If Alice: Madness Returns was dead on arrival, that would at least be aesthetically consistent.

The 2011 sequel to American McGee's Alice went even deeper into Alice in Wonderland's red guts than the first game, pulling out the most nightmarish aspects of the Victorian children's story and tying their shadows into a neat action-adventure. But it suffered from abysmal launch sales, with reviewers and fans both being disappointed by what they felt were rough controls and level design.

Still, game designer American McGee wasn't giving up.

McGee, who created the series after being fired by id Software, hoped to gather enough community support for a follow-up, and the most diehard Alice believers gave it to him in spades. But after a decade of this cutting fan pressure, publisher EA finally made a decision in 2023: there would be no more Alice games. They blamed the "analysis of the IP" and market conditions.

Was it all over? Would Alice have to lie facedown in the graveyard once and for all? Not exactly. Alice: Madness Returns doesn't just live, it thrives.

"Even though EA was going to let Alice die," says 33-year-old Twitch streamer Foxfire47, who has been a fan of the series since the first game released in 2000, "the fans were absolutely not."

She credits Madness Returns’ lively online fanbase to McGee himself. He began working on a proposal for a potential follow-up, Alice: Asylum, in 2017, and encouraged fans to contact EA directly to show their support. His now retired Patreon contains all the other ways he incentivized fans to deepen their obsession, like referring to the fandom as "Insane Children" and eventually posting an Alice: Asylum design bible bursting with art.

His otherworldly design is at least one reason why fans could never truly abandon Madness Returns, or the Alice series in general. They are a gorgeous testament to the fact that anyone can survive the worst thing that's ever happened to them.

Friendships and bonds

Foxfire47 discovered Madness Returns' online fan base through McGee's Patreon in 2018. She remembers feeling McGee’s excitement for Asylum bleeding into her preexisting enthusiasm for the series, and it did the same for everyone she met over Patreon and Discord.

"Friendships and bonds were made through Alice: Asylum," Foxfire47 says.

When EA ultimately passed on the project, they were also rejecting an entire community that had put years and money into materializing a shared dream. But McGee had trained his fans to become personally invested, and an IP issue seemed small in the face of their dedication.

"After [EA rejected Asylum]," Foxfire47 says, "I feel that, as fans for Alice, we wanted to keep the spirit of the games alive. With the camaraderie of this community, we are always going to show our love for these games."

The community now sustains Madness Returns through YouTube videos with millions of views, pouty TikTok fancams with hundreds of thousands of likes, detailed cosplay, tattoos, and other tangible methods of worship. All of this online word-of-mouth has helped Alice fans succeed in an unprecedented goal. They are actively collecting new fans for an abandoned, 24-year-old franchise telling the strange horror story of an orphan teenager, Alice, who retreats into an hallucinated Wonderland.

"I bought Alice: Madness Returns, and I’m playing the first one for the first time because of your cosplay!" one commenter recently told popular TikTok cosplayer Jessilyn Cupcake. In recent years, she's made and shared several Alice cosplays with her eager followers, including Alice's ultramarine tea dress and the yowling Hobby Horse hammer from Madness Returns. She first found Madness Returns in 2011, telling IGN that she "fell in love immediately.”

"It still feels modern and a fresh take despite being 15 years old," Jessilyn says. "I think [its] hack-and-slash-style gameplay with multiple weapons, costumes, and abilities is one of the best examples in a game, ever."

The game is an intoxicating blend of deadly and delicate, much like its most famous weapon, the lace-patterned Vorpal Blade – a chef's knife for short-range combat. In Madness Returns, traumatized 19-year-old Alice must take on the child sex trafficker and psychiatrist Dr. Bumby, who tries to trick her into madness in order to commodify her body. But Alice learns to wield her fragile power against any abomination.

Alice's ability to work through her pain and tackle any problem, from baby dolls that vomit to dangerous men, is part of her underdog appeal. And McGee accessorizes Alice's hypnotic visions with touches like the creamy, white bow behind her bloodspattered apron, and the crystal-blue butterflies in the misty, tree-covered Vale of Tears.

Eight years ago, Japanese director Katsura Hashino announced that he was forming a new team within Atlus after more than a decade spent working on the Persona series (and Catherine), saying he wanted to try something new. Last summer, his game was finally revealed – Metaphor: ReFantazio, an RPG that features plenty of similarities to the Persona games, but has a personality all its own.

In broad strokes, Metaphor retains many familiar elements from Hashino’s previous games. Like its spiritual predecessors, Metaphor utilizes a turn-based command system built around exploiting the weaknesses of enemies. The main character, an outcast who uses forbidden magic, looks a great deal like the hero of Persona 3 Reload thanks in no small part to the art of Shigenori Soejima. Even some of the terminology is the same, a notable example being Tarukaja – a spell that boosts attacks in Persona and now Metaphor (though Hashino denies any link between the two).

Its pedigree and excellent production values has been enough to generate excitement in some RPG circles, with some going so far as to call it their most anticipated game of the year. But others in the broader gaming community are a bit more perplexed, either because of the similarities to Persona, because of the unconventional name, or both.

So what is Metaphor: ReFantazio really all about? And does it have a chance to step out of Persona’s shadow and establish a fanbase all of its own? These are still open questions, but I did get a little closer to developing my own understanding of Metaphor when I played it at Summer Game Fest earlier this month.

About Metaphor's name, and why it doesn't have romance

First, that name, which is definitely a mouthful. The Metaphor part is easy enough to understand – Hashino says that he wants players to be able to relate the story to their own lives. In short, he wants it to be a metaphor. “We had all these different ideas. We couldn't think of many good ones so we were like, ‘Okay, just Metaphor. It's easy.’"

As for the second part, Hashino says, the team wanted to rethink the idea of a fantasy world. Hence, ReFantazio. Okay, so it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but you can’t say it’s not memorable.

As for the game itself, the demo I saw consisted of three different sections – a story sequence, a dungeon crawling sequence, and a boss battle. The demo begins by establishing some of the world through Gallica, a fairy companion who brings a bit of an 80s D&D vibe to Metaphor.

In the sequence, Gallica relates the legend of a place that looks suspiciously like New York City, with Gallica amazed by a world with no magic, no tribal conflict, and “towers of glass that reach the heavens.” It’s a story that seems to suggest that discrimination is a recurring theme through Metaphor, with many of the main cast members battling prejudice of some sort.

Speaking with IGN in a follow-up email, Hashino confirmed that Metaphor’s story is “closely related to the theme of changing the world for the better.”

“As we approached this project, we wanted to challenge ourselves to do something different from our past works while still leveraging the comprehensive strength and experience of Atlus as an RPG maker. As we developed the concept of the game, we realized our interest in exploring the idea of inner strength and how people overcome limitations. Essentially we wanted to explore how we can become the best possible versions of ourselves,” he said.

“To achieve this, we focused on how people perceive each other based on personality or personal interactions. This led us to the idea that biases or prejudices can form around judgements of these characteristics. We created a backdrop to this world around the idea that various characters in this world are exposed to some form of bias or prejudice in this regard."

While the fantasy world of Metaphor is different from ours in many ways, if we are able to convey it well, we believe fans will be able to find various similarities between it and our own.”

Ultimately, Hashino says, his main goal for Metaphor was to move away from Persona’s modern setting while sticking to the format he knows best. That means that Metaphor plays a great deal like Persona on a moment to moment basis, which is especially evident in the dungeon crawling and boss battle sequences. It even has summons that look a lot like the demons from Personas. Admittedly, there’s plenty of nuance to be found in these comparisons – among other things, a big part of the strategy is positioning your characters in the front or the back row, and the battles overall are much faster – but on the surface the resemblance is clear.

The most meaningful change can be found in the third section of the demo, which in addition to the boss battle showcases a bit of how the story progresses. Where the latter day Persona games are built around a linear daily school calendar, Metaphor is structured more like a road trip where you have the freedom to go where you please (Hashino compares it to a vacation where you won't be able to see everything in one playthrough).

Setting a destination on the Gauntlet Runner, the crew’s landship, will take a certain amount of time to reach, during which you can build up your stats by reading books with titles like “Pride and Persuasion” or doing laundry.

Notably, Metaphor doesn’t have any romantic connections to build, unlike Persona, which Hashino attributes to the desire to avoid making a “romance game.”

“We made [Persona] as a RPG story about teenagers. And teenagers, they date, they have romance. That's part of the joy of being a young person exploring your boundaries. So that was why we included it in the game…because if we didn't have this in, it wouldn't really feel authentic. For our new gam…we didn't want to include it because it didn't feel as natural, if that makes sense,” Hashino explains.

“The second point I would like to make is the main plot focus is that there's this character, the protagonist, who is trying to become the next king. And rather than focusing on his love life, we wanted to make sure we have this whole follower system. So we wanted people to focus on that.”

Metaphor draws heavily from 80s and 90s fantasy

This approach sits at the core of what separates Metaphor from Hashino’s previous work. I’ve often compared the latter day Persona games to something like an anime Buffy the Vampires Slayer, featuring Japanese teenagers who deal with high school drama by day and battle demons by night. When I played Metaphor, though, the first show that popped into my head was Aura Battle Dunbine – an early example of the isekai sub-genre featuring a young motorcycle enthusiast who is transported to a fantasy world populated by giant robots resembling bugs.

Hashino acknowledges that he’s a fan of Dunbine, but chalks up any influence it might have to its significant popularity in the 1980s. More significant may be what Soejima calls “the fantasy boom” of the 1980s and 90s, which gave rise to Record of Lodoss War, Dragon Quest, and a host of other well-known properties.

“So I lived through the late '80s and early '90s when there was a fantasy boom over here, and all the fantasy stuff that existed in that era and that previously came from overseas was part of my artistic DNA,” Soejima says. “After that, I read a lot of really serious fantasy stuff, which came into me and mixed into this other base layer and helped form my DNA as well. The first fantasy I interacted with was [Dungeons & Dragons] way, way back in the day. Probably more than books, Wizardry would be what really influenced me from the fantasy genre.”

One way or another, Metaphor figures to be an interesting experiment for Hashino and company. Given a new canvas, the team seems keen to put their own stamp on the fantasy genre, drawing from well-known influences and giving them a new spin with their distinct verve and style. It feels at once familiar and invigorating – a fresh approach that still leans into their individual strengths, with a heightened art style and even faster battle system. Atlus, for its part, is treating it like the launch of a new franchise, giving it a global launch with a prime release slot in October.

“When we were creating this game, we thought, okay, we know that people do like the approach that we take,” Hashino says, “so we have more confidence to realize our vision without fear of how people will react, because we think people will like our game.”

We’ll be able to see for ourselves when Metaphor: ReFantazio releases October 11 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.