Metaphor: ReFantazio may be one of the most stylish-looking games ever made, even more so than Persona 5, the incredibly flashy Atlus RPG that preceded it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out the menus that play a huge role in establishing the visual identities of these games are very hard to make.
Longtime Persona series director Katsura Hashino was recently asked by The Vergeabout Metaphor: ReFantazio’s brain-melting UI, which builds on menu systems that have only gotten more vibrant and lively with each new Persona sequel and spin-off. While the Persona-like fantasy game out this week has the benefit of building on the past work the team has done for the series, creating those menus is still a very involved process.
“In general, the way most game developers make UI is very simple,” Hashino said. “That’s what we try to do as well—we try to keep things simple, practical, and usable. But maybe the reason that we’ve achieved both [functionality and beauty] is that we have unique designs that we make for each and every menu. This is actually really annoying to do.”
Hashino said there are separate programs running for each of the game’s menus, presumably to help with keeping the interface snappy and the action moving. “Whether it’s the shop menu or the main menu, when you open them up there’s a whole separate program running and a separate design that goes into making it,” he explained. “It takes a lot of time.”
Maybe that’s why so few other games take UI from merely being elegant and functional to being a spectacle in and of itself. Flashy menus can also present new problems, like being really hard to read. Apparently that was an issue with Persona 5 until the team did a lot of iteration and refinement on the angular black, red, and white text boxes. In my opinion at least, it was totally worth it.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is out October 11 on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, and it’s already getting positive reviews, including from Kotaku’s own Kenneth Shepard. “Metaphor takes the foundations of Atlus’ beloved life sim RPGs and manages to do and say almost everything it sets out to more eloquently than the games it builds upon,” he wrote. “It’s not flawless like the utopia in [a prominent in-game novel], but it’s a relief to get a game from Atlus that I can recommend without the same caveats I typically have to attach to Persona games, which gives me hope for the company’s future projects, both in and out of this new, rich world it’s created.”
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