Atlus has release a prologue demo for Metaphor: ReFantazio for PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series and PC via Steam.

  • Ashtear@lemm.ee
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    edit-2
    1 month ago

    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.

    • Tamlyn@lemmy.zip
      hexagon
      M
      ·
      1 month ago

      Agree 100% in you visual part. In adition i thinkn the effekt (light, particles and so on) are a bit to much.

      • Ashtear@lemm.ee
        ·
        1 month ago

        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.