SMTV was made with Switch first so it's not going to set the world on fire with visuals. They're stylish and fine to me. I think PS5 had HDR? Vengence fixes the story and some gameplay tweaks. Metaphor is using the Persona 5 engine it seems which was made for PlayStation 3. Not PS4. PS3. So maybe there are some limitations to why no HDR? Not sure. As a game SMT games are quite different from Persona.

Months ago I played P3R on PC with no Issues, but I played the original SMTV on Switch and on Switch the game suffers a lot with pop-in and AA. I'm playing right now SMTV Vengeance on PC (I bought 1 week ago) and the game dont have any problem with optimization and graphics (I'm playing at 1440p with Ultra settings at 120 fps). I'll put a print below.

Wow, that looks next gen conpared to Metaphor. 😲 

Yeah, as long as it doesn't have aliasing I'm good with any graphics. Metaphor takes us back to ps3 era, possibly worse in terms of jaggies and it seems you can't get away from it on any system so like you said, it's the engine sadly and probably the reason for no HDR, indeed. A shame cuase this game looks better than any atlus game before it underneath the aliasing. Might actually leave this one be and go with SMTV instead it's that bad. 

SMTV has better graphics than P5R, Lightning and animations are very far ahead. Models are much more detailed and crispy, but the artstyle make them look a bit uncanny

The better comparison here should be with P3R. P3R has much better models and animations than P5R, I'd say they are above SMTV too, but they have so different art styles it's hard to compare. Metaphor is still a PS4 game at heart, and probably is targeting slightly better models and animations than P3R

P5 and P5R use a special engine based on Gamebyro engine (Catherine use Gamebyro engine and Cathrine Full Body use Persona 5 engine), but P3R use Unreal 4.

I think Metaphor will have a nice boost on visuals via update on launch for PS5 and Xbox Series version, but the PS4 and Xbox One version will receive the demo version without AA.

Hopefully. Just wondering why they wouldn't add AA to the demo version on ps5, best foot forward and all that. 

First impressions after more than two hours

The good

• English VA is great
• Voiced protagonist
• Characters are already likable
• Persona 5 like combat
• Flow from combat encounter to the next is amazing for a turn based game, feels almost Action RPG it's so slick.
• Can restart a battle mid fight if things are going badly, really cool
• Weaker/stronger enemy system is brilliant to avoid tedium
• Great stylization (albeit a bit over stylized in the menu with things flickering) World looks great though
• Animation cutscenes are fantastic
• They thanked me for trying out the demo
• An air of mystery
• Auto dialogue is quick and feels natural
• Music is great 

The bad

• No HDR (shame cause the game would pop even more)
• Alisising in a modern title this bad has no excuse, it's atrocious and terribly distracting. Almost sickening. 
• Everything has an emporhus style where nothing is static, not even the menus and it's cool for ten minutes then gets super annoying 
• They are presenting the story as if you're supposed to know what's going on, like you know the world already. Not cool. 
• Death means nothing, just spawn a few steps back
• Going from scene to scene feels not very cohesive so far

As good as the English VA is Japanese is SO much better.