This article contains some spoilers for the ending of Metaphor: ReFantazio
Over the past few months, I’ve picked up a nasty habit that I swore I’d kicked for good: I wake up in the morning, immediately pick up my glowing rectangle, and scroll social media to see what fresh horrors await.
It’s a terrible compulsion that I’ve repeatedly condemned, and the hypocrisy is not lost on me. The shame of not practicing what I preach is outweighed only by the quotidian psychic damage this habit inflicts, keeping me in a state of fearful paralysis. Sadness and rage make my body limp, and I end up exactly where our oppressors want us: caught in a loop of irreverent posting and passive info consumption, instead of organizing against them.
Everything about the current media environment is engineered to keep us stuck on this hamster wheel, but knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to log off. It’s hard to disconnect completely knowing climate change-fueled wildfires have burned down Los Angeles, or that the richest dweeb on Earth is sending Nazi children to dismantle every branch of the US government except the parts that kill and imprison people. Even so, if we don’t learn to step away from all this nonsense, we’ll never be able to imagine anything better or do the hard work to make it a reality.
One of my few sources of respite during all this has been playing Metaphor: ReFantazio, a game that feels uncannily suited to our current moment in history. It’s a timely reminder that we need fantasy, daydreaming, and time away from the noxious doomcloud of discourse if we want anything to change. If we’re truly witnessing the twilight of American empire, fantasy can show us a new world that lies beyond it—but only if we’re willing to log off and put in the work.
There are two real-world events that will always define my 100+ hours playing Atlus’ much-praised JRPG: the passing of legendary filmmaker David Lynch, and the re-election of Donald Trump as the most powerful psychopath on Earth. This feels weird to type out, given that Metaphor is a fantasy roleplaying game and Trump and Lynch are two real people who exist on opposite poles of the same unreality. One is the ultimate id, a craven narcissist who uses untruth and delusion as weapons to divide and rule; the other taps the realms of fantasy and the subconscious as a guide, his works reminding us to trust our intuition and discover truths hidden deep within the self.
I felt the long shadows of both men as I played through Metaphor’s six story arcs, along with a lingering feeling that the game’s creators bit off more than they could chew. For the most part, the game drives home its timely themes thanks to a vividly imagined world and some relatable and deeply-written characters. But for a story about “the power of fantasy,” Metaphor’s final thesis still left me feeling a bit empty.
Metaphor’s director Katsura Hashino has said that the game is about anxiety, a theme he couldn’t have picked a better time in modern history to explore, given the state of everything. More specifically, it’s about how anxiety can turn us into monsters, and the existential question of how we as individuals and a society should deal with it. After all, anxiety is the price we pay for our existence as a sentient species, and all that agita has gotta go somewhere.
The game’s bleak world shows us how this dilemma can lead down some very dark paths. The most powerful people in Metaphor’s world all offer different solutions to the problem of anxiety, all of which lead to chaos, stagnation, and/or ruin. The late King, whose murder spurs the events of the game, believed the power of government authority could ease everyone’s burdens, using a mystical sceptre that lets him quite literally absorb the people’s anxiety in the form of magic. But in doing so he becomes frail and crestfallen, a puppet-like figurehead of a dying nation who has long since given up on his ideals.
Exploiting this power vacuum are the game’s two main antagonists. Sanctifex Forden, the leader of the powerful Sanctist Church, would have the people pour their anxieties into a corrupt, racist, and highly-stratified state religion, promising salvation in exchange for their blind faith and obedience. Louis, the smooth-talking bishounen Big Bad, takes the Nietszchean position: Under his Reddit libertarian-esque new world order, these corrupt institutions would be destroyed and “true equality” achieved by forcing people to harness their own anxieties and seize the will to power—the ultimate survival-of-the-fittest where the strong survive and the weak die.
Our heroes, meanwhile, seek another path, forged by unlocking one’s inner power and using it to help and protect others. Just like the Persona games that preceded it, Metaphor borrows these concepts from the work of psychologist Carl Jung, who was all about confronting the deepest parts of the self as a way to achieve personal and societal enlightenment. But to me, the game even more strongly evokes the late David Lynch.
In Hollywood, Lynch was as rare as they come. The celebrated creator of surrealist mysteries like Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, he’s one the few artists whose work always seems to be a true and honest reflection of himself and what he believes in. His films are the kind that can only come from a person who is constantly in deep dialogue with their inner self—scouring the depths of their subconscious for hidden truths, rather than waiting for someone or something external to give the answers. In this sense, Metaphor is definitively Lynchian.
If it isn’t obvious by now, I’m a bit of a Lynch fangirl—and whatever the opposite of that is for Trump. If Trump’s brand of fascism represents the darkest pits of depravity that fear and anxiety can drive us to, Lynch’s works point to the dual nature of these forces. His films show how mystery—the sublime beauty of the unknown—can evoke a positive kind of anxiety based in curiosity, intuition, and a desire for personal and collective growth.
This idea of anxiety having the potential to create change for good or ill is the core of Metaphor’s story. Like previous Atlus games, it takes these philosophical concepts and embeds them into the story and gameplay mechanics. When characters awaken to their anxiety-fueled powers, they do so by ripping out their own heart and screaming a declaration of their will into it like a microphone. The powers themselves are “Archetypes,” a term coined by Jung to describe the characteristic patterns that repeat in different people throughout history. Anxiety is also a status effect in Metaphor, notably the only one that can be triggered by things beyond status-inflicting attacks in combat, like being surprised by the enemy or taking too much damage before your first press turn.
In Lynch’s work, the good things in life glow bright because of the dark, and remind us how easily darkness can consume everything if we don’t find and confront it within ourselves while pursuing the light. He embraces ambiguity and often avoids neatly-wrapped conclusions, showing us how the search for truth can bring us together in shared purpose, even when life refuses to give us satisfying answers. In the end, the journey is always worth it, as long as we keep working and stay true to our ideals.
Which brings me back to my bad social media habits.
When you’re lying in bed scrolling through an endless firehose of news, it often feels like you’re afflicted with an Anxiety stat debuff. You know it’s bad, but you can’t shake the feeling that you’re missing one piece of a puzzle—that if you just find the right piece of information, you’ll finally have what you need to start making sense of things. Or at very least, to prepare for things getting worse.
But the fact is, we already have enough information. No amount of posting or scrolling is going to give us that missing piece. What we need to do is to decide what truth we believe in, embrace the unknown, and take action to manifest our truth into a better world.
Unless you majorly fuck something up along the way, Metaphor: ReFantazio ends with both of the main villains defeated, the king’s sceptre destroyed, and our protagonist leading the nation of Euchronia on a slow but steady march toward a better future. Progress doesn’t happen overnight, the game repeatedly reminds us, but we need to stick to our ideals and believe that change is possible.
Many of us need to hear this right now, but it was still frustrating to me that the story ends essentially right back where it began: with a country ruled over by a powerful king, albeit a beneficent one with a much brighter disposition. As the credits rolled, I pondered what David Lynch might say about this conclusion—the way it ties things together with a neatly wrapped bow, rather than giving us space to imagine other possibilities. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Monica Belucci tells Lynch’s character Gordon Cole, “We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream”—so why not dream a little bigger?
Throughout the whole game, it feels like the townsfolk are all simply waiting to hear what fate the Important People have in store for them. Gaining the support of the people is a big part of the story, and many of the supporters and friends you meet along the way have some great character-building moments as they learn to take control of their anxieties and forge a path forward in their own lives. But ultimately, the macro-scale political problems of the world are all on the shoulders of you and your merry band.
Fuck that. Even if the entire kingdom is cheering me as their savior, why is it always up to one Good Person and their team of elite do-gooders to save the world? In our world, our leaders have failed us, and there’s no revolutionary vanguard. No one is coming to save us. It’s up to all of us, collectively, to organize and do the work. And despite what the social media doomscroll would have you believe, that work is happening all around us every day.
The examples are endless. We saw during the Los Angeles wildfires how people sprung into action to create mutual aid distribution hubs for the displaced and the unhoused. In New York City, large networks of veteran organizers dispatch volunteers multiple times a week to keep watch for ICE raids and protect our most vulnerable neighbors from Trump’s deportation machine. Other organizers provided food and warm clothes to migrants after cities closed shelters in freezing temperatures. Others have mobilized to provide legal and material aid to transgender people after a rapid series of illegal Executive Orders claimed to strip them of their rights.
A better world is possible not because of the actions of a few heroic people, but because neighbors organize and help each other, building local power to sustain their communities where the government has failed. Organizers are doing this in every town and city. Some of them have been doing it for decades.
To be clear, Metaphor: ReFantazio is an entertainment product made by a large corporation. I held no illusions that it was going to present the gaming public with a collectivist vision of a world beyond capitalism, and from the get-go it seemed clear that the utopia Metaphor’s characters are striving for is essentially a progressive / neoliberal status quo. But maybe that wasn’t the point.
To paraphrase the great Ursula K. Le Guin, no government lasts for forever. Empires can be unmade, giving way to a new world that—while still imperfect—can seem like fantasy to those who came before. But this better world is not preordained. It’s not something we wait to see happen—it’s something all of us create every day.
At the beginning and end of the game, Metaphor asks the player if fantasy can change reality, but fantasies are fleeting unless they walk in lockstep with action. If we truly want to manifest our ideals, we can’t keep chasing headlines and hot takes while waiting for someone else to fix things. We need to log off, learn to trust ourselves and each other, and commit to doing the work.
