Video game menus tend to fade into the background — but that’s not the case with Metaphor: ReFantazio. Like the Persona games before it, the fantasy RPG has an interface that’s slick, aggressive, and certainly not the kind of thing you’ll forget. And according to lead interface designer Koji Ise, the intent was to create menus that matched and enhanced what players were feeling at any given moment. “As long as we’re able to identify ‘at this point the player should be feeling this,’ we’re able to match our UI and animations to act as emotional accelerators,” he says.
Metaphor is developed by Atlus, and it’s a spiritual successor of sorts to the Persona series. Both are turn-based RPGs, but Metaphor shifts the setting from modern-day Japan to a new fantasy realm. That turn-based nature means the menus are integral to the experience. You don’t skip past them to get to the action; they are the action. Since Persona 3, the franchise has become highly regarded for its stylized menus, and that’s something Ise wanted to continue with Metaphor, though it was actually his first experience working in video games.
“Before this I used to work on website designs, and mainly used Flash to make various animations,” he explains. “It allowed us to make very interactive animations, which maybe you don’t see as much anymore. I thought that my forte with creating interactive animations would serve me well working with Atlus in trying to create UI there.”
The starting point was purely visual. Ise knew he wanted to create something intrinsically fantasy to match the game’s setting. Early designs included one made with parchment paper and another that tried to emulate the anxiety the lead character experiences throughout the story. “We started from ground zero,” Ise says, noting that he didn’t initially look at a game like Persona 5 as a starting place. Here are a few of the early concepts:
But as game development continued, and Metaphor’s features became finalized, things shifted to the more functional aspects of the interface design. This is where the Persona connection came in. “As we were firming up the specification, there were certain elements from Persona that we decided to carry over,” he says.
The biggest challenge, according to Ise, was adding the emotional element. As an example, since combat can be very difficult in Metaphor, he wanted to heighten the feeling of speed and aggression with the menu design. “When players are smashing away at an enemy, we assume that emotions are running high and they’re experiencing exhilaration,” Ise explains. “Your life hangs in the balance with every fight. So we wanted to make sure that came across within the UI.” Nailing those feelings involved working closely with the other teams at Atlus.
Similarly challenging was balancing Ise’s vision for the visual style with the practical concerns of crafting a UI for a video game. “There were times in the development process when it seemed a little too lopsided on the aesthetic side of things, and there was feedback from the team that it went a little overboard or was too hard to understand,” Ise says. “So we try to strike that balance without killing the design or the visuals. Because if we lean in too much towards the functional side of things that would take away what makes us Atlus.”
All of this requires a great deal of work in terms of design, iteration, and coordination. As Metaphor and Persona director Katsura Hashino told me last year, building these menus “is actually really annoying to do” because of all that time and effort. Ise agrees, saying “it was a lot of trouble.” But he notes that “we wanted to make sure that the menu became the face of the title, something where the design would be unforgettable for players.”
