Veteran Persona director Katsura Hashino acknowledges that working on the high school demon hunting series is a little “easier” than creating an entirely new world in Metaphor: ReFantazio, but the latter allowed the developers to work on ideas that simply couldn't. I haven't done it before.
Speaking to the official Xbox podcast, Persona and Metaphor: ReFantazio's Hashino said “we really had ideas that we wanted to put into this game that we couldn't put into other games.” He also used his popular high school supernatural series as an example.
“Persona 5 is set in the real world; Persona 5 specifically in Shiba and Tokyo,” he noted. “That means that the story we wanted to tell was slightly limited to the space we were in. It also means that it's a little easier for us to work with because we know the place, we have that kind of base to work from. But, Una once again limits our options.
Metaphor: In-depth interview by ReFantazio | Official Xbox Podcast: YouTube
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Hashino compared that to the “whole new fantasy world we created” in the most recent genre giant Metaphor: ReFantazio, which is currently breaking records for its developer Atlus. “We have the freedom to explore all these ideas and things that we couldn't do in the past,” he explained. “In the Persona series, the characters [and] “The story itself was based on a single location, a single hideout, usually, where all the characters hang out.” But Metaphor's country-spanning story and much “larger” scale, on the other hand, gives players the “opportunity to see a broader perspective” of multiple tribes and cultures.
Metaphor: ReFantazio combines real-time and turn-based combat because its director wanted to embrace the idea of ”manga and movie style combat.”