Persona series director says Atlus's flashy menus are 'actually really annoying' to design

Metaphor: ReFantazio — (Image credit: Atlus)

Atlus RPGs mean bold aesthetic decisions, and that includes the studio's menus. Where other games might be content to rely on the proven, dependable rectangle, Atlus's interfaces are as much modern art as they are menus. They're arranged at off-kilter angles; they tumble onto the screen as a collage of disparate elements. They might, in the case of Metaphor: ReFantazio, be embellished with runic transcriptions of encoded Esperanto. They're striking, they're satisfying, and—according to Persona series director Katsura Hashino—they kinda suck to make.

In an interview with The Verge, Hashino said that—like any game developer—Atlus has to balance aesthetics with usability when designing its menus and interfaces. However, Hashino explained that by having bespoke layouts and interface designs for every menu, the studio's basically chosen the most difficult version of the balancing act.

That process certainly hasn't gotten any simpler, because Atlus's menu designs have grown steadily more abstract—a progression that Hashino said hasn't always gone flawlessly. Apparently, early iterations of Persona 5's menus were difficult to parse. "It was impossible to read at first," Hashino said, "so we did lots of tweaking and adjusting so it became legible."

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.