Long-time Persona director Katsura Hashino reckons working on the demon-hunting, high-schooling series is a little "easier" than creating a whole new world in Metaphor: ReFantazio, but the latter allowed the developers to work on ideas that they just couldn't have before.
Speaking to the Official Xbox Podcast, Persona and Metaphor: ReFantazio's Hashino said "we really had ideas we wanted to put into this game that we couldn't put into other games." He used his popular supernatural high school series as an example, too.
"Persona 5 is set in the real world - Persona 5 specifically in Shiba and Tokyo," he noted. "That means the story we wanted to tell became slightly limited to the space we were within. It also means it's a little bit easier for us to work with because we know the place, we have that sort of baseline to work from. But, once again, it does limit our options."
Hashino compared that to the "entirely new fantasy world that we created" in the most recent genre giant Metaphor: ReFantazio, which is currently breaking records for its developer Atlus. "We have the freedom to explore all these ideas and things that we weren't able to do in the past," he explained. "In the Persona series, the characters [and] the story itself were based around a single location, a single hideout, usually, where all the characters hang out." But Metaphor's country-spanning story and much "larger" scale, on the other hand, gives players the "chance to see a broader perspective" from multiple tribes and cultures.
