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Metaphor: ReFantazio won PC Game’s RPG of the Year award in 2024, following Baldur’s Gate 3’s overall GOTY win in 2023. Both are turn-based RPGs, a category we’re happy to see thriving on PC—because for a few years there, it sure seemed like big budget roleplaying games were convinced that flashier action was the way forward. That’s certainly been Square Enix’s strategy with Final Fantasy for the last decade, but Atlus has stuck to its guns with turn-based combat in all of its RPGs. And that decision has paid off big time, with Metaphor becoming its fastest-selling game of all time.
“I don’t think it’s a matter of which one’s better than the other: I think both turn-based battles and action battles can coincide and live in the same atmosphere,” said Metaphor: ReFantazio’s lead battle planner Kenichi Goto in an interview with PC Gamer.
His answer, when I asked if turn-based RPGs can be just as successful as action RPGs in 2025, was unequivocal: “I very much think so.”
You don’t have to look far past Metaphor to see plenty of other Japanese RPGs with turn-based battle systems, of course—just a few months ago Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D was a big success, particularly in its home country. But the trend has seemingly been for more retro-oriented games with 2D pixel art or just lower budgets in general to stick to more traditional battle systems, while the games with the bigger budgets and flashier graphics—Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, for example—lean into action.
I asked Goto what he thought led to the idea that turn-based RPGs were outdated—and if Atlus itself had even debated the point internally.
“I think it was moreso me personally feeling that, as opposed to having discussions within the company,” he said. “As a creator myself, I was feeling that it was starting to get outdated. And I did start to see reactions from players and fans that it was starting to get outdated.”
That’s right: Atlus actually did go down the action path for Metaphor, just as so many other Japanese developers have. But it ended up coming right back to turn-based combat with a renewed sense of confidence.
Goto presented a panel at last week’s Game Developers Conference all about how the development team reinvented the type of battle system that’s been “often ridiculed as old-fashioned” into something that feels at once old and new. Part of the team’s solution was introducing a simple action combat system that you can use to give your party an advantage before you engage in the deeper turn-based combat.
It took a long time for Atlus to get that balance right.
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“In playtests we encountered players who were overly worried about using up their MP in turn-based combat and would do anything, no matter how unrealistic, to finish battles on the field alone. That was despite the fact that turn-based battles provided more attack options, allowing players to defeat enemies faster and more efficiently,” said Goto. “No matter how we adjusted the game, there were players who were worried about wasting points, who always felt that resorting to turn-based battle was a form of ‘succumbing.’ Any objective number or data was irrelevant: it was simply the players’ subjective perception of the gameplay experience. And this was a critical problem. To address this issue, we reassessed what the game should be.”
After that reflection, Goto and his team refocused on the classic battle system. “We decided it was vital that action exist only to reduce the number of obvious fights,” he said. We made it clear within the team that action only exists to smoothly lead the player to the heart of the game, which is the turn-based battles. When you look at the final product, you might think ‘well, that’s obvious.’ But it was important that we put our core game concept into actual words.”
Goto said that as soon as the team solidified that concept in words, they were able to avoid going off on any tangents that seemed promising for the action system but would’ve distracted from the core turn-based design. A big component of Metaphor: ReFantazio’s turn-based battles working, though, is Atlus’s stylish presentation, which turns menus, so often a bland aspect of combat, into a strength.
“I do think that for turn-based battles, our UIs are distinct, and that’s something that comes to the forefront,” added interface designer Koji Ise. “The framework for turn-based battles has a great affinity for layering animations onto it, so we feel there’s a great synergy in the ’emotional roller coaster’ [of a battle] and us being able to attach our UI and animation to that. We can use our UI to elevate players’ emotions.”
Goto closed his talk by saying that “unfortunately there is no magic bullet to making a turn-based RPG feel interesting.” But after doubting turn-based games himself, he ended development more encouraged than ever.
“I believe it’s possible to keep even an old-school game genre fresh by identifying what modern users want and not losing sight of what you want to achieve,” he said. “I personally believe turn-based games have a long future ahead of them.”
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Kurt Indovina
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