Why is this game so ugly?

[Danq]

Stylized graphics can look wonderful. This ain it bro.

The texturing work here especially is absolutely horrible. Among the worst I have ever seen. for the "anime" look. They literally used photo-based textures and just filtered them in photoshop with "paint doubs". They are also low resolution. I cant believe a game that is know for the "style" of persona is this ugly. Also it runs like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥? The UI is going for the classic Persona look, which is fine but holy crap what a mess the overall presentation is. They just added the weirdest color filters on top of the whole shait and called it a day. Ugh.

[Johnathon Fortnite]

Originally posted by Kotatsu:

The game's 2D portraits are beautiful but the environment, character models, lighting, and textures all look much worse than Persona 3 Reload and SMTV:V. I'm not sure what happened.

Have you seen the cutscenes with lots of random npcs? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful. Genuinely it looks like gravity rush lmao. Which is odd because like you said textures and models looked really good in the last two games.

[REBirthTheEdge]

Originally posted by shelledfade:

no joke these are morrowind-era textures. Boggles me mind, I'm almost wondering if its a bug and their textures aren't rendering correctly? It's truly THAT bad.

Yeah, that isn't true.
I actually do play Morrowind.

[Alveriel]

there is a difference between not having all the modern bells and whistles, not expecting it to look like space marine 2 or alan wake, but at least expecting something clean. This is Ps3 level 3d graphics. The excuse its a game in development for a long time...how is that an excuse or the consumers problem... You release a game in 2024 at full price and more with DLC, it should at least look clean, not all aliased and washed out low-rez textures and colors. This is bad asian MMO style graphics, doesnt have a place in single player games in 2024 at full price.

[EnriKO]

Originally posted by Alveriel:

there is a difference between not having all the modern bells and whistles, not expecting it to look like space marine 2 or alan wake, but at least expecting something clean. This is Ps3 level 3d graphics. The excuse its a game in development for a long time...how is that an excuse or the consumers problem... You release a game in 2024 at full price and more with DLC, it should at least look clean, not all aliased and washed out low-rez textures and colors. This is bad asian MMO style graphics, doesnt have a place in single player games in 2024 at full price.

and yet it does.

[Nyxtus]

Originally posted by EnriKO:

Originally posted by Alveriel:

there is a difference between not having all the modern bells and whistles, not expecting it to look like space marine 2 or alan wake, but at least expecting something clean. This is Ps3 level 3d graphics. The excuse its a game in development for a long time...how is that an excuse or the consumers problem... You release a game in 2024 at full price and more with DLC, it should at least look clean, not all aliased and washed out low-rez textures and colors. This is bad asian MMO style graphics, doesnt have a place in single player games in 2024 at full price.

and yet it does.

I like the game but let's be honest, the texture work is really, really bad. There's stylized graphics, but look at Persona 3 Reload - Stylized as hell but it looks incredible. This game 100% looks dated. I think it's a good game despite that, but when a recent release is much, much uglier than a studio's recent releases it's disapointing.

Again, you can like the game - I do too, but it's kind of ugly and low-res.

[DrkCntry]

More people who don't know the difference between subjective and objective.

The Internet definitely was a mistake.

[ChiefCornFlake]

Originally posted by dalmatian700:

Pardon me if im wrong, but cant you force AA on through nvidia's control panel? Like turning FXAA on, and ramping up the transparancy to 2,4,8x?

I tried this but sadly it does not work.

[Nyxtus]

https://github.com/Lyall/MetaphorFix

Get this, get the TAA mod, disable black outlines and motion blur. Game looks a LOT better with just these tweaks.

[ChiefCornFlake]

Whoever is saying that its not true, look at the textures of the rugs in the Cathedral dungeon and also look at the book textures that are on the table in the Safe Rooms/Magla Hollows in the cathedral dungeon, you cannot tell me those are not low resolution textures or that its ok for a Triple A game in 2024 that costs $70 to have those textures along with other technical deficiencies. If you don't own the game why are you even talking as if you know what you are talking about?

I really like the game its truly amazing. but not pointing this out means that Atlus can just do this again, the game costs the Triple A game price $69.99 it should at least have high definition textures and good anti aliasing. Some of you people will just accept anything just because you like the developer.

The game also has a lot of Day 1 DLC as per Atlus tradition, yet no one seems to care, it only matters if you don't like the game or the company I guess.

[Malagon]

Yea, it looks like a PS2 game in a lot of places. Really shocking for a $70 game.

[shelledfade]

Originally posted by Malagon:

Yea, it looks like a PS2 game in a lot of places. Really shocking for a $70 game.

wondering if this was some unreleased ps2 game they had worked on and they just had a.i upscale/retexture it or something instead of scrapping it entirely, (explains the crazy monsters as it looks like something a.i would make). Wouldn't even surprise me if this was the case, some of these textures legitimately look like they belong in the year 2002 they are so bad.

[ChiefCornFlake]

Originally posted by shelledfade:

Originally posted by Malagon:

Yea, it looks like a PS2 game in a lot of places. Really shocking for a $70 game.

wondering if this was some unreleased ps2 game they had worked on and they just had a.i upscale/retexture it or something instead of scrapping it entirely, (explains the crazy monsters as it looks like something a.i would make). Wouldn't even surprise me if this was the case, some of these textures legitimately look like they belong in the year 2002 they are so bad.

It was in development along with Persona 5. Persona 5 was being developed for the PS3 and got a PS4 port. Because of this Metaphor is actually running on that old PS3 game engine.

Nowadays Atlus has ditched the engine and now uses Unreal Engine for games such as Shin Megami Tensei V and Persona 3 Reload. Instead of scrapping Metaphor and making it on Unreal Engine they decided to proceed with the old engine and hence its why it runs pretty badly and looks old, its because it running on a game engine that is about a decade old. It actually has bugs that the Persona 5 Royal PC port had, like the sound issues.

[Randy28CR]

My only complain is the lack of anti aliasing, because if it had TAA we could run it at lower res looking still good.
Beyond that, the game art makes graphics look enough.

[Gökçeada]

Im sorry but even going from persona 5 royal to this is jarring. P3R used Unreal engine, i get that, but the art style is all ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ over the place. Its muddy and it doesnt help the setting leaves every single dungeon and building a boring snooze fest design wise.

[Frostlight Inc.]

Originally posted by meowlo:

I mean.. it's a PS4 cross-gen title. I get the feeling it was also developed with Steam Deck and possibly Switch 2 heavily in mind, which would make sense considering in Japan portable gaming is insanely more popular than in most western markets, and this is a Japanese game. I'd also speculate a lot of the budget for the game went towards the hand-drawn anime cutscenes, soundtrack production, marketing, and other non-technical stuff in general. Pushing the PC as a platform to its absolute limit is not an easy or inexpensive thing to do when making a game -- and even in 2024 only a handful of titles truly take full advantage of a highest-spec PC build (which at the moment would be something like a 7800x3d + 4090).

Not every game can be Alan Wake 2 or Cyberpunk with path tracing.

Ninja edit: Also, if you haven't installed MetaphorFix by Lyall, I'd suggest doing so immediately.

Hey man, thats great and all, but I'm playing on a PS5 and I have ground textures that look right at home on a PS2. It gets REAL bad sometimes, this is just a fact. Do you need photo evidence?