>>724878074 (OP)
>What did Persona have that Metaphor didn't?
Good visual design. There's no getting around the fact that most of the time Metaphor simply looks ugly. The colors are very dull and grey, textures are dirty, and character designs are frankly not very appealing. Everybody has either weird patterns on their clothes, or massive silly looking shoulder pads.
And while the turn system is fine, actual combat just doesn't feel as fun as Persona. You get very often fucked up the ass by either missing attack, or enemy landing a lucky crit. When the game has built-in instant restart for encounters, even devs knew there was a problem.
The story isn't very good either. It tries to tackle some big themes, but they simply are not skilled enough to tackle them gracefully. The whole racism and oppression stuff feels really surface level and toothless. And then there's the twists that game tries to do, which fall completely flat due to either poor foreshadowing, or entire lack of it, like protag's true identity.
The dungeon designs also suck. Like, I'm not gonna say that P5 had masterful dungeons, but at least they were interesting to look at, and had some cool gimmicks. Even the main ones in Metaphor ones feel like corridors.
...Also, the game just feels rushed, with some story threads being dropped. For example, the game builds up the church council as characters... And then they just disappear without nothing happening to them? What?
tldr; I did not like it.
