It’s not quite on the level of Baldur’s Gate 3 adding cross-companion storage, but the new Metaphor: ReFantazio update is close behind it on the Gradient of RPG Inventory Convenience – the GRPGIC, we in the business call it. The patch added two small yet significant menu quality-of-life features that would’ve come in mighty handy during my 100-hour playthrough last year.
Update 1.11 (that is, 1.112.0 on Xbox, 1.11 on PlayStation, 1.0.112.0 on Windows, and 1.0.11.0 on Steam) hit Metaphor yesterday, January 14, and while the patch notes are short, I practically sprinted to my couch to update the game after seeing the headliners.
“Now able to change party formation and configuration in Main Menu > Equipment,” the first note reads. And as if that wasn’t enough, it adds: “Now able to cycle through item categories in Main Menu > Item.”
The rest of the patch is just an assortment of “minor fixes,” but these menu additions are more than enough for me. Sometimes you find yourself thumbing through some video game UI and you feel with powerful certainty that something just ain’t right. Maybe something is missing. Maybe it’s taking too many steps. That was me almost every time I went to update my party’s gear in Metaphor.
Before this patch, you’d have to slap on your new boots and swords in one menu, go back to the main menu, and then rearrange your party members – that is, put those new boots on the ground. You couldn’t adjust your deployed party, either who’s active or what row they’re in, straight from the gearing menu. For shame.
This sounds like a minor inconvenience, and that’s because it absolutely is. The Baldur’s Gate 3 companion thing was a genuine hassle; this is more on the level of getting one piece of your neighbor’s mail in your mailbox. But when you spend as much time in JRPG menus as I do, this kind of thing adds up over the course of 100 hours. I’d catch myself reaching for the party adjustment settings that logically should be in the equipment menu, and each time I’d have to remind myself that ours is a cruel world burdened by a whole extra two seconds of menu time in this video game. No longer. My hunch was right: those settings should be in there, and now they are in there. That’s what I call a minor victory.
And the item cycling thing? It’s basically added vertical filters to the “All” items category, that way you don’t have to go through the categories horizontally all the time. For my money, this is pretty handy when you’re looking for a specific type of consumable. Believe it or not, I didn’t notice this much even before the patch so I don’t have any canned hyperbole ready to go here, but I’ll count this as a win too.
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