Few games demonstrate the disconnect between graphics and aesthetic like Metaphor: ReFantazio. A pure technical analysis would conclude that it has the fidelity of an early Nintendo Switch game at best, and yet anyone whose heart flickers with even the tiniest ember of sentiment will instantly fall in love with its lavish pause screen animations. Yes, this RPG has style for days, maybe even an entire calendar, and an upside of its more dated aspects is that it runs fine on the modest internals of the Steam Deck.
Well, I say fine – it’s a bit up-and-down, with more than its share of sudden framerate drops. But then it can be made to stay above 30fps, which for a talkative, largely turn-based adventure like this, is adequate. And although booting up Metaphor on Valve’s handheld produces a warning of miniscule text, I haven’t had any legibility problems in the hours I’ve played. And I have the eyesight of an octogenarian vole.
It controls smoothly too, with all the correct Xbox-style onscreen glyphs, and the Deck’s quick resume feature – whereby waking it from sleep mode will jump right back to the moment you paused it – works without issue. You can expect above-average battery life as well, with an hour of play draining my original LCD Steam Deck from 100% to 50% charge. That was with the speakers and screen brightness both at 50%, so lower those (or use the more efficient Steam Deck OLED) and you’ll stretch it out longer.
Veterans of running Atlus games on their Steam Decks will also be relieved to know that Metaphor is free of any problems with broken cutscenes or out-of-whack audio, of the kind that hobbled both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Strikers before their respective fixes. Here, it’s Deck-ready out of the box, which is good news for everyone except people who make tutorials on installing Proton GE. Oh, wait.
Adding to this ease of setup is that lack of demanding visual effects; Metaphor doesn’t even have basic anti-aliasing, so it probably thinks ray tracing is something to do with drawing fish. As such, the lil’ old Steam Deck can run more or less okay on the default ‘Intermediate’ preset, if you can’t even be bothered to hit up the settings menu.
I would, however, suggest dropping to Low. This disables ambient occlusion (one of just two non-resolution-related quality settings, alongside textures), but will stop Metaphor from falling below 30fps in its toughest moments. On Intermediate, it really is fine for the most part, but you might see brief drops into the 25-29fps range in more intricate locals like cities and forests.
If anything, I’d have liked a few more options to take the visual quality even lower. 30fps will suffice but Metaphor can hit a much smoother 60fps at points, and lurching between the two extremes is a graphical shortcoming that’s harder to compensate for with animation flair and flashy UI. You could change the Deck’s own settings to cap the screen at something like 40fps, but I’d have sooner liked to tinker with more specific lighting, shadow, and effects settings to bring up the 30fps base instead.
Ah well. What we have here does still work, which is more than could be said when some of Atlus’ previous works went handheld bound. Even if it does look it was released in the same year as them.