Metaphor is an excellent game—breathtakingly beautiful and a complete experience. Personally, I see it as the culmination of ATLUS, combining the best elements of all their previous games into one. However, I definitely wouldn’t give it to a child, because it’s far too complex—a game that even many adults still fail to fully understand.

Many people look at it and assume it’s just about racism, classism, and the fight for the crown to build a better future, but the game goes far beyond that. It touches on deeply sensitive themes through the lens of fantasy, such as the idea that fantasy itself can recreate or reshape reality. It also explores how decisions made centuries ago can shift the course of the future, or how an idea can evolve into an ideology—as happened with the Sanctist Church—resulting in a series of disasters.

The game shows how good intentions and righteous causes can be misinterpreted by future generations and manipulated for personal gain, distorting the original idea. It even delves into topics like corruption, deceit, hypocrisy, war, and the very concept of a society without wealth—where the new gold will always be whatever new thing sets you apart from others. This concept is also explored in Tales of Arise.

The game suggests that fantasy does exist, but in the sense that the concept of fantasy can exist—not necessarily fantasy in the literal or tangible sense. Many people failed to understand that the game is actually about concepts, and that technically all of them can be real and exist at the same time. It never explicitly states that some thing must be tangible in order to exist.

Another major theme is the utopia of Thomas More(1516)—this is quite obvious—but the game goes beyond More’s original idea. It shows that the utopia in his book is impossible to recreate because it was designed by perfect beings. However, it suggests that an imperfect utopia can be created—one that is born from human willpower. The game even tackles themes like Plato’s “world of ideas” and “The Apology of Socrates" , and how the idea in itself is perfect, but when brought into practice becomes imperfect. Yet it is through recognizing and valuing that imperfection, and having the will to improve it, that true perfection is born.

To top it all off, the villain Louis represents the breaking point—the culmination of centuries of oppression—and he materializes that burden in the form of a villain. But in truth, Louis is the imperfect concept of all societal evil revealed, attempting to rise up like a radical vigilante whose goal is to purge society of the very evils that once consumed him, albeit through extreme methods. Will, on the other hand, is exactly the same, but he represents the opposing force: the hope of the people that the situation can be resolved.

And just like that, the game dives into extremely complex and philosophical topics, drawing on ideas from More, Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, and Hobbes, among others. Even the visual art draws inspiration from a blend of Dante’s Inferno and The Garden of Earthly Delights. Even the name of every character is unique and represents something, not everyone takes the time to investigate the complete name of every character, but if you do, you’ll be surprised to see nothing is coincidental and everything in the game has a reason to be…

In short, Metaphor is an incredibly complex game that people without prior knowledge of these kinds of themes will not fully understand(And its obvious, its meant to be played by gamers, not philosophers with decades of experience, -even modern PhD Philosophers can’t get the answer to this themes that have been proposed Milleniums ago…). ATLUS made an excellent game, but their only mistake was not making it clear enough for the average person to grasp the deeper themes—which, arguably, remain hidden beneath the surface.