Metaphor: ReFantazio - a sublime game let down by bizarre technical choices
Dated tech, performance problems - and a PS4 version that runs faster on PS5 than the native app.
A fantasy Persona game - that's the back of a napkin pitch for Metaphor: ReFantazio, the upcoming Atlus RPG that blends the key mechanics from the Persona games with a novel fantasy setting. But Metaphor marries this with an expanded scope, situating its lengthy story campaign within a semi-open world game structure. That could spell trouble for Atlus, who haven't necessarily been known for technical prowess over recent years - and it's fair to say that for all of the brilliance in the game design, Metaphor: ReFantazio has some profound technical issues at odds with the relative modesty of the visuals.
I think it's best to start with what Metaphor: ReFantazio does well, because its visual presentation can be striking at times. In signature Atlus fashion, its UI design is an absolute highlight. Menus combine carefully illustrated 2D character art with bold splashes of paint texture, and iconography that recalls the Renaissance era of human scientific exploration. This is best appreciated in the game's main menu, which highlights shifting paintings of the main character sandwiched between background and foreground paint splash elements, which are used to highlight text.
The main font is an Industrial Revolution era serif typeface, that emphasises visual contrast between thick and thin lines. Text is intersected with ragged straight and circular sketch marks that suggest a kind of older scientific or engineering illustration. Plus, the game has a small obsession with clocks and the passage of time - perhaps fitting for a game that revolves around a calendar. I think the ultimate effect evokes something quite visually striking that fits with the game's themes. And the menus are generally pretty easy to read and navigate, despite all this apparent visual complexity. The transitions between menu panels are well-executed too and have a nice sense of motion.
It's somewhat reminiscent of the recent Persona games, but it takes visual inspiration from very different places and uses a lot more texture and colour variety. Plus, it makes much more minimal use of real-time 3D elements than Persona 3 Reload or the recent Persona 5 spin-offs, so it's more in line with Persona 5 itself in that respect. It's definitely more similar to those titles than other recent Atlus fare, like Soul Hackers 2 or Shin Megami Tensei 5, which had appealing UI designs but look much more basic in comparison.
Like the Persona games, Metaphor tells a long and detailed story, which is presented quite effectively. A roughly 80 hour runtime obviously doesn't lend itself to the kind of per-scene production values that you might be used to seeing in some other RPGs, so there are a lot of relatively basic dialogue scenes, which are often voiced. These scenes have effective framing, decent looped animations, and striking animated portraits to convey emotional states. However, Metaphor features a lot of higher production budget scenes too, including lengthy fully-animated 3D cutscenes, which often depict pivotal action moments that wouldn't really work as little dialogue dioramas. Additionally, the game has quite a lot of 2D anime cutscenes as well, which are sprinkled liberally throughout the story for key plot developments. This is a big improvement over other recent Atlus fare like Persona 3 Reload, where these more demanding animated sequences were used more sparingly. Judging from my play so far, I'd say Metaphor has a high density of these sequences compared to other lengthy Atlus RPGs, which helps to propel the story and keeps things interesting for players.
Metaphor also does a credible job of representing a larger world than most of Atlus' prior efforts. It's not quite an open-world game I'd say, as the gameplay spaces are still broken into chunks, but some areas can be substantial. Market areas have plenty of NPCs milling about, with the game sometimes rendering hundreds of characters at a time, and draw distances are generous. 2D backdrops are not that common anymore, with city areas and dialogue sequences generally framed with full 3D art, though there's the occasional painting in the mix at times as well. The dungeons are meaty and have some interesting areas, though perhaps Persona 5 was a little more visually striking in its Palace areas. Metaphor has a bit of a tougher ask though as it needs to remain more firmly planted within a fantasy setting, and within that context I think the art looks pretty good.
Metaphor: ReFantazio does take a step up from Persona 5 in that the baseline target platform has moved from the PS3 to the PS4, and there is an attendant increase in the complexity of the game's environments. Metaphor probably won't be winning any awards for asset complexity, but there's definitely a greater level of polygonal definition in the environmental artwork. There's a good amount of geometric detail in this wall for instance, which before would have probably been relatively flat before, with maybe a normal map to catch the light. It's also a considerable step beyond what Atlus achieved in P3 Reload earlier this year, which had strangely stark environmental art.
I also think lighting in Metaphor can be pretty good as well. I don't want to give Atlus too much credit here, as the actual open-world lighting can look quite flat in indirectly lit areas. However, smaller scale areas do exhibit higher-quality baked lighting, and there are some nice post-process touches like SSAO and a very Persona 5-like bloom lighting effect. I'd say the game's lighting and texture art are in general quite reminiscent of that earlier Atlus effort, which is perhaps not a surprise given that the game is actually running on the Persona 5 engine.
Metaphor is definitely not up to current-gen lighting standards, or even necessarily the quality of a more sophisticated last-gen game, but the lighting quality overall is satisfactory enough in a lot of places - and even where it isn't, the use of higher-frequency texture art helps to break up the image in a way that makes any faults less visually obvious than in a game like Persona 3 Reload. Finally, I'd say the game looks reasonably visually cohesive. There are some stylistic shifts between the various ways the game is presented - shadows for instance have cross-hatched patterns in the 3D cutscenes, which isn't true elsewhere in the game, and there's an obvious contrast between the painted portraits and cel-shaded rendered graphics. But overall, I think it looks cohesive enough, and the real-time graphics blend well with the UI and 2D art.
Metaphor: ReFantazio has some gaping visual faults, and I suspect these issues will have a tendency to stick with players. Firstly, the game's overall level of rendering tech is reminiscent of the PS3 era, so we're not getting the sophisticated baked global illumination, physically-based materials and TAA that defined PS4 and Xbox One efforts, never mind the ray-traced lighting that is increasingly characterising the current gen. Instead, Metaphor is marked by harsh shadowmaps, normal maps, and specularity, a visual mix that came together on seventh-gen machinery like the PS3 and Xbox 360. It's not necessarily an unappetising mix, but it does give the game a dated feel. It's somewhat reminiscent of some early eighth gen games from about a decade ago, which combined higher art budgets with more primitive rendering techniques.
The art isn't uniformly high quality either, and there are some areas where the 2D assets are a little questionable. Level geometry is fine enough for the most part, but textures are sometimes a little flat and muddy. There are some curious issues with video as well, like how the video capture used in the title screen appears very low quality. Anime cutscenes also appear a little soft and can look overly compressed at times.
The next two issues though are perhaps the largest, and might end up defining the visuals for the worse. Metaphor has relatively poor image quality, with a lot of aliasing and shimmer at all times. Like Persona 5, there's no anti-aliasing whatsoever, but critically here the geometric density of the game has seen a big bump, providing more fodder for aliasing artifacts. Combine that with a high-contrast art style that uses outline shaders, and the game is just an aliasing mess. PS5 renders at circa-1656p, so resolution isn't really the issue I'd say. Image detail looks fine enough from a normal viewing distance, and the game seems reasonably sharp. It's just the presentation of aliasing that annoys, and that's something that only a temporal AA technique could really fix - though getting that working properly with the existing engine tech here would likely be a reach.
In contrast, the PC version of the game runs pretty well at native 4K at high refresh rates on my RTX 4090-based system, but it doesn't actually look much cleaner at all. It seems like the size of some of the outlines scales with rendering resolution on PC as well, which means that you do lose a bit of visual stylisation as you step up the res, and the finer lines tend to shimmer obviously. It takes a full 8K downsampled to 4K to approach decent image quality, and that drives performance often below 60fps even on a 4090. These brute force approaches just aren't going to work for console hardware, so it's a bit of a 'TAA or bust' situation for image quality in this title I think.
To put it frankly, erformance is not very good. On PS5, the game basically operates at an unstable 60fps, with frame-rates in the low 40s at worst. Some areas play back mostly at 60, like the second city, while most areas in the first city cause substantial performance issues. Combat tends to run poorly as well, and strangely, some of the more enclosed dungeon and interior spaces also tend to run well below 60 frames per second. Real-time cutscenes also see prolonged drops, though the 2D anime sequences appear to be encoded at a straight 30fps. That's a bit odd for a game that looks like this and is running at a moderate resolution on PS5 consoles. I definitely get the sense that the game is primarily GPU-limited here, as panning the camera towards the sky gets us back to a 60fps lock, even when traversing at speed.
There is some slightly weird behaviour going on with the game in general though. Despite having a pretty wide scope, I don't think there is a good level of detail system here. I never noticed pop-in on models in game, aside from the use of stylised imposters (sprites, essentially) for distant characters. I'm also not sure how effective the culling system is so that objects not seen by the player aren't drawn. I can position the camera such that I'm essentially facing a wall, and can still get a large performance hit, as long as the area behind that wall contains a complex scene. Most game engines do a good job of keeping out-of-view and distant detail under control, but the Persona 5 engine might not, at least in this game.
Persona 5 does run pretty well on current-gen consoles using the same game engine, hitting 4K60 on PS5 and Series X, though it's a much simpler game that tends to have pretty basic environments in comparison. However, perhaps the better point of comparison is the PS4 Pro version of Metaphor, running under backwards compatibility on PS5. Here, the game runs just about at a locked 60fps in the content I tested, including busy city areas that struggled consistently on PS5. Critically, resolution gets a big cut here, going from roughly 1656p on PS5 to 1080p running the PS4 code. Imposters are also used at a closer distance from the camera, shadowmap resolution takes a substantial hit, and some texture assets appear especially low-resolution. The UI is also rendered at 1080p, which doesn't look great compared to the 4K UI of the native PS5 version. But that performance level, critically, is much higher, and presumably some of those compromises wouldn't be necessary for a native PS5 version to maintain 60fps.
The nuclear option may just be to wait a month for PS5 Pro, where the 45 percent GPU bump would likely just about lock the game to 60fps. This assumes that the game has PS5 Pro support and that Atlus doesn't do something poorly considered, like forcing higher res rendering. If the Game Boost features deploys the full force of the Pro GPU to older software, that may be enough as well. Unfortunately, we weren't sampled Xbox code for this review, so I can't fully address performance and visuals on Xbox Series consoles. But we do have a lengthy playable demo that in my experience on PS5 corresponds closely with the full game, so I did take a quick look at that code.
On Series X, there is a very similar visual experience to PS5. Graphics settings appear identical, with the same 1656p resolution combined with similar shadows and imposters. Performance is, again, similar to PS5, with a variable frame-rate that dips into the 40s but can hit 60fps in lighter content. Series S, predictably, takes a resolution cut all the way down to 1080p. That also affects the UI, which goes from 4K on Series X and PS5 down to 1080p on the S. Other visual settings look similar, except that shadow draw occurs at a closer range on Microsoft's junior console. Performance is notably degraded compared to Series X and PS5, with frame-rates sometimes dipping into the 30s.
Overall, I quite enjoyed my time with Metaphor: ReFantazio. The game is going to attract a lot of Persona comparisons, and for good reason. This is the most Persona-like of all the games that Atlus has produced, outside of the Persona series itself. There are so many similarities that it would take an extended article of its own to describe them, but it has very similar time management, social links, turn-based weakness-oriented combat, party-based gameplay, items and equipment, and dungeon layouts and mechanics. Virtually everything in Persona has a direct analogue here, and if you're used to Persona this game feels familiar from the get-go. Metaphor is framed a little more conventionally though, focusing more on a wider overarching story than on smaller character narratives. The game's companion system, a direct analogue for the social links in Persona, isn't quite as fleshed out in my play so far, though that could develop further with more gameplay. I also really enjoyed the music, which feels very Persona-like despite its more orchestral style.
I am definitely eager to play more of this game though in my personal time in the future. I'm just not sure where to play it - if I should continue on PS5 or on the PS4 Pro code on PS5, wait for PS5 Pro, or restart it on PC or Xbox. It's very much contingent on how Atlus develops the game further through post-release patches, and especially dependent on how the game works on PS5 Pro. Metaphor has major performance compromises, and we really need to see those issues addressed. I'd like to see a quality 30fps mode, a 60fps mode that runs more consistently at the target performance level and low frame-rate compensation support for 120Hz output with VRR enabled on PS5 (the developer is halfway there - 120Hz is supported with an unlocked frame-rate).
Expecting Metaphor's basic visual faults to be fixed post-release is probably unrealistic, but changing the game configuration to work better at more consistent frame-rates would be appreciated. In particular, I really don't like that the PS4 code runs so much better on PS5 than the actual native PS5 version. At the moment, I can't wholeheartedly recommend any console version of the game, though a cursory look suggests the PC release might be a solid choice if you have higher end hardware. That said, the PS5 version with VRR is probably the best combination of image quality and performance at the moment on consoles, given that it's usually above 48fps. But I still think Metaphor: ReFantazio is very much worth playing if you do enjoy - or think you'd enjoy - Persona-style games, as I think Atlus' latest RPG is excellent. It's just that to best enjoy it, you need to carefully navigate a range of platform and display choices, each of which come with their own tradeoffs.