my game had glitched, until the crowd started cheering about how good the singing was (and then they call her ugly). The silence seems to have been a deliberate choice, in a cutscene that doesn't have much going for it. A moment that could've been a nice closing note is instead overshadowed by Atlus making the scene look bugged, when simply playing an existing track or skipping the performance altogether would've worked just as well.

    This feeling of cheapness was a cloud over my playthrough. A cloud darkened when I remembered that late 2024 was still early-ish in the wave of developers adopting an increased price of $70 dollars on PC, lagging behind consoles. My frustrations with this game were often compounded by the incredulity that Atlus was charging so much for what was often a subpar experience.

     

    It may appear as if Metaphor: ReFantazio exuding an air of shoddiness is in conflict with its many elements that clearly took considerable care, skill and especially money to execute. The game's menus demonstrate art direction in a class of their own. 2D animation is expensive, and Atlus features anime cutscenes liberally throughout the game. The music in this game is inspired; I didn't know that I was missing the chants of a priest in my orchestral choir music, but Atlus had a vision and delivered on it. But even these elements fall into the trap of ineffective execution that plague so many parts of Metaphor: ReFantazio.

    Anime cutscenes often are placed in great moments of the story and can convey than would be impractical with in-game assets, but other times are used frivolously.

    Towards the end of my playthrough, I was convinced that I had been hearing the same 5-6 songs on repeat the entire time. I was so convinced, that I looked up the soundtrack and was surprised to see that it was as long as soundtracks I remember for their breadth. The songs in Metaphor: ReFantazio tend to sound quite similar, leading to a sense of limited dynamic range in its music. The soundtrack is dominated by driven, up-tempo songs with similar timbre. Many tracks, like the collection that can play in combat, go so far as to feel like sections of a single song. Where the game does venture beyond its typical sonic palette is in main story specific songs, which are never heard again after the hour or so you spend with them. Especially towards the end as main story missions became scarce, my auditory experience with the game was saturated by music that sounded so similar it just blended together.

     

    Ultimately, Metaphor: ReFantazio didn't feel cheap because Atlus cut corners. Every game does. Metaphor: ReFantazio felt cheap because I could see the corners they cut, and struggled to see what those cuts bought me.

     

    Plot Points That Keep Me up at Night

     

    Act I

     

    iPod Magla

    Canonically, the game's soundtrack is fairy magic that plays music in the protagonist's head

    Secrets For Thee but not for Me

    Our party has a funny approach to guarding a country-destabilizing, antagonist-thwarting secret. An antagonist who, despite crashing the royal funeral to reveal that he's the killer, is extremely popular to the point of driving some to cultish devotion. On the other hand, our party can't escape attention. The main character is a member of a race so rare that many don't think they exist, and so hated that NPCs regularly go out of their way to throw jeers at him. His partner is a fairy, who were thought to be extinct. In spite of this, the game shows our main cast discussing their kingdom-destabilizing secret while walking down busy roads, over meals at the tavern, or even while fighting one of the antagonist's soldiers.

    Justice is Blind. And so is foresight

    Our party's plan to seek justice against the main antagonist is... to stab him during a royal funeral. The guy who came up with this was a mercenary so accomplished that he ingratiated himself with the royal family and became a swordsmanship tutor.

    Somehow, despite needing to run a great distance through a crowd, this almost works.

     

    Act II

     

    Major Spoiler: Nakama

    The main characters become friends with a lady who was sacrificing children. The entire point of their journey was to take her into custody, but they instead leave without her and trust that she would show up on her own accord to face justice and her likely execution.

    Pride Comes Before A Fall

    One mission requires you to infiltrate the antagonist's fortress to steal something, so the game asks you to case the place first. Each zone within the base is secured by a key safeguarded by top generals.

    In the name of secrecy, our party obviously decides that the best plan is to do... a boss gauntlet. They challenge each of these generals to a fight over the key, with the expectation that the generals' pride would stop them from mentioning anything to their boss.

    The game gives no indication that these generals said anything after the fact.

    Aren't you a ninja?

    One mission requires you to infiltrate the antagonist's base to steal something, so the game asks you to case the place first. At one point, your party decides that they need to send someone to sneak around some guards. The game presents you with a choice of who to send, so of course I choose my party member who was a ninja specialized in covert operations on the behalf of a royal knight order. In response to the obviously correct answer, the game hits me with a "If he gets seen, he won't be able to keep his cover" and sends the main character instead (???).

    Major Spoiler: Sudden Onset Magical Blindness

    A major plot point hinges on the fact that one of our party members can "see" magic. The game explicitly shows her differentiating between a Legendary Weapon and its counterfeit with her magical sight.

    Atlus seemingly forgets this, because our party is foiled by the Antagonist swapping the weapon and its counterfeit without anyone noticing. Despite our magic seeing party member being present the entire time. She even has to ask for an explanation.

    Major Spoiler: Social Engineering

    The antagonist receives a mortal wound, only for him to show up the next day perfectly healthy. The game reveals that the Antagonist's right hand man infiltrated the clergy of the state region and saved the Antagonist's life.

    This explanation gets more ridiculous when you realize:

    • The right hand man died on XXXX-06-21
    • The right hand man somehow revives himself, and heals his own wounds
    • Within only two months , the right hand man joins the religious faction and is somehow able to work his way up to being AN ATTENDANT OF THE LEADER OF THE STATE RELIGION. Despite being a necromancer and looking the part.
    • On the day of, XXXX-09-01, the right hand man has to manage to, with no prior preparation:
      • Be the attendant who checked the antagonist's body so he could lie to the religious leader
      • Figure out how to steal the antagonist's body
      • Find a secluded area in a holy city to heal the antagonist with necromancy
      • Figure out how to swap the murder weapon with a counterfeit, a spear that's taller than most characters in the game, that was confiscated by the religious leader because of its immense power.
      • Sneak the antagonist back in the next day, so the antagonist can dramatically reveal that he survived and stole the weapon.

     

    Act III

     

    Major Spoiler: Cosplay

    One of the final major reveals in the game is that the antogonist has been disguising himself as another race using a headband with horns on it (picture a headband with cat ears and you aren't far off). The game suggests he's maintained this disguise since his youth.

    How didn't anyone notice? The game lightly suggests that he might've used some magic to make the headband look less obvious, but that doesn't address the infinite ways someone could have still found out.

    And why not go further. He's one of the most accomplished magic users in a world that definitely has transformation magic. Why not magically produce the horns?

    Perfect Timing

    Leading up the final confrontation, the game shows your entire party sacrificing themselves to give you the chance to confront the antagonist 1-on-1. The antagonist "kills" you with a spell, but you wake back up some indeterminate amount of time later. The antagonist is gone doing evil stuff I guess, but your entire party "miraculously" survived and has been worriedly trying to wake you up.

    The antagonist somehow has the dramatic timing to reappear right as you wake up? Why did he leave in the first place? If he was watching you, why didn't he deal with your party while you were still out?

     

    Extra Thoughts on Core Systems

     

    Royal Virtues

    Royal Virtues feel like Atlus gave up midway through their design. Canonically, Royal Virtues measure "the qualities necessary in a king": Courage, Eloquence, Imagination, Tolerance, and Wisdom. In game, you need to level up your Royal Virtues to continue progressing your Follower Bonds. The primary way the game has you interface with this system is through NPCs, and sometimes locations, that let you do an activity to gain experience towards a specific virtue. None of these activities are interactive; you're either spending 4-5 minutes button mashing through dialog boxes or sitting through a "talking head" cutscene. And they're really hit or miss. I appreciated the Tolerance, Eloquence, and sometimes Wisdom virtues, since they'd often give you satisfying nuggets that build on the world's cultures, religions, history, and politics. But the vast majority of these activities feel like they're just there to pad runtime. Lots of activities, like bungee jumping for Courage or people watching for Wisdom, only feel thinly connected to the virtue they represent. Their relevance to the temperament of a monarch is even thinner. Your companions offer some of these Royal Virtue activities, which compounds with many of the same Follower Bond issues that keep character development shallow and away from the main story. It eventually felt like Atlus recognized how dissatisfying these activities are, but instead of iterating, they just made it so that you could engage with it less by having some quests and cutscenes also reward you with virtue experience. The saddest part is that Royal Virtues don't even live up to their mechanical purpose in the game. Atlus sometimes supplants Royal Virtues by using your story progress to dictate when you can start a Follower Bond. Both approaches deliver the same experience to the player, which, given how little I'm getting out of them, really makes me wonder why have Royal Virtues in the game at all. .

    Traveling

    I found Metaphor: ReFantazio's approach to traveling especially disappointing. Traveling is often the backdrop to my favorite moments in games. These moments are compelling because they realize possibilities contained within the unknowns of the journey. Metaphor: ReFantazio has none of this. The only way to travel is to fast travel. Moving between the game's cities is just a quick cutscene. When you travel to points of interest, the game simulates your journey on your gauntlet runner, essentially an RV with legs. The routine is the same every time. You pass the time on a Royal Virtue, Follower Bond, or doing chores, after which there's a small chance your gauntlet runner gets attacked and you have to do battle. Repeat that n times until the game says you've arrived at your destination. The game tries to inject some sense of discovery by occasionally breaking the routine with mid-journey stops at small towns and natural wonders. Except these "stops" are just animated paintings of the location, in the style of a background from a visual novel. Granted, they're really beautiful paintings. But that doesn't make up for the fact that all you do is interact with a menu in the towns, or mash through dialogue while the characters stand in the natural wonders. Metaphor: ReFantazio reduces traveling in a JRPG to feeling like a road trip. A bad one at that, since you can't even enjoy looking out the window because of how ugly the passing landscapes look.

    9 votes