What I have always admired about Japanese role-playing games is their unashamed grandiosity. The likes of Final Fantasy, Persona and Shin Megami Tensei don't restrict themselves to the familiar trappings of good v evil, wizards-and-goblins, swords-and-magic; they absorb all of those things, and plenty else besides, from science fiction and mythology and comic books and psychology and classical art and whatever else interests their creators, and construct these absurdly ambitious worlds and narratives out of them. The themes are never small, the playtimes never short. Think of them as the operas of the video game world: a theatrical synthesis of different virtual arts, from storytelling and stagecraft to music and movement. And as something of an acquired taste.

Tokyo Game Show takes place at the Makuhari Messe, a series of cavernous halls in a suburban complex about 45 minutes east of Tokyo city centre, and given its late September slot in the calendar, it is always either horribly hot or pouring with rain. Either way, it's humid as heck, and there are many thousands of people crammed in, creating what can only be described as a suboptimal sweat situation. Nonetheless, I've always had a soft spot for TGS. I attended my first one in 2008, and so the experience of playing games in packed halls while understanding very little about what is happening has become powerfully nostalgic. And I surely wasn't the only person feeling nostalgic in Tokyo last Friday, because the halls were filled with series and characters from 15 years ago.

Metaphor: ReFantazio has been a long time in the making. It was announced in 2017 as Project re Fantasy through a weird long video that said very little. Since then, Atlus has swapped the Project for Metaphor and scoured Google Translate to find a cool way to say'fantasy.' It's also made a giant fantasy JRPG -- and after rolling through a demo at Summer Game Fest last weekend, I'm dying to play it. ReFantazio is the first original title by Studio Zero, a relatively new Atlus division headed up by Katsura Hashino.