Metaphor: ReFantazio has allowed Atlus to detach itself from the narrative of everyday life and the typically Japanese setting (here is the review of Persona 3 Reload). The new fantasy setting has pushed the development team to review their inspirations, opening the doors to the possibility of drawing on new ideas and artistic trends: the grotesque is not lacking, abundantly present, but the creative approach has pushed us to think about many aspects related to the way in which the production is preparing to show itself to our eyes next October 11th.
An Isekai Turned Upside Down
In our New York test of Metaphor ReFantazio we had the opportunity to preview one of its central themes, namely the reversed isekai: this is an uncommon expression, because when we talk about isekai we are referring to a world into which we are catapulted, willingly or not, and which is able to make us enter a completely new universe. We have already had the opportunity to talk about isekai in the past (here is our special on the subject on Forspoken).
To put it simply, just imagine Sword Art Online, in which the protagonist finds himself entering a context, the virtual one, completely detached from his daily life; Dante Alighieri himself in his Divine Comedy was a precursor of the genre, because that journey that led him from the Underworld to Paradise was an exploration of something that did not belong to our condition. The isekai, in any case, always requires that from our reality we travel in a fantastic direction, or that we reincarnate in a new universe, while Metaphor: ReFantazio has decided to think differently. The idea of Yuichiro Tanaka, Lead Scenario Planner of the Atlus title, is to reverse the situation and put us in the condition of being us humans the inhabitants of the isekai, the world to reach. And no longer the starting one. Something that Tetsuya Nomura had already hinted at in the much-maligned ending of Kingdom Hearts 3, in which Sora found himself having to confront Yozora and the metropolitan context that opened up before his eyes: an atypical way to warn the player that what he had experienced in the Disney worlds was reality, while what happens on this side of the veil of illusion is nothing more than, precisely, fantasy.
ReFantazio wants to tell us – perhaps – exactly this: the world of men is a utopia, a fantasy that wants to imitate the dream of Thomas More, who tells of that magical island where everything is democratically univocal.
Moro’s Utopia
Inside the Akademia our protagonist meets a man who has been relegated by the king to this structure that houses a multitude of books and concepts partly unknown. The individual works with a map that is a reenactment of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, on which we find the 40 Archetypes useful for the job system.
The man in question is introduced to us as More, not coincidentally the same surname as Thomas More who was so praised in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium – also translatable as The In Praise of More): he is the author of the book that the protagonist carries with him, in which he tells of an existence stripped of magic, as is our world, where wars between tribes do not exist – a little less real, this aspect – and where everyone is equal, in a full democracy.
The isekai, at this point, ends up making a double leap, because it would not only lead Metaphor: ReFantazio into our world, but it would push it towards Thomas More’s dream, namely Utopia. Although they had decided to approach art, as well as social life in diametrically opposed ways, Moro and Bosco – who we will talk about shortly – were children of the same generation, both from the second half of the 15th century and died in the first half of the 16th century, in the midst of humanism that began to put man back at the center of daily events. Moro coined the term utopia by playing with Greek etymologies, chasing a dream that harked back to Plato’s Republic. What the narrative twist in Metaphor might be is yet to be discovered, but in the meantime, from a narratological point of view, Atlus’s title wants to play no longer only with the grotesque and with the idea that inside us there is a Person to be unleashed. He wants to tell us that beyond that veil of illusion there could be a dream that takes shape under the name of the British bishop who dreamed of utopia. If and how our character will be able to get there, to the point of realizing that that work of Thomas More was nothing more than a book and not a mirror of reality, will be all to be discovered.
Bosch’s iconography
Another extremely fascinating aspect that is connected to the construction of an inverted isekai is that the first two boss battles we faced put us in front of two humans with very atypical features. Although the protagonists presented them to us as such, without this information we would never have identified them as our peers. In a universe like that of Metaphor, in which our alter ego belongs to the Elda and around him we find the races of the Roussainte and the Clemar, the human has a connotation all of its own.
To our eyes it appears grotesque, with forms that recall that already used style of Persona, this time however with different artistic derivations. The key reference is the work of Geronimo Bosco, born Hieronymus Bosch. A Flemish painter who lived between 1400 and 1500, he went down in history for the inventiveness put into his paintings, with an often sui generis reading of his times: Bosch not only concentrated on trying to mock religion, in an era in which man was rediscovering his own identity, but also on staging the conflicts of our species.
Medieval iconography was going to join what was an extreme satire, deforming the material and creating a sort of dynamism in his figures that acts in a way contrary to the natural one. His paintings proposed irregular human figures, conditioned by forms that suggested movement, but that at the same time went to deconstruct what was the human condition, forged in such a way as to go to join with apparently foreign elements.
On the left the Berserk page, on the right the Triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch
In Metaphor: ReFantazio we see a wide use of the eggshell to represent the human, which leads us to understand that if on the one hand the connection may be illogical, on the other hand we cannot help but identify a sort of connection between the man and what is the shell containing the embryo of the hen.
Bosch, by the way, is not a new inspiration for the Japanese world: the Belgian painter had already been a useful source for Kentaro Miura and Berserk. The work used as a reference part of the representation of the Triptych of the Garden of Earthly Delights, today exhibited at the Prado Museum in Madrid: the detail of the Musical Hell, which Bosch placed on the right side of his most famous work, puts us in front of a human figure with a cavity in its body, in itself closer to that of a tree than to that of a human being. Inside it we find drunkards depicted together with gamblers, with the entire representation that could be a way to outline the Antichrist.
It is precisely this figure that we find symbols that can be found in Metaphor: ReFantazio, as well as being traceable in chapter 306 of Berserk, The Fantastic World, published in 2010. Returning to Atlus, the man’s torso is made from a hatched egg, the same ones that are found in some of the adversaries of our adventure, and his head supports a disk on which demons and victims can move that approach a pink bagpipe, very similar to human entrails. The face itself ends up transmitting a strong melancholy, while we, in thinking about Homo Gorleo, cannot help but stimulate our synapses. Bosch was one of the first to explore the monstrous condition of the human being, with the clear intention of making him grotesque and broken: that melancholic look that the Antichrist directs at the person who looks at him is full of mysticism, of questions related to his own condition.
Katsura Hashino, the game director of ReFantazio, had already had the opportunity to confirm, moreover, the dangerous condition of the human in Metaphor: the monstrous creatures that we will encounter are indeed frightening, but never as much as the human. Homo Gorleo also has a peculiarity that cannot go unnoticed in his battle: in his body that is very reminiscent of a tree, with branches that intertwine around him, he manages to generate apples, which, when ingested, allow him to recover energy. Returning to the Bosch Triptych, in the segment that precedes the aforementioned Musical Inferno, there is an exotic form of Adam’s apple, which is a recurring figure in the entire painting, precisely to mock the fundamental act of creation.
