Good Design, Bad Design Vol. 16: The Best and Worst of Video Game Graphic Design

Persona 5's UI is a masterpiece. There's just nothing that comes close to matching the tone of the game while having its own stylish flair.

i continue to be the only person in the world who thinks p5s ui was stylish, yes, but actually horrid, messy, and confusing as an actual ui and the way it presented information. sometimes even eye-straining

inscryption plz

Nice

It's actually painful to see the developers of the Legend of Zelda series mess up with such a colossally bad UI decision. I'm not saying they're infallible, they have made mistakes this bad in the past (I'd say the over-tutorializing of their games and excessive dialogue are on par with wasting the player's time), but they usually have more care than that so when it does happen it's... just sort of sad to see.

It's a bit like seeing your grandpa show the first signs of senility. He's usually a fun-loving guy, and then one night he just randomly shits the bed and tries to kiss you and you want to get out of the room. He doesn't know what he did wrong, he's already forgotten, but you don't forget.

You never forget, grandpa. Never.

Persona 5 has the worst UI an UX design. It looks BAD. Your "fanboy" nature of this game blinds you to how bad it is.

can someone tell me the name of the outro song?

Speaking about bad UX, i'm really at the limit of ZZZ, the art direction is superb, the color is vibrant and nice to look at, but really Hoyoverse, ease up on the press confirm button a bit!

Just a simple act of opening your store need so many button presses! When i press square button to open the store (after selecting the movies) the game ask 'are you sure?' i need to press X to confirm, and then for some godforsaken reason, the game confirmed my confirmation 'yay, you open the store, make monies' and i need to press X again! WHY???!!!

Same thing for buying coffee, why the extra information screen for buff effect after purchasing the coffee? The UI already told me that!

What's frustating is the game have so many awesome shortcuts during gameplay that is very intuitive and context based. Press R1 to open fast travel and if you already tracked a quest, the game will automatically choose the area of the quest and you can simply press X to go, so simple.

I've played Chants of Sennar twice, (with a 1year gap) and fell in love with it both times. It's so satisfying.

I haven't played either TOTK or Echoes of Wisdom, but I'm not so convinced that the carousel is the problem here, as much as it is a lack of obvious querying tools. Any inventory is a database, and a database without proper querying tools is going to be hard to navigate no matter what. And it does in fact seem like this Echoes of Wisdom has the most fundamental tool - the sort. You can get anything you need very quickly with robust sorting options. Again, I haven't played it, but from the clips you've shown - maybe the sorting options aren't well-chosen.

A good querying tool should be intuitive and easily accessible. Take for instance, Atelier Ryza's inventory querying tools. Sorting is by far the easiest thing to do, and once again you can quickly get what you need just by clever sorting. Filters are also useful, and grouping is useful for large categories (e.g. inventory tabs).

I get what the Lorelei devs were going for, but it definitely strikes me as a design choice where you could have your cake and eat it too if you wanted... have a dynamic omni-button that players who can't handle "complicated forks" can play the entire game with, but assign specific functions to the rest of the buttons.

The UI design of P5 is 80% of why I will never touch it with a ten-foot pole. It's ugly, hard to read, and is more desperate for attention than a chuuni. And then this game managed the impossible and made it worse.

Your final review is reminiscent of a Bob and George comic from 2003. Specifically, the arc starting September 23, 2003. Dr Light explains that his time machine has just one button for the sake of simplicity. "You can access different features by varying the amount of pressure, duration, and frequency of button presses."

It's a bit disappointing, because as much as I love your channel, it is specifically focusing on UI/UX matters (a topic that genuinely doesn't get discussed as much as it should, it's fascinating), and praising Metaphor for being good design when it's the absolute pinnacle of form over function is a wild choice. I was a massive fan of P5's kinetic approach to UI and can praise it endlessly, but Metaphor pushes everything so far beyond functionality, stretching fonts, bending shapes, tilting text in illegible ways, sacrificing accessibility at the altar of eccentric design. Nothing is reigned in, the information takes longer to absorb than it should in almost every scenario. It's as putrid in terms of function as it is expressive in terms of graphic design, so the artistic intent to choose one over the other is clear, but as a "game design" best practice on to properly communicate information and the hierarchy of information, it fails absolutely miserably and it's a shame you didn't quite point that out. Accessibility should always be paramount and they just threw that out of the window entirely. I generally agree with you since your analysis is quite rooted in pretty basic concepts but on that one I feel like your love for the P5, the amazing developers and their stellar pedigree was a big blind spot. You can kind of see that when you realize that 90% of the runtime for the Metaphor section of your video was really not, in fact, about UI/UX design but about providing context to their art direction. But art is about raising questions, provoking thoughts and feelings. But design is about answering questions, making a function clear and practical to users. Especially graphic design. And for games, the function is the gameplay.

Still a cool video as always, though.

I'd be curious to see what you have to say about The Silver Case. I recently played it and I'm so in love with its presentation. Super unique and ahead of its time, in my opinion.

Zelda ui is boring as hell

Yeah, the one button control scheme for Lorelei is probably why I won't ever finish the game. Which sucks because the 2 or 3 hour I put into the game was really fun, but the interface finally got to me and I couldn't take the misclicks anymore.

Chants of Sennar is SO F-ing GOOD, oh my god.

interesting

Hover references, no matter how brief, will always make me happy. I can't help but love that janky little game

I like link vs ganondorf final epic battle in the depths and how he parries you it’s awesome. I love how the improved the demon pig into a dragon fight and I love final sword blow to the cyrstal

I found the scrolling tape menu in Zelda Echoes frustrating at times, but otherwise thoroughly enjoyed the game.
Sounds like the Laser Eyes team decided forks were too complicated, and removed the prongs. Then paralyzed with the threat that the handle could be too complicated, they removed that. Then horrified by the idea that fingers could be too complicated, they removed the hated fingers. They then reasoned that a person with arms, legs, a torso, and a head was far more complicated than what they wanted, so they removed those too... They made things complicated and frustrating in pursuit of purist simplicity, and that's very foolish. 2 or 3 buttons would be smarter.

That quote about the fork is the kind of stupid meaningless and totally empty quip some idiot who thinks he's smart would say. I use small forks, big forks, dull knives, sharp knives, serrated knives, small spoons and big spoons. Only an idiot like the described one would have their meal hindered if presented with cutlery. He would better use his own hands like the ape he is.

I LOVE metaphor refantazio and its menus are gorgeous, but they are an absolute nightmare to use. There are 17 ways to get to the same things and the ways that you get to them depend on which menu you go into. The layout of the item menus changes between combat and when you sift through your inventory. You have to go to akademia to do special experiments, but you can still manage archetypes through the menu. For some inexplicable reason you have to buy some items from specific merchants 1 at a time and open up and close the same dialogue prompt as many times as the number of the item that you want. Great game, beautiful menus that suck to use

I just recently watched the whole playlist on this and now I keep looking at games with this sort of lens. I've been playing Dragon Quest IX recently which I got in a bargain bin somewhere. Though I do enjoy the game I can see several issues with the UI, art direction, and menu organization.

Also I think I would really like Metaphor and I do want to play the new Zelda game when I get around to it.

Yes.. TotK is a 10/10 Masterpiece that deserved GotY before it even came out 🤣🤣🤣

Chants of Senaar was a good time. And I am absolutely with you on the annoying one-dimensional echo menus in Echoes of Wisdom.

Second game with Zelda being the main character

Could you mention a lack of customizable controls, or unintuitive controls in certain games? Like Crosscode?
It's an amazing, easily one of my top 10 favorites, but not being able to change what buttons shoot, dash, etc. kind of sucks. I got the hang of it, but with a game that's nearly 100 hours long, you'd think you'd be able to change how you do things.
As a note, I played on Switch, where the shoulder buttons were used for nearly everything, and the only control options were to reverse which shoulder button did what.

Same goes for Astral Chain. Why is the attack button a shoulder button? Shouldn't a primary action like that be mapped to like, A or B?

I'd love to see you talk about The World Ends With You's Tutorials. It's my favorite game, and I love every aspect of it... except the tutorials, of which some are basically just handbooks you need to read to understand, such as the one for how pins work. There must be a better way to teach the player, right??

I don't like Personas design
Actually the chaotic and non organized looking menu design of Persona is a weak point to me. Funny that so many people like it. That's how diverse the interpretation of design can be. Every view has a new design and is not cohesive and too random. Not my cup of tea.

This guy put 2 of my fav games this year in the “bad design” category 🥲

How do you feel about the standardisation of the Final Fantasy and Resident Evil UI's?

Zelda A Kink to the Past has a extremely simple soulotion against long scrolling.
It's at the Beginning where you give your character a Name. Instead of moving to each letter one by one you can aim at the letters with a crosshair cursor. It's extremely intuitive and very fast.
That's how you maneuver through hundrets of items.

Cool video!

I really, truly hate the menus in Skyrim for PC. They are so obviously made for console, with only the bare minimum of changes done to work with a mouse and keyboard (which is to say, basically just a 1-1 button remap). It is horrible. Mods will make it a little better, but they are band-aids. They can't fully patch a gaping wound.

People keep saying "play chants of Sennar" but you see. My biggest problem in those types of "linguistics" games is that they use scusare as a base. "Oh look, hee hee, we coded a message with the signs, that correspond to English alphabet and combine into English words. Wouldn't it be fun to translate them"?

Guess what? English is my fifth language, and every language has different logic, phrasing, word order, and even alphabets. And I'm not even that good in English to think in that language. Also it is such a simple language that it doesn't even have a neutral gender and there are no cases (IE grammatical cases like in Latin or German etc) if I have to do the "deductive translation of foreign language" at least make it based on grammar system different from English FFS. Make those English speakers feel like foreigners for once!

There is a recent interview with the dev team from Echoes of Wisdom and they said they purposefully designed the menu to be that way so that people would discover echoes they hadn't used.
It was annoying and maybe multiple option wheels could have helped with the interface, but the thing I disliked the most in regards to the quest design of this game was how they made a relatively open game with a rigid structure.
To access the Goron city one has to talk with the Goron in front of the entrance, but he won't talk with you unless you first triggered a flag north west of the town, where the name of the area appears.
There was a reviewer who thought he had soft locked the entire game, when in reality they got in that situation due to the game expecting gamers to access that part in a rigid sequence.

...no you can't drown in a swimming pool of pennies, there's enough space for air to go through

I am literally writing my Master's thesis on Chants of Sennaar :'D

Agree with the point that TearOfTheKindom UI need some work, but I guess that's the best you can do with console UI. If you are on PC/TouchScreen there are lots more of UI components available.

#2 I don't understand why the designers of TotK and EoW didn't include a way to mark some items/echoes as favorites to make them appear at the beginning of the list.

#4 OK, I'll never ever play this game. Multi-actions buttons are already the bane of my existence in many games.

It's very interesting how the Nintendo guys thought, it was a good idea to just keep the scrolling menu