This conversation feels very reminiscent of the much older 'invisible vs visible editing debate' in film. Invisible editing describes cuts that occur between two visually similar scenes, so that the transition is almost unnoticeable. It's done to create a smooth, immersive experience for viewers. Visible editing, on the other hand, calls attention to the jumps in time, subject, or setting, and reminds the audience that they are, in fact, and audience. Fundamentally, both of these debates hinge on the question: "to what extent should an audience be aware of their place as a viewer?" I don't think being reminded of your role in the seat of the player - something that menus inevitably do - is a intrinsically bad thing. Abstractions are core to video games as a medium, and that's not a weakness. In fact, the primary way we interact with games is *through* abstractions. Mechanics, systems, even just the simple act of manoeuvring of a character through a physical space is how we connect them, no matter how much you try and hide that. If menu's are inhibiting player's ability to do so, then yes, your ideas here would be great! Lethal company especially; that game zeros in on its physical space. Incorporating its menus into that environment is genius, because, like you said, it feels like part of the game world, instead of some layer on top of it. The social link menu idea could work phenomenally as well. Skeuomorphism (making a design resemble a real object that shares it's function) helps with both readability, and personal investment. But I think it's narrow-minded to assume that's always the case. LISA The Painful, for example, is quite possibly the most the most "immersed" I've ever felt with a game in my life. It's a brutal, hard-as-rocks RPG. To even stand a chance at beating it, you need to make expert use of your items and recruitable party members. However, the game will often stop you at key points, and force you to choose between losing all of your items and currency, a party members life, or a limb from your main character. A choice between all of your consumable healing/damaging items, or an expendable collection of skills with barely a backstory chosen through a clunky, default RPGMaker 2003 menu should not be a difficult choice, but through LISA's excellence, it *is*. It's built through its mechanics to make you rely on these things, not because you hypothetically care about your belongings or teammates, but because you, the player of this RPG, desperately need these abstract, transparently video game-y things to even beat it. LISA is not being dishonest, these are virtual possessions - It knows that, and you know that - but you still need them to complete it. It forces you to think about your role as the player to emotionally invest you in the story it's trying to tell, and to put you in the head-space of your main character. What I'm trying to say with that tangent is this: something is lost when we're always trying to make the audience forget they're an audience. Lethal Company's invisible menus are great because they keep you firmly grounded in the physical space core to its gameplay. LISA's visible menus are great because they force you to emotionally engage with it in very visceral way. Games have abstractions. We should try and make games that create emotionally fulfilling experiences because of those, not in spite of them. Great video btw, I loved it :) (P.S: Play Lisa the Painful. It's a great game that, through it's excellence, challenged my fundamental beliefs of game and menu design - which happened to be very similar to yours)

Immersion should never come at the cost of usability. There’s a reason why menus have never died off completely and remain such a constant - they work. Its like how in jrpgs you can screw around for hours and days ingame when the world is in imminent danger, its immersion forsaken because its much more fun and frustrating that way.

Fun fact: Persona is an offshoot of Shin Megami Tensei, which also means they play similarly with the creature catching except SMT has them fight alongside you instead of summon them to attack. SMT also started in the NES days, meaning Pokemon plays like it, not it playing like pokemon.

Something I found curious is that you didn’t mention UI, or User Interface. Your Persona 3 idea is essentially finding a way to integrate a separate menu into a new user interface that can be opened whenever outside of battle. While it’s true that menus are UI as a player uses them to interact with the game, there are other kinds of UI which it seems you are advocating for. For example, the indicators in the corners of the screen of lethal company flow more easily in the game world than opening a separate menu for the status of your player character. I’m not sure whether you are advocating for minimal UI on screen either. Nier: Automata is a great example of minimal UI on screen, but still requires separate menus for more complicated actions. These menus remain stylized and work within the context of the story, given the characters you play as are robots. This is arguably a different way of integrating a player into the world as there is less information not currently needed on screen. Another example is Minecraft’s adaptive UI which can be turned on to be transparent when not communicating important information like what is in your hot bar when changing hands or if your health is especially low. It’s a conundrum. Adding too much immersive UI on screen can have important information lost in a sea of other UI, but having too many separate menus makes it a slog to get anything done. The relationship between UI and menus cannot be understated. My personal healthy medium is essentially the newer Persona games. As you said, responsive, easy to use menus that convey information succinctly in an engaging way. They’re heavily stylized to fit the aesthetics and themes of the games. It helps keep me interested in the game, even if it affects my immersion in the game as a whole. Sometimes convenience trumps gameplay, and I agree that I would be up in arms if they implemented a tarot card system like that in game 😅 What are your opinions on this? I’m curious since your position has many merits, but I think you missed something crucial. Every menu is a form of UI, but not all UI is a menu after all :p

I don't really agree with the thesis of this video. Immersion as the be all end all isn't really reasonable or the best thing to aim for in terms of designing games. Like, especially with the suggestion of only being able to level up at certain spots so it's diegetic. Sure opening a menu isn't the most realistic experience, but it's an extremely streamlined and easy to understand convention that people are used to. It doesn't take me out of the game to make use of game mechanics, because i'm still playing a game and interacting with its systems. I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about specific levelling up spots, potentially involving case studies of like, the soulsbourne series vs other rpgs where levelling is seperated. But I definitely know which one i prefer, and which one's more convenient. For things like the persona games, i think it was pressing square while in a dungeon opens up a menu where you talk to the navigation character and can heal quickly that way without going into menus. It's like, automated use of skills and stuff and is a way that makes sense in universe. The tarot card spread thing that you mentioned just sounds like.... another menu with a different design. Furthermore, it'd inevitably take up more space, especially with a full list of like 16 personas, where you wouldn't be able to easily show every one of them at a glance to the player. It would also place more focus on all of the personas skills, which would for the most part be redundant when you only need to open it up for healing. In which case it'd be better to fold it into something else to better serve the player's experience. Different menus have strengths in different places. Like you mention in baldur's gate 3, it's not immersive to have something completely diagetic like a massive bag of holding with every physical item. People's immesrion won't be broken by opening a menu to quickly rifle through items, but if it's cumbersome and convoluted all for the sake of fitting into the game world, then there's an issue. Tbh like, at the end of the day, a menu will always be a menu, whether it's diegetic [Fully presented in universe] or not. On some level it will always take the player out of the main flow of the game, but that's ok. In many cases, they're necessary in order to allow players fast and streamlined access to information and options to change. tldr: Diegetic != immersive. Player expereince is always king.

If your not-menu is "a hassle" I'd argue it's way, way less immersive because it makes me think about how other games have menus that don't suck huge ass

I do think the game being immersive is important to a certain degree, as it does improve the gameplay experience as you've mentioned throughout this video. However, I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's entirely necessary for the game to be more enjoyable, that the game is suffering from being less immersive than it can be. Persona 5 and Persona 3 Reload are good examples (in my opinion) of how style can *be* substance. The unique and stylish animations that occur when navigating menus make up for less immersion due to how flashy they are, thus lessening a need for immersion in enjoying the game. Like how more immersion comes at the cost of less convenience though, more style comes at the cost of less readability, and that was something that kept non-players of Persona 5 from understanding what was going on when spectating the game. Personally I'd rather take such a route as it has less potential for sacrificing the player's own patience, but I've yet to be part of a game's development long enough for it to see playtesters, so my validity in this claim may be controversial. Interesting though, no? I'm curious of what other opinions you have on this subject, as well as other factors in a game's ability to be enjoyed.

I feel like the average person doesn't really care too much about menus whatsoever sure it feels nicer if they're immersive but most of the time when I'm playing an rpg the actual menu itself doesnt matter too much outside of what im going to do in the menu I'd rather focus on making the rest of the game immersive

Sons of the Forest is another good example of menu minimization you could check out!

In your video, I noticed a lot the menus of some older games just look really ugly and barebones. Comparing it to newer games, things are better, but then you have the standouts like P5 and it makes you think...How come? The menus are cool, snappy, easy to look at and easier to use - but it's really distinct. In a way, shouldn't it be immersion-breaking? But then you see this everywhere in the game. It's integrated in its entire style, from its textboxes and shop menus, to choices you make, to battles. You see this everywhere, so when you see it in the menu, it is still stark and different because of the character model, but it never feels jarring. The most you're gonna get is even more enjoyment as you quickly flick through and see cool shit happening on your screen. Atlus isn't special in using style to immerse players. Most games already do this, but a lot of them fail at making it as unique. Atlus does THIS style with Persona 5. P5 is red, white and black. P5 uses sharp edges, and only a select few fonts. P5 uses these patterns. I feel almost certain that you could take a screenshot and zoom in on some random part of the UI and people could tell its P5. To conclude, P5 excels in UI design, because its uniqueness becomes a foundation of the game's immersion. You aren't just watch a story unfold and playing a JRPG. You're playing Persona 5. Again, everything is considered as part of the experience, not just the parts most people usually mean by immersion (gameplay for example). It's interesting to see a game confront its meta like this. There's a a lot of misunderstanding comments, so I'll make it clear just in case. This is to add to the discussion of UX (User Experience) in games. Atlus makes the act of playing a game immersive in itself, to the point where you can acknowledge you're just looking at a screen and still have fun. Like a way of escaping into reality. Games should focus on stuff like this so every experience with a game is memorable and leaves you looking forward to play again. Nice video, this discussion is a goldmine where we all care about enjoying ourselves as much as possible in the time we have.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake had something similar for healing as you suggested for Persona games You open a small submenu where you could select skills/items to use on the fly, without stopping gameplay But on the downside, you could cast one spell/throw one potion at the time, not really letting you queue them up FF7 Rebirth fixed this, letting you use items from the menu screen, which is much faster

This idea is incredibly impractical and difficult to implement on a large scale. What kind of immersive concept exists for the main menus? How can you take an abstract such as "The main hub menu that lets me choose inventory, equipment, stats, abilities, character growth, system options, and saving" and possibly turn that into something diegetic? Additionally, turning each of the sub-menus into its own elaborate animation would turn simple actions into something incredibly tedious. Look at FFVIIR2. It's awash in menus, probably too many to be honest. But there's a lot of information that has to be conveyed to the player and having each one formatted with a different UI and design would make managing your characters that much harder and unintuitive. I appreciate the idea, really....But it seems like something you do when it opportunity presents itself; not one that you shoehorn in for immersion. Because nothing pulls me out of a game more than frustrating time-wasting animations repeated ad nauseam.

I really don't give a shit about immersion. I care more about ease of use. A lot of the ideas here give me a damn headache just thinking about it. The Persona game menus are the best and near perfect the way they are because they're easy to use, give almost all relevant information in one place, they look cool as hell, and it actually feels so fun to use. Literally, the only thing I would change is including s-link availability under the social link tab, but it's not really a big deal.

what you say may be right but do we need this shit? i think not

what???

I'm curious about the blatant click bait. None of the other videos have this much exaggeration in their thumbnails.

A truly L take. Reminds me of the guy who thought minimalist Sonic with a backpack was a good idea.

persona is big boy pokemon (i can vouch for this stance)

You are speaking straight facts I miss stuff like the map you just pulled out in farcry 2