I saved myself and you $70 by simply modding Skyrim to be indistinguishable from Metaphor: ReFantazio, the year's best RPG

Metaphor: ReFantazio, the tale of a young outcast's quest to end racism by clearing dungeon after dungeon of seemingly evil lesser species, is a great RPG and one of the best games of 2024. It's also like $70, which represents half a year's savings in games media. Clearly Atlus has become detached from the concerns of the common man, high on its Persona-fattened hog.

Not me, though. I'm a valiant defender of the working class and a (provisional driving) licensed financial expert. I'm here to help you—and me—defeat the cost of living crisis by creating the Metaphor we have at home. All you need is a copy of Skyrim, some mods, and a little ingenuity.

Low standards help too.

Facing my true self

The fundamental experience of Metaphor: ReFantazio is being a small boy with weird eyes who hates apartheid, so the first mod I'd need to recreate it amid Skyrim's snow-capped peaks was obvious: Heterochromia Reborn – a Complete Eye Customization Overhaul. Skyrim's default eyes are dim, un-lustrous, depressingly uniform. With these, I'd be able to approximate the gorgeous gazers of Metaphor's protagonist right at character creation, getting me in the mood to overthrow society with sensible tax policy or whatever.

Sweet merciful Christ.

Turns out that Heterochromia Reborn offers, if anything, too much customization. Heterochromia has been too reborn, and the default starting stage for each of your peepers is total non-existence. This is horrible.

I quickly located some mismatched eyes and stuffed them in our man's head, giving him the appropriately dreamy gaze of Metaphor's magical Mandela. But there was still a problem. The real Metaphor protagonist—named Will, by the way—is a young lad, and pretty short of stature. Skyrim's default roster of musclebound grimy warrior-types didn't quite capture the vibe.

I needed someone more youthful. In stepped Playable Child – Elder and Vampire Races – Appointable For Conquest Of Skyrim, which let me play as someone in the springtime of their life. One issue: The heterochromia mod didn't quite take with the new playable kids, leaving young Will with two Luciferian black opals where his eyes ought to be.

He was also glowing for reasons I lack the mental wherewithal to interrogate.

But close enough, I thought, dyeing our hero's hair its trademark indigo and sending him on his way. I had him choose Hadvar and the Empire rather than Ralof and the Stormcloaks in the tutorial, reasoning that the latter were too big on hate crimes to really jive with Will and crew.

Venture forth

We were in business. I had a protagonist. Now I just needed a party. Your companions are, for my money, the best part of Metaphor: ReFantazio. They're an affable cast of oddballs you can't help but fall in love with. If I couldn't replicate them in my Skyrim Community Theatre production of the game, it'd be better to cancel the whole thing.

This was a toughie. Metaphor's heroic gaggle is unique. How would I capture the anguished nobility of Strohl? The upright Prussian nobility of Hulkenberg? The being-a-small-bat-person of Heismay?

Difficult to do, but Skyrim modders are nothing if not industrious and exhaustive. I was sure it wouldn't be an insurmountable task to find reasonable analogues for my favorite Metaphor party members.

After some searching, I became convinced that it was an insurmountable task to find reasonable analogues for my favourite Metaphor party members. It was time to find some unreasonable ones. First up, Hulkenberg. What defines her? Honour, strength, and a hidden but rich inner life.

Those were her surface traits, sure, but at her core? What defines Hulkenberg is that she's called Hulkenberg. Hulken berg. Where have I heard a name like that before?

Sometimes I astound myself.

With Yennefer of Vengerberg fitting seamlessly into the 'berg-shaped hole in my party, it was time to find our Heismay. This one was even harder. As hard as I searched, I couldn't find a short, white, anthropomorphised bat to take up the party's ninja role. It was time to get creative.

First up, Heismay needed to be short. Shorter even than me, a Satanic yet egalitarian child. To this end, I installed Bardin Goreksson – Voiced Dwarf Follower (Warhammer Fantasy), an alarmingly detailed dwarven companion who was appropriately lacking in stature. Now I just needed to turn him into a bat.

Bethesda's Creation Engine has no in-built means of mutating your followers into stunted batpeople, which only highlights the extent to which it has become divorced from the wants of its players. As such, I relied on another mod to chiropterise Bardin. I admit that, maybe, at this point, I gave in to laziness, because all I did was download the prosaically named Batman mod and put the armour on the dwarf, who loved it.

I had my small bat man, leaving me only to install the most simpering noble follower I could find—Lucien—and cast him in the role of Strohl. I'm working to a schedule here.

Game of Thrones

The final piece of the puzzle was politics. Metaphor is fundamentally a story about a competition for the throne: the first bizarre green shoots of representative democracy in a world that's heretofore been thoroughly fantasy-feudalist. I couldn't just run around Skyrim with my party whacking frost trolls, I needed to summit the heights of secular power.

Enter LC Become Jarl of Ivarstead SE – Port with Expansion and Voices Fix, a mod that promises to "introduce the opportunity for the player to become Jarl of Ivarstead, and to enjoy all the luxuries that come with such a title—such as a magnificent castle." Jarl is Swedish for king, probably, and I figured this was the best approximation of Metaphor's actual plot I could get.

I gathered my party and popped over to Ivarstead, newly home to a decidedly non-canon and enormous castle. Upon entering, we found a man called "Goldur of Warehouse," sat idly at his desk munching on a heel of bread.

"What's going on here? You look scared!" Will said to Goldur as he, dead-eyed, continued to chew.

Turns out he was terrified. The castle had been attacked, the Jarl had been abducted, and all Goldur could do was eat bread about it. With a voice that sounded suspiciously like it had been recorded on a headset microphone, Goldur implored our party of progressive heroes to free Ivarstead and its castle from the yoke of oppression. Donning armour I pulled off a dead guard—which did not manifest on my body but which did make me bald—we set off into the castle depths.

Inside, we found werewolves, and I immediately realized the folly of taking on mods like these on a completely fresh level-1 save. We might as well have jumped in a blender. Every strike sent us hurtling across the room. My comrades were knocked unconscious, I was killed outright. It was only by valiant effort and finding a section of the wall I could stand on where enemies couldn't reach me that we eventually fought our way through. At one point, Heismay began singing a song about a guy whose "brow was ruffled bald," which I took personally.

Once we'd made it through the ice caves that were inside the castle for some reason, we found the Jarl. He was dead, as were his guards. Did Metaphor's villainous Louis Guiabern do this? Most likely. It could also have been the many, many werewolves.

I gave the former Jarl all the respect due a perished aristocrat and robbed his corpse, yanking a jeweled circlet off his head that might maybe mean something to Goldur.

I returned the circlet to Mr Warehouse, who still hadn't made a dent in that baguette, and he was aggrieved. "Our beloved leader is dead!" he cried between mouthfuls. Who would look after the people now?

Perhaps a certain black-eyed boy? I think so. Actually, the questline was a lot longer, and Goldur wanted me to faff around gathering resources and whatnot before I got to be Jarl, but I figured this article was already long enough, so I simply summoned the former Jarl's circlet back out of his inventory and put it on. Hail to the king, baby. Racism is over.

Verisimilitude: Indistinguishable from the real thing.
Fun factor: RPG of the year.
Money saved: $70.