TL;DR VERDICT: 6.5/10
Great all-around but lacking sorely in the narrative department (even more so when it comes to social links), gameplay really carries the game outside of the slog that is late-game dungeon crawling. Get on sale.
The archetypes are a great concept, because they add a decent bit of strategy to the game that some of the afformentioned "other titles" don't have; however, these turn out to be a double-edged sword since the amount of grinding required to master all of them or get the royal archetypes at the end of the game (Metaphor's equivalent to ultimate personas) is frankly appalling.
The game's story is definitely solid and the worldbuilding is quite interesting, but there's nothing here to write home about; despite the main villain being incredibly well written, the main plot and the protagonist's arc are both really cliché and lack depth. For a game that tries to be more mature than the majority of Atlus' most popular titles, it's dissapointingly childish: the entire messaging and plot of the game revolve around a really shallow view on morality and class struggles. The MC and his party are Superman-tier good guys who want to believe that everything is actually sunshine and rainbows, and, as for the game's view on class struggle, all the racism and xenophobia in this game is utterly nonsensical. Racism in reality is borne of stereotypes or deep-seated fear/hatred, however, racism in Metaphor: ReFantazio is completely senseless; none of the races are very different to one another outside of appearances (with the exception of the Mustari that actually stick out somewhat), none of the races are shown as "criminal" races like Skyrim's Khajiit for example, and none of them have any political/historical reasons to hate eachother.
The social links and plot-twists are also quite stagnant, I found myself predicting pretty much every majour plot-twist in the game way ahead of time, and I struggle to recall memorable social links outside of perhaps Alonzo and Heismay.
In short, the game's story and worldbuilding have great potential, but it's as though the writers were too afraid to really go at it.
The gameplay is an improvement by almost every metric from a lot of Atlus' other titles in my opinion, you're almost never bored unless you have to deal with the slog that is the late-game's grindfest or some of the longer main story dungeons like the Dragon Temple and the Skybound Avatar. One of my main complaints outside of excessive grinding however (I'll have you know that I generally like grinding in RPGs so I'm not exaggerating either) is that you run out of MP far too fast and there are virtually no ways to replenish it. Every Persona game for example had some way to replenish SP without leaving the dungeon you were in provided you had the money to pay for it, however in Metaphor you will often find yourself having to return to a dungeon 2-3 times and still having to carefully conserve mana, which really does kill the momentum of the gameplay at times when you're in massive dungeons full of enemy encounters.
Finally, the music and artstyle of this game are nothing short of incredible; I do however take issue to the fact that roughly 70% of this game's tracks sound identical to one another when you're actually invested in the gameplay. This is indeed a bit of a harsh critique on my behalf, however, considering that Atlus' primary strong point outside of storytelling is their music, it's hard to let even the littlest things slide here.
In conclusion, if you're a fan of Atlus then you're going to love this game. However, don't be surprised if it doesn't live up to the grand expectations you've had for every other work of theirs, as there are many things in this game that feel largely experimental.
