Atlus has release a prologue demo for Metaphor: ReFantazio for PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series and PC via Steam.
I’m about >1hr in so I more or less just completed the tutorial(?). I have to set the game at 200% render scaling because the anti-aliasing is terrible at 100%. The mouth movement is a bit odd and the characters move strangely sometimes. There’s also a lot going on in the UI and it’s not nearly as clean as P3R. There are text boxes that kind of hover around your screen in the city. I’d much prefer it was anchored on the NPCs instead.
Also MC’s face looks funny in some angles.
Other than that, the game looks really good. I think they made the atmosphere quite well. I wasn’t sure I was going to like it at first as I’m not the biggest fan of fantasy but the introduction with the man talking about “fantasy” was interesting enough.
I’ll finish the demo this weekend but I’ll buy and play the game after I play the other Persona games first.
I kinda doubt proper antialiasing is going to be ready in time, so this might be the first time I really try Reshade for a game. Even at 200% a lot of it is still rough. There’s so much motion, even in quiet scenes.
About 90 minutes in, I’m enjoying the gameplay so far (still super simple) and already 100% hooked by the story. English voice acting is also phenomenal. I think the people who haven’t been thrilled with Persona’s slow starts are going to like this.
I’m not sold on the visuals. The handcam-style screen drift in dialogue scenes is a bizarre choice, especially with this game being on consoles and more and more people playing on Steam Deck. The vast majority of players are going to have aliasing issues on their hardware, and that’s not going to be pretty with constant screen movement on a static scene with an anime style (and then it’s not in the animated scenes either). It just feels so weird to me in a game without a realistic style.
Steam reviews are also mixed right now complaining of frame drops, and I did get some bad performance in the very early outdoor area. Haven’t been to an area with that kind of draw distance since, and even in town I was able to maintain 60 FPS, so that’s a good sign if the expansive areas are few and far between in the game. A lot of little things are telling me it’s unlikely we’re going to see substantial performance improvements in the full game, and it’s going to have to overcome the Denuvo performance hit there, too.
Edit: finished the demo just now. I’m a little more used to the visual quirks (and I have a strong hunch that an interesting explanation is coming for one of them) and think this is going to be really good. I’m understanding now why Atlus is investing so much marketing into it.
Agree 100% in you visual part. In adition i thinkn the effekt (light, particles and so on) are a bit to much.
Yeah, there’s a bizarre amount of particles in the world. I guess I’ll hear more about that later but combined with the usual busy Persona-style UI, I’m expecting to hear complaints, lol.
Eehhh well i played maybe 2 hours, not sure. And so far is a bit tutorial showing you slowing more options how to fight. And the main char feels kinda dumb, but maybe because i choose always the option people explain me what to do or what happens and all the time they tell me how stupid i am for asking that. Well let’s say so far it’s alright, but i’m still in tutorial mode. Bit annoying that you again have to wait for points to safe…but that’s expected on an Atlus game.
