Last year saw the release of many major titles, many of which I could not play due to either time or the rising costs of the hobby, but I knew I wanted to review at least one landmark game from that era. Waiting on a sale wasn’t easy, but today’s title in particular seemed like one I was practically destined to cover at some point. Between its heavy political themes and ties to one of the most contentious creatives in the Catholic gaming sphere’s eyes, yet also its promise to break away from said creatives’ previous limitations, deep down I knew I had to examine it one day. After finally having soldiered through to the end of this journey, I’m ready to share what I have found. Let’s see just what kind of power fantasy truly has.

Developed by ATLUS, published by SEGA, and released in October of 2024, Metaphor: Refantazio is a cross-country Japanese role-playing game available on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Steam. Its premise involves a nobody being caught up in a mad bid for a vacant throne of a country wracked with turmoil, and follows his quest to ensure the future finds its way into the right hands. Players interact with the game by exploring various environments, deepening relationships with different characters, managing their time, planning road trips, braving dungeons, fighting in turn-based combat, doing menu busy work, and watching a lot of cutscenes. Please note that I played the PC version for this review.

The game takes place in a fantasy world, in the United Kingdom of Euchronia, and tells the tale of a semi-silent protagonist. At present Euchronia is well and truly rudderless, with its king having recently been murdered and the prince having disappeared long ago. Guided by the fairy Gallica, the protagonist is tasked with aiding in the hunt for the man responsible for both counts of regicide: the powerful Count Louis Guiabern. This will be no simple task however, as during the previous king’s funeral a sort of delayed magical arbiter awakens and declares that the next monarch shall be decided by the collective will of the people. With the political landscape thoroughly upended and Louis looking to use the chaos in order to secure the throne, the protagonist gathers allies to infiltrate this strange tournament-election in order to avenge the royal family and see the rightful heir to the throne ascend.

For about the first half of the game, Metaphor: Refantazio’s story is surprisingly engaging. The main cast of characters is excellent, the plot moves at a good pace, and the world is fairly interesting to learn about. It helps that this is a rather unique case of a game that strives to explore heavy themes like racism, utopianism, and meta-narrative among others, yet isn’t exactly a ‘dark fantasy’ setting. Some of my favorite sections being the journey back from the outpost tutorial dungeon, and the Martira arc. Sadly once you sail across the sea the pace starts to buckle under the calendar system which I will explain later, and shortly thereafter the game just goes totally insane. A whole slew of new information and new conflicts are presented and resolved in a really short span of time, and the focus of the story gets totally derailed by being both extremely rushed and feeling like an absolute slog at the same time (reading this over, that’s kind of impressive in its own way). There were still some good thematic ideas in the later parts of the game, but they’re presented and included so awkwardly that I hesitate to call them particularly well earned. Needless to say the story was quite a mixed bag, and while there is a lot more to say about it I feel the in-depth topics should be saved for later in order to minimize spoilers.

Gameplay wise, Metaphor: Refantazio serves as something of a greatest hits for mechanics from previous ATLUS titles, though as someone who’s previous experience with the company boils down to Etrian Odyssey and Tokyo Mirage Sessions this game’s systems were fairly novel to me. The combat system is known as the Press Turn System, wherein you engage in turn-based fights and win bonus turns by exploiting enemy weaknesses with your skills. Considering enemies have the ability to do the same to you, it’s a surprisingly quick and brutal system which encourages you to take the enemy down as efficiently as possible. Dungeons are filled with a lot of encounters too, so you have to balance grinding normal enemies with conserving MP quite carefully if you want to make any substantial progress. Sadly it does have to be admitted that once you start really expanding your options through the game’s central class system and get more party members, Metaphor becomes extremely easy for most of its runtime due to how many viable strategies are available to you, and the difficulty doesn’t pick up again until the final boss rush where the game becomes artificially harder by spamming bosses with no weaknesses to exploit. I can definitely see the appeal of this classic fighting system, but this particular game simply doesn’t feel like it was tuned to really make it shine. It’s also worth noting that a sub-combat system where you fight monsters in light action combat exists to grant advantage in normal encounters, but it’s extremely barebones and doesn’t add too much to the experience.

At the very least, character building is pretty fun. The skill system in this game is based around Archetypes, embodiments of heroic tropes (positive-sense) of history and literature which serve as the overarching class system. While each character has a signature Archetype, they can use almost every other Archetype in the game, and learning skills in one class allows you to add those skills to another for a payment in the currency MAG. The immense freedom on offer does have a lot to do with why the game’s balance is all over the place, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. From switching Junah and Eupha into classes that were significantly less annoying to build (Faker and Seeker), to making Heismay a Gunner who rained death from the back row, to opting to make my protagonist “Rook” into a Healer for the vibes, I really felt my party was unique. I do wonder if the game could have been more challenging with a more restrictive build system in place, but what’s done is done.

Actually gaining access to these Archetypes isn’t about fighting alone however, because to unlock and strengthen them you need to witness the virtues (or in some cases “virtues”) of everyday people who embody those heroes. This is accomplished through the Follower system, which plays out various character side stories for the time you spend with them. Not only are the benefits critical to raising your combat strength, but I would argue that the best writing in the game can be found in some of these side stories (Maria, Catherina, and Bardon to name a few). Progress through these is balanced by a social stat system which mandates that you spend time doing small activities in order to clear various stat checks, so between the followers and the dungeons you have a lot to balance. The biggest highlight of this social system is the road trip feature, as many of the major activities and battle quests require you to physically leave town and spend days journeying around to clear your objectives. Metaphor’s gameplay hit peak engagement during the Brilehaven arc, where I was navigating a network of landmarks in the countryside trying to clear a bunch of side quests in one go, and it made me feel kinda smart when all was said and done.

If you’ve been paying attention though you might have noticed that time was a factor in all of the above, which leads us into the most unfortunately problematic system in the game: the calendar. This system unsurprisingly divides most days into day and night time slots, and a big part of Refantazio is trying to decide how best to use that time before hitting various deadlines to advance the main story. Early on in the game this system worked pretty well and I could see why the developers wanted to retain Persona’s most iconic feature for their new project, but as the game progressed the system ended up being stretched until it broke. This started in the Virga Island arc where the context behind the dungeon is extremely pressing in concept, but the game makes up some really silly excuses for why you can leave the dungeon and go do other things for a full week or something, and it really killed a lot of the immersion there. The real kicker was after this arc though, as in the final stretch of the game I was able to clear the palace dungeon very efficiently but the story just stops dead in its tracks and tells you to sit around until you’re allowed to fight the true final boss. This took so much time to get going, I was able to take a Follower all the way from rank 1 to rank 8 with a couple days left over! Ultimately the context surrounding the story, and the many ways Metaphor is highly distinct from Persona, left the calendar system pretty badly handled. There’s really not any improvement recommendations I could give that don’t radically shift the design of the whole game unfortunately, so this kind of just sticks out as a flaw plain and simple.

I’m sure you’re tired of all these mixed bags, so let’s talk about something uncomplicated: Metaphor: Refantazio’s presentation is stellar. The game opts for a kind of renaissance-fantasy aesthetic to draw you into a world unfamiliar to your own, yet identifiably on the cusp of massive change. Some of the stock locations and such can stick out as a little bit low-poly, but the vast majority of the game is stylized to an absurd degree such that I hardly minded what blemishes there were. My personal favorite part of the art is the skyboxes in the open-air locales, as these are straight up made to look like a painter’s impressionist rendition of the heavens and they add so much to the environment despite their subtlety. Character design is fairly memorable, if a little bit plain at times, but the real highlights here are the Archetypes and the monsters called Humans. The Archetypes sport really smart biomechanical designs which call to mind the various heroic tropes in ways that are both fresh and recognizable, and embodying one for the first time was always worth it just to get to see a new design. Some instant favorites of mine were Savior, Warrior, and Magic Seeker. The Humans on the other hand are made up almost entirely of references to the works of Hieronymus Bosch, which ties into the renaissance theme of the game in addition to being far more memorable than most JRPG enemies. Some are legitimately terrifying, and I’m surprised they let a few of these designs pass in a T-rated game. And of course, the UI design is just another one of many successes ATLUS has been leading the industry in for a while now.

Another aspect of the presentation that deserves special mention is the voice acting. This isn’t quite as impeccable as the visuals, but the good far, far outweighs the bad here. The direction of the major cast members is impressively down to earth and believable, with lots of European accents giving the world its fantasy color without sacrificing gravitas. My personal standout has to go to Stewart Clarke as Leon Strohl da Haliaetus, whose incredibly sincere delivery on lines during mundane conversation makes his big dramatic scenes all the more impactful and gripping. I will never forget that awakening scene! Shout out as well to Joseph Tweedale as Count Louis Guiabern, as while the role didn’t require quite as much vocal range he nonetheless is THE reason Louis as a villain has such amazing screen presence. If there was anything to complain about regarding the sound of the game it would have to be the music, as while I liked the idea of the soundtrack being a diegetic magic that the protagonist is hearing to better connect with his feelings, ultimately music is repeated just a bit too often for a 70+ hour game. Plus I think the pieces where they have a Buddhist monk chant sutras in Esperanto can get a little grating, and might have worked better if the chanting phases of said pieces were moved to later in the loops so that they weren’t so overstayed.

Finally we come to the spiritual analysis of Metaphor: Refantazio, and for today I’d like to cover some of the major themes of the game in detail. The first I’d like to cover is the topic of racism, because for better or worse I keep running into it in recently reviewed titles. Naturally a setting with eight distinct racial tribes in a game as un-subtle as Metaphor is invariably going to tackle themes of prejudice, and the result ends up being… actually quite good? Yes, for all of its ham-fistedness the game actually manages to treat the subject of racism with a level of care that I was hoping for. The various tribes all have their own maladjusted perspectives, and the game isn’t afraid of examining the ways in which a society with deep-rooted discrimination can be perpetuated by both the top and bottom halves of the equation. More importantly though the game correctly identifies that the true solution is also the toughest one: you can’t settle for anything less than mutual reconciliation. The standout moment in the game for this has to be during the Follower quest for Catherina, a member of the downtrodden Paripus tribe whose platform in the race for the throne is to put a bounty on the heads of the rich and uplift her people through seizing the assets of the wealthy. There’s a really profound moment during one of your conversations with her where while Catherina recounts her plans you can reply: “Let’s save them (the rich), too.” This line of thinking ultimately helps Catherina desist in her bid for the throne, realizing that her solution is as unsustainable as it is barbaric, and gets her to really think about what would truly help the Paripus. And yes this example is based heavily in ideas of class warfare, but the game does make it abundantly clear that this is a primarily racial issue for Catherina and her cohorts. I love how the game constantly encourages its characters to reconsider if animosity and violence truly solves anything, and it’s a crying shame that more stories don’t share this perspective. It makes me think of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, His greatest, most unimaginable suffering ahead of Him, yet His prayer is not for mighty conquest but for His Church to be one people undivided. An image more of us need when we find ourselves tempted to prejudge others, no doubt about it.

Unfortunately not everything is quiet on the spiritual front of this game, as seen in Refantazio’s exploration of utopianism, specifically a great confusion surrounding the sources it chooses to draw from as inspiration. The key factor here is that the protagonist constantly reads a book that depicts fantasy utopia based on our world, and magically visits the book’s author More in order to hone his ability with Archetypes. If the name More sounds familiar to you, that’s because it’s derivative of the Catholic hero Saint Thomas More, who wrote a book called A Truly Golden Little Book, Not Less Beneficial Than Enjoyable, About How Things Should Be in a State and About the New Island Utopia. This piece of literature is widely considered to be the origin point of the utopian fictions that would follow in the coming centuries and thus a total no brainer for a game like Metaphor to reference, but by now I’m sure most of you are very dumbfounded considering most people call this book “Utopia”. Well that’s because the original book, which I’ll shorten to TGLBNLBTEAHTSBSANIU, was in fact a satire written by St. Thomas More as a kind of warning about the problems with the modern world that was emerging at the time. It couldn’t possibly be a serious reflection of the author’s views, or else it makes no sense why TGLBNLBTEAHTSBSANIU ‘positively’ depicts a society where divorce is commonplace when St. Thomas More is most famous for becoming a martyr for refusing King Henry the VIII’s demand for him to approve a divorce forbidden by the laws of God. Even the protagonist’s name “Hythlodaeus” literally translates to ‘talker of nonsense’! It is for this reason that Metaphor’s depiction of “More” as this modernist idealist comes across as disappointingly ignorant, something that can be said about a number of faith-related things in the game actually.

Sigh… I’ve been dancing around this for long enough. Skip this next section if you don’t wanna be spoiled on major portions of the game.

In Offense of Sanctism (Spoilers)

While the United Kingdom of Euchronia is currently without a leader, there are those in the setting who seek to control the country even despite the official ascension of any particular king. The foremost among these is the Sanctist Church, the major faith organization of the game and the state religion. Throughout the game they are depicted as major antagonists since they are largely defenders of an unbearably cruel status quo, and maintain relevance for most of the game’s runtime. In the beginning I was happy to, in spite of the obvious aesthetic and architectural allusions to Catholicism, do my best to keep the two entities separate in my mind and engage the fiction on its own terms. The idea of a church being an antagonist in the fashion they are here actually makes sense, as while the middle ages were far from theocratic, the Church and the kings of yesteryear did have a certain soft-sharing of the burdens of governorship over society, and I could see that being an interesting angle to explore in a story like this. Let me make it completely clear, this section was originally not going to exist, or at least not to the extent it does now. I’m not so fragile as to take any vaguely Catholic church being portrayed negatively in a JRPG as a malicious attack that needs meticulous addressing.

But the problem is that fans within the Metaphor: Refantazio community (which largely overlaps with Shin Megami Tensei and Persona) did draw those comparisons more directly, and quite frankly I’m horrified. There are multiple video essays covering the game out there telling people to compare Christianity and Sanctism, with one person even outright calling the two religions “basically the same.” I have never seen such flagrant bigotry from ATLUS fans, even knowing the sort of games the company has been known to produce. It is against this backdrop that I have decided to examine the game’s portrayal of Sanctism and explain in detail how it is unreflective of both past and present Catholic Christianity, as well as some of its broader spiritual commentaries. I feel I would be doing a disservice to my readers if I didn’t at least arm them with cursory information on the subject.

The first thing to address would be the topic of racism, as it’s one of the game’s major points of discourse. The Sanctist Church itself commits racially motivated acts of aggression largely due to the social forces at work in Euchronia rather than by dogma, save for two exceptions. The first being the Elda tribe, who are condemned as bearers of cursed, evil magic, uniquely detestable among the tribes. Needless to say this kind of discrimination is absolutely nowhere to be found within Catholic teaching, particularly since the New Testament in both the Gospels and the apostolic letters emphasize offering salvation to the gentiles and Jews alike with nobody beyond God’s Grace. There have of course been Catholics who have and do commit acts of discrimination in their weakness as human beings, but such actions are in spite of the Church’s teaching, not because of it. This commitment to the humane treatment of all extended even to the West’s lowest point on this issue, as the Church not only opposed the reinstitution of slavery in the colonial eras, but countries under the Catholic sphere of influence actually had better protections for the oppressed in their slave codes despite the Church’s inability to block the practice entirely (see Bearing False Witness chapter 8 by Rodney Stark). If I try to put this into the perspective of Metaphor’s Japanese developers I do find it plausible that this aspect of the Sanctist Church was intended to be a commentary on the genuine persecution on dogmatic grounds in the eastern hemisphere, such as with the “untouchables” in countries under heavy Hinduist influence, but chose to give the Sanctists a western stylization in order to make that criticism more palatable to their domestic market. This is fine in a vacuum but it does bring up questions of whether the game should have been localized the way it was, considering this is a connection most of the western fans clearly have nary an interest in drawing.

The other major discrimination the Sanctists perpetuate is against the Mustari tribe of the southern isles on account of the Mustari’s adherence to a network of pagan faiths, and this is where the comparisons start to get really toxic in nature. For the first arc leading into the back half of the game, the church assigns the candidates for the throne to pillage the pagan realms for the relics central to their faiths, as a show of devotion to the state religion. This is of course quite similar to the many claims made by critics of the Catholic Church’s evangelization efforts over millennia, which have cast her missionary work in an imperial light. As someone descended from an island nation myself it’s hard not to draw parallels to my ancestors in particular, but said parallels find themselves sorely lacking when considered even a little bit further. The plain and simple fact is that the conversion of my ancestors is well documented as a peaceful process put into motion by the great St. Patrick, and genuinely saved the people from oppressive pagan ways that demanded not love but terror for the gods, up to and including human sacrifice. Beliefs and traditions are not good merely because they are the traditions of your people but by the merit of what they actually accomplish spiritually, and if my ancestors saw fit to renew the soul of their nation under a vision of ultimate Truth that they found in connecting with others, then it’s wrong to condemn their faith simply because it originated from afar. Perhaps there is some truth in the sentiment that others were not converted so willingly and that is worth mourning, but even so it feels dishonest to let those exceptions be blown out of proportion, especially when forced conversion is not an endorsed practice. Furthermore, even in the cases of those converted forcefully I don’t exactly see large movements of re-paganization with the waning of the Church’s influence, suggesting those old traditions didn’t have enough theological cogency to be worth maintaining in secret against Christianity.

This legitimately could have been a historical reality Metaphor: Refantazio used to its advantage. The main conflict during the Virga arc is that the priestess Eupha has to grapple with her duty of becoming a human sacrifice in the name of the dragon god, and in all honesty this could have led to an extremely interesting turn of events where our protagonists have to consider what is truly just in this situation. Maybe it could have even caused them to consider if the Sanctists in some way have a positive effect by outlawing such evils as was about to be committed against Eupha, which would have made the story’s transition into the rushed reconciliation of the Sanctists… well not good, but somewhat more justified. Unfortunately just as the priestess finally makes the brave decision to defy her people’s twisted ways, she is IMMEDIATELY rewarded by finding a mural in the temple ruins the pagans somehow completely forgot about that depicts Eupha’s decision as having been the true teachings all along, and any interesting ideas they could have explored are thrown right out the window. Absolutely garbage mural-ex-machina writing, totally undermining the stakes of the entire arc and unreflective of actual history besides.

The game is so twisted in fact that even after the aforementioned rushed resolution to the Sanctist problem, it STILL can’t stop finding ways to completely undermine the progress they make. Aside from the reconciliation itself being a backhanded boiling down to calling the entire Sanctist faithful a bunch of pathetic weaklings (very classy I know), their final major appearance in Eupha’s Follower quest is what truly broke me. In a vacuum, the message it wants to present about not letting one’s faith make you too passive but rather inspire you to action is perfectly fine. I think the game fails to appreciate the idea that prayer is necessary to entreat the strength needed to take charge of your problems, but it’s overall a missed nuance I can forgive. The problem with this Follower quest is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and in an earlier rank it is revealed that prayers in the world of Metaphor literally become spiritual pollution that makes everything worse. To put this in real life terms, this game envisions a world where praying for the sick actively hastens their demise and suggests that you are basically a bad person for not being an ubermensch who can cure the sick personally on top of whatever your day job is. I honestly don’t know what else I can say to make my point more clear. I could mention some of the throwaway lines earlier in the game where it attacks monotheism as a tool of political control instead of engaging it as a genuine theological possibility, or the room temperature IQ comment about how “if Sanctism is true why do you need to evangelize so hard” as though human nature had some kind of natural drive towards accurately discerning divinely revealed truth (it doesn’t), or even how the game uses the word “martyrdom” to describe Eupha’s attempted human sacrifice which is a truly perverse and probably intentional misunderstanding of the difference between the two. But at this point I think you get the picture. And remember, we faithful Catholics are “basically the same” by the way! Your prayers make everything worse, akshually! Give me a break…

If you’ll indulge me with one final observation, the ideal of faith that Metaphor: Refantazio ultimately wants to present is found in the pages of the utopian fantasy novel, which describes utopia as a place where all are free to follow any faith they want. This assertion is so incredibly naïve that I can debunk it not using history, the Bible, or anything of similarly well-respected caliber, but with ATLUS’ own previous works. In the latest installment of the Shin Megami Tensei series, SMT V (which in the most recent version of the game is known as the Canon of Creation),  the conflict is actually fairly similar to the one presented in Metaphor except it is the various figures of mythology and their followers scrambling to take control of the throne of the universe itself. The two frontrunners for law and chaos ultimately end up being exactly the same debate as shown here, between either affording the myriad gods free control over the world or ascending another sole ruler to take up ideals of “God’s” reign once again. The chaos-aligned factions are generally portrayed as the sensible path for the majority of the game, but actually obtaining that ending cuts to the actual heart of the matter. In a world where everyone’s fundamental view of reality is decreed right by default, when two realities of irreconcilable truths come into contact, argument becomes impossible and the only option left for both parties is to just force their way of thinking on the other through violence. The law faction by comparison actually ends up making the world a better place, and whatever poo-pooing the ending narration makes about a lack of “free will” is absurd considering they’re talking about merely accepting that monotheism is true beyond all doubt in that world. 

I truly don’t understand this, ATLUS. Why would you give a great steelman argument for spiritual objectivity in one title, only to basically ignore it wholesale when advocating for spiritual subjectivity in the next one? Are you just telling people what they want to hear instead of making honest reflections on the way reality is no matter the project? The fact of the matter is that no proposition about reality can be true and false at the same time, and in mankind’s quest for the divine this means that ultimately only one understanding of God can be correct. I do truly believe that this consensus can be reached without violent oppression and retaliation, just as Metaphor wants to believe in some way, but we have to be honest about the nature of truth as exclusive and objective. Anything less will eventually just devolve into SMT V’s chaos ending, no matter how hard we try. I can’t believe the game built on the absurd notion of “Satan” killing “God” is somehow the game with a better grip on reality.

So where does this leave us? Well right away I want to implore every fellow Catholic who reads this to not get into contact with ATLUS’ fans. I kept the names of the creators of those video essays anonymous and will not at any point divulge who they are, because approaching any of them is absolute folly. People generally do not go onto the internet to have their minds changed, and every person has a deeper story that we will probably never witness. Behind much of ATLUS’ fandom probably lies many complicated backgrounds and difficult circumstances, and only those who know these people in a very personal way (their immediate IRL community, their families, and The Lord above) have any real power to affect meaningful positive change. Here and now I choose to forgive their bigotry for the sake of the reasons I can’t see, and pray that they get the help they need.

The ones I really want to stand up to are ATLUS themselves. The successes of series like Shin Megami Tensei have indeed amassed the company a following with a disproportionate number of people hostile to God and His flock. However, I do believe that intellectual honesty towards the discrepancies between the fiction and reality (due to how explicit SMT’s references are) has kept them relatively civil and contained. Through the abstractions of Metaphor: Refantazio, I believe this particular faction has finally found an open forum to air its antagonisms, and it’s time for ATLUS to truly reflect upon the effects they have had as artists. I understand that there are many cultural divides between us which make it difficult for the West to grasp some of the situations they are commenting on, but if they’re going to continue to publish games in the West then they cannot use this excuse forever. A blink-and-you-miss-it disclaimer about your game’s similarities to real life groups being “purely coincidence” (which doesn’t even reappear after the first time you run the game) is no longer enough, especially not for a game whose very title invites the player to draw those similarities! Certainly not when the cost is potential radicalization against the innocent faithful. The truth is that we’re willing to join hands and fight to make a better world, but that’s only going to happen if they finally take steps to leave the shadow of Japan’s historical grievances behind and acknowledge the efforts Christians are contributing to make that world more than a fantasy, even on their side of the planet as we speak. They need to handle our legacy with far more care if they are going to draw from it. Whether this humble article will ever reach ATLUS’ ears I know not, but if nothing else I will shout my resolution from the depths of my heart for all to hear:

A sinner I always was; Sanctist I never was.

Conclusion

In summation, Metaphor: Refantazio is the definition of a mixed bag. Its story and gameplay start off quite strong and artistically the game is consistently peerless, but the longer the game goes on the more things destabilize until the gameplay becomes nearly mindless and the story loses its touch. Perhaps those more familiar with SMT and Persona game design will have the acquired taste necessary to appreciate the game more than I did, but for most of my readers I can’t imagine it being worth that exorbitant $70 price tag. Maybe if you’re desperate to get a taste of ATLUS’ signature style free from their questionable uses of world religions, then I suppose there are worse games to buy during a Steam sale, but that’s about as far as I’m willing to recommend it. As for myself, I’m going to remember this as the game that showed me how indirect and symbolic representation can sometimes inspire more conflict than explicit representation when done carelessly, and strive to be further mindful of how fantasy speaks to different audiences.

About PeaceRibbon

A graduate in philosophy from a campus with Benedictine monks, "PeaceRibbon" is just an ordinary introvert looking to put his hours of playing games to good use. He's played games on every Nintendo console since the family Wii and later took up PC games once aware of Steam. He's explored a lot of genres, but his favorites have been story driven RPGs and fighting games. Often finds himself going deep into gaming culture and seeking out low-profile titles over keeping up with big releases.

When not gaming, he enjoys walking in beautiful places, and overthinking just about everything. Also serves as a cantor at Mass whenever he can. Has a twin brother who shares many of the same hobbies and passions.