Metaphor: ReFantazio director and Studio Zero head Katsura Hashino has revealed some rather disappointing news regarding the potential future of what we might have called the Metaphor series.
In a new interview with Famitsu (via Persona Central and Japanese gaming news leaker ryokutya2089), Hashino says that there are no "concrete plans" to make Metaphor into a series, although he hopes that this will happen someday.
Rather confusingly, however, Hashino also says that development on Metaphor: ReFantazio began with a view to making "a third JRPG series alongside Shin Megami Tensei and Persona", so presumably, either the scope of the project changed or Atlus decided against this direction.
We can assume that if there are no plans to make Metaphor into a series, that also means there isn't currently a Metaphor: ReFantazio 2 in the works, although that doesn't mean Studio Zero isn't working on something entirely different, of course.
Hoshino says that if a sequel were to be made, he might "decide that the best setting for a future [Metaphor] title is the Sengoku period", which, he says jokingly, would create "a JRPG with a world like the Basara series".
He's almost certainly referring here to Capcom's Sengoku Basara games, hack-and-slash action titles which have a rather spotty history of Western localization. One can only imagine that this might mean a Sengoku-set Metaphor game could struggle to get the localization nod as well.
If a Metaphor: ReFantazio sequel is, indeed, not currently in the works, that would come as a surprise from a business perspective at the very least; after all, the JRPG managed to rack up a million sales in just a few hours, so a sequel seems like a no-brainer for Sega and Atlus.
Of course, if a sequel is in the works, it wouldn't be the first time a major Japanese developer apparently openly lied about not creating more games in a series anytime soon. We can only hope.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is available right now on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox Series X|S. You can read our very own Andrew Stretch's review of the mammoth JRPG here.
