Persona director says making beautiful menus is ‘actually really annoying’

Persona is one of the rare video game series where people actually talk about the menus. They’re functional, sure, but they’re also so incredibly stylish that you almost don’t mind constantly pausing to equip gear or heal your party. So when I had the chance to talk to longtime Persona director Katsura Hashino about his new game, Metaphor: ReFantazio, which continues this tradition of beautiful menus, I had to ask how they do it.

The answer, as Hashino explains it, is simply a lot of work:

In general, the way most game developers make UI is very simple. 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. We have separate programs running for each of them as well. 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. It takes a lot of time.

There are elements of craft and experience to it as well. While games like Persona 3 had stylish menus, there was a clear evolution in later games as the designs became more elaborate and animated. You can even see a difference between Persona 5 and Metaphor (see above).

Hashino says this is simply a matter of building off of previous work. “How we achieve both of them together is by the know-how that we built up over years,” he says. As an example, Persona 5’s menus feature a lot of angular elements, which initially created issues with legibility. “It was impossible to read at first,” Hashino says, “so we did lots of tweaking and adjusting so it became legible.”

You can explore Metaphor’s menus — along with the rest of the game — yourself when it launches on October 11th.