Final Fantasy is in trouble. Does Metaphor: ReFantazio show it the way?

As Polygon’s newly minted awards pundit, I’ve seen something pretty interesting transpire over the past month or so. When I started ranking contenders for The Game Awards’ top prize, Game of the Year, I identified Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as the frontrunner. It was a big game in a storied series and a favored genre, with high production values, a strong storyline, and a 90-plus Metacritic rating — all historic indicators of success with The Game Awards’ large and diverse voting jury.

But since the start of October, Rebirth has been wholly eclipsed in Game of the Year conversations by another game that has its roots in the 1990s Japanese role-playing game scene: Atlus’ Metaphor: ReFantazio. It has a weird title, relatively modest production values, and an old-school, niche ethos. But I’m confident that it surpasses its fellow RPG in the Game of the Year stakes, and its critical reputation outshines the Square Enix blockbuster more than its two-point Metacritic advantage might suggest.

Metaphor is an original title from Atlus’ in-house team Studio Zero, makers of the fan-favorite Persona series. Atlus, now a subsidiary of Sega, has been enthusiastically touting the game’s success; the company announced Metaphor sold a million copies on its launch day, making it Atlus’ fastest-selling game to date. By contrast, Square Enix’s public pronouncements about Rebirth — and last year’s Final Fantasy 16 — have been positively glum. At a financial briefing in May that was made public in September, Square Enix said profits from both blockbuster Final Fantasy games “did not meet expectations” and Rebirth sales were “not as strong as expected.” In April, game industry analyst Daniel Ahmad estimated that Rebirth was selling “about half” as many copies as its predecessor Final Fantasy 7 Remake did in a similar timeframe.

Neither Square Enix nor Atlus has reported hard sales figures for the games, and it’s entirely possible that Rebirth has sold more copies than Metaphor — maybe even a lot more. But it’s clear that Metaphor’s publisher is happy with how things are going, and Rebirth’s publisher is not. More to the point, it’s clear that Atlus’ games are growing in stature in the culture, and Square Enix’s are shrinking.

Persona 5’s lifetime sales across all its editions are reportedly more than 8 million — a number that’s in the same ballpark as Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s sales. That kind of success would have been unthinkable in the Persona series’ early days, when each new Persona game sold in the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, Square Enix is reaching for anything resembling the Final Fantasy series’ sales peak: the original 1997 Final Fantasy 7. (To be fair, this discounts the actual bestselling Final Fantasy game, the MMO phenomenon Final Fantasy 14, which is still going strong — but which arguably operates in a completely different sector of gaming.)

One reason for Final Fantasy’s struggles is Square Enix’s anachronistic tactic of PlayStation platform exclusivity, which it has already promised to abandon. But another might be that Square Enix’s strategy for the series is out of step with contemporary gaming tastes.

Final Fantasy is one of the most famous brands in gaming, and Square Enix’s management ardently wants the series to take its place in gaming’s top flight once more. To that end, it’s configured its recent entries in the series as mainstream blockbuster games, with huge production budgets and cutting-edge visuals that gesture simultaneously toward the Final Fantasy history and toward generalized trends in contemporary AAA gaming: generic open-world design, sprawling hierarchies of content, and — in a marked shift away from the series’ roots — real-time action combat.

Metaphor, on the other hand, employs turn-based combat and visuals that combine strong character designs with anime stylization and sparse, functional environments. It doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a mainstream AAA game — and it doesn’t play like one, either. Instead of trying to combine a 1990s RPG with a 2010s open-world action-adventure, Studio Zero burrows deep into its own niche. Metaphor establishes an ornate, original setting while exploring the curious features of Persona games in a new context — features like the sophisticated social simulation and the day-by-day structure that applies gentle time pressure and weekly rhythms to your adventuring. And yet, this highly specific gaming flavor seems to resonate increasingly with critics and gamers.

There’s another example of this change in tastes happening in Western-style RPGs right now. Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn’t quite the open-world jamboree of its 2014 predecessor Inquisition, but it does try to broaden the appeal of BioWare’s games with its easygoing, action-style combat. And yet it has fewer players on Steam right now than Baldur’s Gate 3, a game released more than a year ago, with a fiddly, turn-based, tabletop-influenced game design that owes everything to the kind of hardcore Dungeons & Dragons simulators that BioWare (developer of the first two Baldur’s Gate games) used to make. Baldur’s Gate 3 is estimated to have sold around 15 million copies. Sales for The Veilguard aren’t known yet, although publisher EA’s silence on the matter is perhaps telling.

There’s plenty of evidence, in role-playing gaming at least, of a shift that elevates sophisticated, niche designs above obvious stabs at mass appeal. For proof, you don’t need to look any further than the astonishing success of FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, a game that makes few concessions to approachability even as it expands FromSoft’s forbidding Soulslike template across an open world. This might also mean the epicenter of gaming culture is moving away from mass-marketed consoles and toward Steam, whose community tends to gravitate toward highly specialized experiences.

Former Square Enix exec Jacob Navok has surmised that the publisher likely set the budgets and strategies for its recent Final Fantasy games as much as a decade ago — the era of The Witcher 3 and Skyrim. Things looked very different then. If Square Enix wants to reclaim Final Fantasy’s glory days, it might need to let go of its blockbuster envy and mainstream ambitions, embrace the niche, and get weird again.