GPU - A ReShade Preset for Digimon Story Time Stranger

Digimon Story: Time Stranger looks blurry and washed-out, to my eyes. I have put together a ReShade preset to try and resolve these issues. This is, admittedly, a challenge; Digimon Story: Time Stranger has an abundance of glowy features and insane technicolor hellscapes which demand a lot from a shader, and efforts to combat this tend to wind up too dark, too bloomy, over-sharp, or otherwise visually imperfect. This, too, is not perfect -- but after many hours of testing, testing, and retesting it against many different environments and scenarios within this title, I think it's about as close as I, personally, can get it. (I worked on this for so long that I literally dreamed about fiddling with settings in the ReShade menu.)

This ReShade preset sharpens the overall image while improving contrast, shadows, and color saturation, without becoming so bright, bloomy, or sharp that the overall image suffers as a result. I've gone for visual clarity and readability over staying close to the game's aesthetic, with the caveat that I've tried to keep holograms glowing without turning text and faces into a light source. While I have attempted to tune this to enhance a wide variety of situations, there may be use-cases where these settings are not adequate or do not accommodate a given environment or UI element! (Rest assured I will go back to tweaking this if that happens, but feel free to let me know if you get there first.) Overall, I hope it is pleasing to your eyes.

There are also now five alternative variations of the ReShade preset designed for certain use cases -- for use on Steam Deck, to tone down Bloom, to simply fix the Blur, among other things. I hope one of them shall work for you!

Thank you for trying my ReShade Preset! (But the real thanks go to those who make all of this possible with their code!)

How to Use

1: Install ReShade and follow the prompts to set it up for Digimon Story: Time Stranger. (If this is your first time doing something like this, browse the game's install directory -- aka the place where you put the game on your system -- and find "Digimon Story Time Stranger.exe".)

2: Download this preset. Make a note of where you save this to, you will need it in a moment!

3: Open Digimon Story: Time Stranger. Some text will appear at the top of the screen as the game loads: this is ReShade! Follow the prompts and instructions for a brief tutorial on how to use ReShade if this is your first time with the software.

4. Import the ReShadePreset.ini file you downloaded from Nexus by clicking the "+" button at the far right of the ReShade menu, and then selecting the "folder" symbol next to the word "Template." Browse to where you saved "ReShadePreset.ini" (or one of the file variants,) and select that file to import it into ReShade.

5. The ReShade preset will be applied to the game! If you like how it looks, enjoy! If not, play around with the settings and effects until you get something you like, or, try one of the other variants to see if that works better for you. You can share your own ReShadePreset.ini in the same way that I have, so have fun playing around!

6: Enjoy a sharper, cleaner, easier-to-read Digimon Story: Time Stranger!

Questions

1. I can't unzip this! I have errors trying to unzip this!

I pack my files using 7zip! If Winzip/Winrar doesn't work for you, please try unzipping in 7zip instead.

2. Will this work on Steam Deck?

Probably! It's a bit involved to set it up, but there are some nice guides for doing just that, like this one here (https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/16sm2ic/steam_deck_custom_reshade_setup_guide/)! Be sure to use the variant of this mod labeled "Proton" -- it's specially made to work well on Steam Deck!

3. Will this work on Switch/Console?

Probably not, unfortunately -- though please do correct me if I'm wrong!

4. Will this help the performance issues?

It might honestly make them worse. But it looks pretty!