Metaphor: ReFantazio demo launches on PC to framerate woes, but fans are already cracking fixes for the new JRPG

Metaphor Re Fantazio
(Image credit: Atlus)

Metaphor: ReFantazio's Prologue demo is out on all platforms, giving everyone access to the first few hours of dungeon crawling and political scheming in the newest JRPG from the Persona team - but PC players aren't having the greatest time. 

As the Prologue demo continued to roll out globally, posts in every corner of the internet with an active Persona base complained about the game's PC performance and stuttering issues. Many Reddit, ResetEra, and Steam forum posts all reported that the game chugs significantly in busy city areas, and some players have found more frequent framerate drops regardless of the location's density.

Tech sleuths have tried digging to find out what the problem is, and some have even come up with answers. Multiple Steam user reviews claim the game's resolution setting is put at 125-150% by default, and simply turning that dial down is sometimes enough to reach consistently stable framerates.

Should that fail, one Reddit post outlines a slightly more complicated way of tweaking the game's files to squeeze a little stability out. If that also does not work, one ResetEra thread highlights a couple of other fixes, as the game seems to have some kind of CPU bottleneck capping performance. 

Whether these scrappy fan fixes work or not, the performance issues plaguing Metaphor: ReFantazio are worrying since the game comes out in no time at all, or October 11, to be exact. To its credit, Persona 3 Reload was a very well-optimized game on PC, so Atlus certainly knows how to deliver a smooth experience from the get-go. Hopefully, some day-one patches bring Metaphor up to snuff with its past games. 

Metaphor: ReFantazio developers thought it would be shorter than Persona 5 but just kept adding content, so now we’re matching the fan-favorite JRPG’s 100-hour runtime. 

Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.