Metaphor: ReFantazio's director does the smart thing, avoids reading comments as much as possible: 'Constantly looking at reactions isn’t good for your mental health'

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(Image credit: Atlus)

Two characters in Metaphor: ReFantazio - a red-haired knight and a priestess in a steel helmet - look dramatically off-screen at a foe.

That’s a pretty humbling thing to hear, if I’m being honest. Metaphor: ReFantazio’s done rather well for itself, grabbing itself the prestigious title offastest-selling gamein developer Atlus' library, and a stonking 95/100 from us in ourMetaphor: ReFantazio review. I’m currently 52 hours along myself, and I can verify that it’s a banger.

In a survey early last year, over 91% of industry respondents identifiedharassment and threatsas a persisting issue in game development—meanwhile, review bombing (not to paint the two with the same brush, there can be some valid reasons for the latter) has increased across titles after Helldivers 2 players rather successfully told Sony to gostick it where the sun don’t shine.

One supposes, also, that Hashino has the advantage of already being pretty good at making the kind of game he likes to make, having been a director at Atlus for over two decades. Auteur privilege, and all that. Though as someone who often has people telling me how dumb I am for videogame opinions (not that you’d ever do that, right, dear reader?) I can thoroughly relate.

Hashino adds that he also doesn’t “really want to appear in promotions,” adding that “maybe because it’s a new IP, I get a lot of requests to talk about it. It’s a lot more than when I was working on Persona.” No wonder he’s not been responding to requests to do a musical rendition of ourTop 100 list—shame, maybe Gabe Newell’s free.

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