There's one thing that I learned from my time working at an ice cream shop, that people do not see signs when there are a lot of signs. Customer's eyes gravitate towards the simplest and most straightforward pieces of information, so when there's multiple signs of different styles that possess unrelated information, they instead just ignore all of the signs and just go towards whatever physical item they want. There's 2 signs on the ice cream cake display freezer that tells customers not to try to open the door after they just closed for at least 15 seconds, and I rarely see customers read that. So they get confused when they can't open the door again while it's vacuuming out air and they just pull the door harder. Someone broke the door handle doing that. TL;DR, signs are invisible when they are too abundant

As a huge JRPG enthusiast, I was easily able to distinguish how a lot of persona 5’s animations hide load times. There are dozens of JRPGs where they have to have a small load time between overworld and combat. What is functionally 5 seconds of dead air-where there is no information to present-is filled with wonderful zany colors and things to look at, you don’t realize you’re watching a loading screen. Wonderful video.

As an UX designer who studied videogame development at college (and is a videogame enthusiast at heart who happens to have Persona 5 as one of his favorite games) it is SO refreshing to see a video essay about our role, especially one so well researched, respectful and thoughtful. Thanks a lot on behalf of the UX community for this masterpiece.

As someone who’s currently working on polishing the UI/UX design for an interactive media capstone project, this video feels well timed. Very nice work!

Speaking of style vs clarity, your videos have great clarity. Providing information in a clear and concise fashion and having great pacing (not too slow or fast, might be because I'm also from SG). In terms of style, it does not have too much clutter and I can really focus on understanding what you're trying to convey. Your videos actually one of the few long informational videos I can actually pay attention to fully without skipping through any content.

Y'know now it makes sense that the loading screen says take your time makes sense, that's a cool detail

Everything you said clicked with me the moment you mentioned P5 strikers. I remember how often in that game i had to open the spell menu, not because i was considering using a spell, but because the screen was so full of information that i needed a way to make the screen clearer and see what is happening.

I know an example of a slow-paced game that needed a utilitarian UI. Hylics 2 is a JRPG that uses a plain UI to distinguish it from the chaotic moving backgrounds and to draw the player's eye to the far more interesting enemy designs. This is important for the game because one of its most fundamental aspects is its use of claymation.

I want to add for strive's big hitstop whenever flashy effects like the iconic COUNTER flash on screen. the hitstop itself is a genre staple in part to assist with confirming hits since a lot of fighting game characters want to do different things if a move hits or is blocked, however strive takes this a step further using the big UI effects to convey what are very big moments, hits that the opponent should really be scared of the consequences of their mistake, and a very slow, very big tell to the attacker that its time for them to do whatever big combo they practiced.

I'm a graphic designer (though not in game development) and so much of the video rings true. It's also fun to finally hear from professionals in game design about Persona 5's UI because I was wondering about it. I personally can't stand to look at it for too long; it makes me dizzy - that's actually a reason why I never made it far into the game. I can totally see why people love it, the same way I understand why people love graffiti. But for me personally, the actual usability is so much more important. Something I do love about the UI though, is how in battle, the menu options are tied to the face buttons rather than scrolling through a list. I've only seen that a handful of times but it makes turnbased combat feel SO much snappier.

I'm just glad there's creators like you out there providing clarity to somewhat esoteric topics.

Being a designer myself who's worked on online games as passion projects and in the R&D department for a payment processing company I'm not a stranger to UI and UX. Looking at Persona 5's UI I do see how it has elements that contradict "good" UI design, however it's still easy to parse and read thanks to it's high contrast focal points. Sure there is crazy patterns, stylized splash art, unusual alignments, and weird shifting boarders, but look at the places where information is actually displayed it's always the most high-contrast part of the frame and on those focal points the information itself is readable and clear. While the rest of a menu may have a red and black contrast for style you have a white and black focal point drawing your eyes to the information that menu is trying to convey. Even the battle menu uses this, with all the style in the world it still uses the highest contrast possible to draw your eye and present the information in a way that can still be parsed, a word that you recognize and that holds meaning to the context of the scene next to an icon that represents it's corresponding button with no stylization. While it's technically a mess by any normal sensibilities of design clearly they used an effective visual cue that cuts through the noise. Really this is more of a cleaver deconstruction of UI in the same way you need to need to truly understand the fundamentals of why and how something works before you start to tear it down and subvert the conventions of the medium. There is a clear difference between a UI that is bad because the designers don't understand the fundamentals of what makes a good UI and one that is "bad" because they do understand them and deconstruct with extreme thought and effort. But that's just my take on it with my meager background in design. Edit: After thinking about it for a short time I realize didn't factor in that I have an above average "game literacy" where I'm used to parsing vast quantities of information in games like Stellaris or Galactic Civilization. My experience with overwhelming amount of information to parse in gaming might have colored my view on how readable and easy to digest the information is in Persona 5, because to me it was 100% readable and I could parse it from the start. but that doesn't change the use of contrast focal points designed to help parse that information on most screens.

Yea if Persona 5's UI is "wrong/bad" then i dont want good UI in games

Genuinely, mad respect to you for not titling this with a clickbait "PERSONA 5 UI BAD ACTUALLY????". It gives me a lot more faith in your criticism and the point you want to make, and this was a surprising but educational one for me! You explained the issues and context well. Plus, the P5 UI gets even worse when I remember how much English there is in the Japanese version. I wonder how long it takes to parse for the average Japanese player.

I didn't actually have any issues with the UI in Strikers, since I had played Persona 5 before and was still capable of parsing all the needed info during the fast paced action, especially as my focus was usually on a single point of the action anyways. I can see how it can detract from the experience if someone has trouble doing that, but I personally was able to get the info I needed while keeping up with the action.

22:48 WAIT, HOLD ON A SECOND, THAT'S A MODDED VERSION OF GG:STRIVE! Caught me off guard when I noticed, but if you watch carefully at the end of the footage, you might see something hilarious.

I forgot who said it, but I once heard the line "A UI is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it's not good."

For the record, I'm actually a fan of the Persona 5 UI style myself. But it's very context sensitive and difficult to pull off. The game's director himself explained in an interview that it took them many iterations and a lot of effort to make it understandable to an average user. Being a turn-based game is really such an important factor into why it works so well. Music Timestamps -- 0:00 - Trucy Wright, Child of Magic 2013 [Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies] 3:34 - SUSPICION [Ghost Trick, Phantom Detective] 5:22 - Fate Changed [Ghost Trick, Phantom Detective] 8:09 - COMPLICATION [Ghost Trick, Phantom Detective] 12:04 - Butterfly Kiss, Theme of Takemi Clinic [Persona 5] 18:37 - Have a Short Rest [Persona 5] 22:09 - Out of Tartarus [Hades] 23:55 - Axe to Grind (Instrumental Mix) [Persona 5 Strikers] 27:02 - No More What Ifs, Thieves Den (Instrumental Mix) [Persona 5 Royal] 30:20 - 221B Baker Street [The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles] --- No funny opening joke this time. The video is long enough as is already.

Great video. Your content is clear and enjoyable to watch, and makes me appreciate often-overlooked aspects of video games.

I think i have to push back on this one tbh. The topic is awesome and the UI vs UX rings true, but I have some disagreements when it comes to interactive and narrative media. My first disagreement is seperating style from UI in a narative driven media like an rpg/visual novel. Its just not style vs functionality when the goal is supporting a narrative driven experience. Instead, there is a baseline for functionality required that once passed increases the importance of style to further support the motifs of the narative. Second issue is seperating the movement from UI from an rpg. RPGs and visual novels are heavily menu driven. Movement is an integral tool for adding interactivity into all time spent in menus. Going back to above, its integral to the UI's main goal in supporting the interactive narrative of the video game. Last point is "persona 5 UI = bad". PERSONA 5 is in a long standing video game series in a long standing video game genre. It uses mainly basic rpg menus that anyone with experience in the rpg genre will feel right at home with. Its not complex enough for the style decisions to strongly impact the UI experience. Its completely functional. Sure the functionality and readability could possibly be improved, but the UX is great and the UI itself is actually great within the context of an interactive narrative experience (rpg/visual novel video game)

Honestly this is the best 31 minutes of my day, you did such a well-explained and amazing work. It'd be great if you consider making another video on P3R UI and UX too!

This is an underrated video. Good shit man

I feel like the only person who didn't have trouble following everything that was going on in Strikers.

I've just started my Multimedia Design degree and I'm so glad I got this video.

Great Video

So, I need to make a Disclaimer that I am a huge Musou fan, but didn't like base Persona 5 despite loving Persona 3 and 4. I didn't have more trouble with Striker's Ui than I did with the base game. The UI is there to give you all the information you may want, but you don't really need any of it aside from maybe a health bar (and in some case the mini-map). It's there if you want it and the game is honestly open enough that, some zooming enemies aside, it doesn't get in the way of whatever you're looking at. I actually thought it was one of the better musou games we got in a long while and it annoys me being told by everyone that it wasn't good.

Very good digestible explanation. I find the difference between UI/UX to be quite blurry but I think this has helped make it clearer why games like Persona 5 work and why Persona 5 Strikers doesn’t.

Persona 5’s stylish menus are still my favorite of any video game. I do realize it’s imperfections after watching this video though. It was an interesting watch.

Okay, so... I'm by no means an expert either but I did study game design too and while I agree with most of your points, I think your conclusion is wrong because of the way you define UI. While I agree that UI is absolutely part of UX, you seem to forget that the reverse is actually true. There is no objective measure of UI quality beside how much people enjoy it. That is... UX. Basically the only real metric telling you whether or not your UI is good is if players aren't bothered by it. It can be because it is functional and unobtrusive, but it can also be because it is so stylish and fun that people enjoy interacting with it in itself. You show Hearthstone in your video and the little interactive decors on the side of the board are a great example of that, they have no gameplay purpose and only makes the screen more cluttered with useless information, yet they are a fun and beloved distraction. If it takes a player 5 seconds to do a task in a menu in a game and 10 to do the same thing in another game, you would usually think that the first game has a better UI because you want your players to have fun interacting with gameplay rather than tinkering with menus. But if the player somehow has fun with the menus and doesn't mind spending time using them, then keeping them in there isn't a failure. And that's the prowess that P5 accomplished. It understood that, at its core, Persona was a game of menus and management, something that you acknowledge yourself in the video. If it wanted to be as readable and efficient as possible, it would have been an Excel spreadsheet that you fill in with your choices of attacks, personas or daily activities. That would have made the UX terrible and I would argue that this would mean the UI would also have been terrible because of that. So instead, it made this game all about making menus fun by themselves since that's basically what you're spending the game fiddling with. That's why Sakurai never says P5 has poor UI, just poor readability. Obviously, P5 is an exception, both because of how amazing it looks and because it fits a very specific kind of game. In most cases, you don't want your UI to stand out and so I understand why your teacher used it as an example of "bad UI" because, in most cases, doing what Atlus did here would indeed have been a terrible idea. But if we limit ourselves to conventional rules about what a "good UI" is supposed to be like, we reduce what we are allowed try and miss on opportunities to create fantastic works of art. In the end, a good UI is just what leads to people liking the game. I will add another important point. You know what makes a UI very unreadable ? A player not paying attention because they are bored. P5's interface might be cluttered and sometimes confusing, but it does grab your attention which in itself makes it easier to convey information to the player. You say players will "forgive" a "bad UI" if it's entertaining but that's not it. Entertainment value serves readability by making people want to pay attention, hence there is no tradeoff, nothing to "forgive". Hmm... That ended up being a long post, but what can you do... this is a subject that I care about. Anyway, don't want to come up as overly critical. As I said, I did agree with most of what you said during the video and I agree that it's good to educate the people about the difference between UI and UX even if I consider the two topics to be much more interlinked than you do.

This is wild to me because I never thought it was hard to read or use even in Strikers, and a lot of the times when you go from one menu to another where the place the information is displayed changes there's always some animation that leads your eye there. I never would have thought of it as a bad menu or hard to read but I guess I can see how it could be for some people?

Though you posed it as a rhetorical question, I imagine there are a number of information-dense, complex games where being able to read the menu could actually take time and practice. My first thought went to Library of Ruina and Limbus Company. There's a lot of information involved in any given turn, that may change depending on your currently selected actions. This includes targeting lines, passive abilities, weaknesses/resistances, clashing values, status effects and buffs/debuffs, speed values, health and stagger bars/thresholds, cards/skills available, for Limbus there's the number of coins, as well as offense and defense level, for Ruina, you eventually have a second hand where special cards are stored, as well as special cards that grant you new passive abilities. I distinctly remember a moment while playing Ruina where everything fully clicked and I realized I finally understood every aspect of the menus in the game. I don't mean to detract from your overall point, but there are certainly a number of games where reading a menu can actually take practice.

This reminds me of manga where manga where more detailed drawing are harder to portray movement and how detail and stylization can negatively impact panel flow if used incorrectly. This is pretty much the same all across mediums like filmmaking and books where you need to have a basic foundation to build on, because if you don’t it will be messy.

i personally never had issues navigating persona 5's ui, though i can see someone getting lost in them. (in strikers though the shop menu was painfully bright to me lol) honestly the more plain and simple ui's can kinda confuse me sometimes if everything looks the same, causing me to sometimes gloss over stuff

As much as I love the Stylized Design of Persona 5. My friend who is blind in one eye, and has other photosenstivity issues literally could not play the game because the design made it impossible for her to read without getting a headache. Which sucks, because I wanted her to play a REALLY good JRPG since she was starting to get in to games...

I never had problems with P5's UI, heck, I liked it from day 1 without even having any outside influence of the game

I can understand what you're saying about Strikers, but speaking from my own experience as both a Persona and Dynasty Warriors gamer, I barely had any issues with the UI or UX (the only time this happens is when I change the button layout, where the game would tell me to push one button but I had to push another one due to the changes) - yes, it's busy and gives a lot of information, but I had no actual difficulty in keeping up with the fast-paced combat (and even found the pausing to choose a Persona skill rather refreshing, something not found in your typical DW game). If I may be frank, I can't really reconcile the two. Do you have any thoughts as to why this may be?

Ok so, person who is going into game design and is already a computer science student: is it just me or do I feel that games with “good UI” have actually terrible UI anyway? I much prefer a “non functional” UI that makes you eyes dart around the screen and takes some of its readability for UX. The reason is: it makes the menus fun, which not many games can say. I’ve played many games were I felt like “GOD, I don’t want to open the menu… it’s so boring”, but when it was persona 5 I never grew tiered of it. I loved the satisfying sound design, the bright colours and the unorganised letters. It made me want to just sit there and simply look at the menus at first and in the later game it made having to heal up the characters/give them sp/equip different things more fun. I also have an argument for “what game needs you to practice the menus”… and well… you don’t have to purposely do it. Due to the game taking more than 100 hours to beat you’ll easy get some muscle memory from it. Also about persona 5 strikers: the whole reason why it’s so bad is due to its size, if the UI was smaller then most of the complaints would probably not exist. Anyway, am I crazy for liking unconventional UI? I still see the argument but… I just like it.

Persona 5 menus are so good it made a 125hr playthrough fly by without noticing. There's not a single boring moment in the game, there's always something interesting going on in the screen. Kinda like juggling keys at a toddler and it works surprisingly well.

I love this channel. I recently got into P5R and the menus really are fantastic, but 42 hours of gameplay in, and I'm still getting lost in a few menus. I will admit, if it werent for the stylish UX I would never have touched P5R

Its stylish and readable i never once was confused??? Thats literally a you problem

I haven't seen the persona 5 ui before, but I see it now as a pure refined eye pain.

A hobbyist designer who doesn't work much with UI / UX, I definitely learned a lot from this video. And I'll definitely try to consider both sides with a bit more thought from here on. The point about turn-based vs real-time UI was also really interesting. I often really dislike strategy game UIs, since they feel like they'd need a tutorial of their own, but they do give you all the time in the world to learn and adjust to them. On the other side, Strive has my favorite interface in fighting games. It was actually really distracting when I first saw videos of it, but it's completely natural once you actually play the game. Otherwise, I totally understand that Persona 5's UI might have flaws... but I honestly wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. It's style fit the game so well, and the learning curve is only a small hump at first until you're navigating it faster than the animations can keep up. At that point, instead of taking me out of the game, the interface kept me just as immersed as the rest of the gameplay. So I pretty much agree with everything you said. I think UX over UI was definitely worth it in this specific case - for me at least.

In terms of users conflating terms, there was a (possibly apocryphal) story I heard a long time ago that might make for a good video on your part. Back in the early 2000’s, there was a huge push for better graphical fidelity. While it still exists today, basically every AAA game back then talked about how realistic it’s graphics were. And that’s because survey after survey had respondents rate ‘good graphics’ highly. Then a few games came out, including Team Fortress 2 and Minecraft. They were hits, which was a big hit, and caught the industry off guard. So, what happened? The answer turned out to be that respondents were conflating graphics with ascetics. What people actually wanted were games with a distinct and involved style, which often didn’t need hyper realism. This borderlands, hollow knight, etc. but respondents on those survey were laymen, and couldn’t properly convey what they wanted.

This is a brilliant video! It deserves way more subscribers and viewers

im gonna suscribe, like and comment, just for big numbers pal.

Digipen name is the last thing i expected to see browsing youtube. Happy to see an alumni.

When you brought up the fact that Persona 5 could afford a stylish UI because of its slow-paced nature, it was quite an epiphany for me. You're right; the slower pace of a JRPG (as opposed to, say, a fighting game or a musou) gives players more time to parse the UI, and thus we have an overall positive UX.

Interesting. Speaking of UI/UX what Pokémon game do you consider to have the best one?

In my personal experience, I will say that Persona 5 was the first game to make turn based combat feel fluid. By the end of my first playthrough back when the original dropped, I was basically doing finger gymnastics like an action game in order to get the inputs and it felt amazing.

To me, a layman, I consider style in UIs like spice in food, the taste being UX

I'm not a fan of the first half of the video where you define and explain what UI and UX are, there was a lot of incorrect information. However, your analysis of the UI and UX of Persona 5 is still correct, despite the technical information being inaccurate. I think you could have just given some very basic overviews of UI and UX, or had a guest designer explain them instead. The rest of the video fills in the context and understanding of the concepts anyway. But as a game designer, you obviously did the game analysis well; which is what we're here for anyway.

Ive never played any persona games, but the way ive heard it described sounds pretty great

It's not often a video gets me to actually sign on to use my account, so big props there! I apologize ahead of time! From what I'm understanding, that, despite you explicitly saying otherwise, UX does indeed trump UI. Every time, even! I'd go as far to say the UI exists to serve the UX, not the other way around. You explain things in such a way that implies going with a safe, clean, neat UI should be the default decision of just about every game made as to preserve the UX. But what if, in fact, that decision could make the UX *worse*? What makes this funny/frustrating is that a great example of this comes from a game you already mention in the video: Guilty Gear Strive. Specifically Guilty Gear's Strive beta! Pull out an old video of the character selection screen from 3ish years ago versus the one we have now. You'll see some...interesting choices were made, originally. Before, characters were neatly separated into their own labelled categories (each of their own color) at the center of the screen, all the whole squeezing the selected characters into a box that made sure that their heads and feet stayed neatly in the frame, cutting off at the edge of the screen. The colors were bright, the stars representing the character's ease of use being proudly displayed at the top of the screen, and just about everything did its job! But. It was so clean that it came off as a little sterile, in direct contrast to the wailing guitars and rebellious tone/smell of the game. These days, you'll see the same information is displayed on screen, but actually made *harder* to read, the characters being allowed to freely clip to the top, bottom, and edge of the screen without so much as a line to hold them back (shoutouts to Potemkin), and everything being a lot less saturated. It still manages to be relatively clean and readable, but not so much so that players are pulled out of the game. Let's not talk about the old health bars, lol Conversely, this also reminds me of this video (an update video to the original) about the Tetris Effect. While I encourage you to watch them in full, I know it can be hard to squeeze in, so here's the exact timestamp. The most relevant parts are two minutes after it 2 minutes: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ZtCPmdNmsZ63mWw.htmlsi=aZMEKVXKeEaPX35Z&t=320 Consider those comments with this observation by a passerby viewer: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ZtCPmdNmsZ63mWw.html&lc=UgxQtNvP_TMlCLoksAZ4AaABAg Even though the UI was *much* more disruptive than the NES version, he was able to achieve *more* when in VR, something completely new to him. And I think the reason why is, well, the titular Teris Effect: him being better able to *feel* the game rather than just looking at it on a screen allowed him to simply act and not think. In other words, the UX trumped the UI. So! In the end, the issue with a good/perfect UI is that its job is to make itself as invisible and painless as possible; its presence is inherently disruptive. No matter how you slice it, its job is to get between what the player *wants* to know and getting back to playing the game. Ideally, the player would be able to intuit exactly how many resources they have and how close they are at getting to their objective; being able to issue commands at the speed of thought (like how we control out IRL bodies), but that's not really possible in scale with today's tech. Even if it's for the *briefest* of seconds, the player is pulled out of the game. Pulled out of the experience. A good UI is unseen, but a great UX is *felt*. And feeling is what we play games for, as we do with ALL art. P.S: I'd love for you to do a video that explains how Pokemon typings, IVs/EVs/DVs, the concept of movepools, and the limit of six Pokemon to a team all work together to encourage the player to become attached to their team versus something like Medarots or Telefang!

Ok i might anger people with this one but. Every Monster Hunter ever. That's all I'll say

ffs You're not famous enough ! Golden content !

My personal opinion about P5 is: "You should know very well the rules before you break them".

When you want to please your professor so badly, you crap on objectively great things.

are you gonna the person to disagree with the judgment of mr sakurai? me, a lifelong sakurai disliker: yeah, i am

I dont know if Sakurai has a platform to stand on regarding UI/UX. A few of the Smash Bros games are not that great when it comes to navigability. Considering the complexities of the JRPG genre, I think P5 does a decent job regarding UI and information readability. Dead Space implementing vital aspects of it diagetically into the character design was really great.

This is a great example of a video with great information but bloated execution. I love all the various explanations you give and how thorough you are, but there was absolutely no reason for this video to be half an hour long, and much of your script was repetitive. The pace of your delivery was also a little on the slow side though I think that's more of a taste thing. Great video overall, but you really need to work on your brevity, cut the bloat and slack out of your scripts.

thinking Sakurai has any idea what makes UI or UX good or bad is baffling, to be honest. Smash Bros games have always had some truly terrible UIs, where single player things are tucked away three folders deep, options are hidden away somewhere inside the single player folder even though options still effect multiplayer matches, and some ways to interact with menus just arent obvious at all!

First things first: First! What makes the distinction between UI and UX hard is how they influence each other. I had a rough idea what the terms mean but somehow I am more confused after the video. The introduction is quite simple. The clarity-style pair is a great example of how you can sacrifice some UI guidelines for better UX. This places "readability" clearly in the domain of UI. Persona 5 has good UX but bad UI. Case closed. The confusion starts with the hotel comparison. UI being the floor plan and UX the decoration. Then you proceed to say that Persona 5's UI is good because the way it is structured makes sense. The quality of the UI does not depend on its style. The flashy UX works because of the solid UI hierarchy in the background. From that standpoint, the UI is good. Only to criticize the UI immediately for the style and readability issues it causes. I think the hotel comparison did more harm than good. It's an oversimplification to say that all decorative elements are part of the UX. If we assess the UI on criteria such as clearity and readability, we have to consider some decoration to be part of UI. I think it would have been more helpful to focus on one of the example definitions (6:55) than to summarize them with "how they feel" and come up with the hotel. I took the time to pause and look through them and honestly, they directly contradict the hotel example. The overall architecture is planned by UX designers (the menu hierarchy), the graphical implementation is part of UI (placing the full clarity-style pair in UI). UX is about the full user workflow, not only the feel. Luckily, all this pedantic technicalities don't change anything about the conclusion.

Shops in [J]RPGs are boring and typically extremely simple. I enjoyed Persona 5 having a totally different design for every one because if they were homogenized you'd end up realizing they are just a simple drop menu. It maybe creeps in when you're fusing shadows and such but for the character shops I think was a good move. One thing I hope you mention, Persona 5's menus are FAST, any gripe you can have with it not being clear I think takes second fiddle to how snappy and instantaneous it all is. Yes you have to practice using it, but it turns it from basic bitch menu to interactive actions. I have not played a single RPG thats released since that had as fluid and speedy of a menu, everything feels chunky and slow in comparison and that speed really clears away any negativity I could come up with for the menus

I remember Chuggaaconroy saying on twittter that Persona 5's menus were "overdesigned messes of word salad". I personally love the style of the UI, but I can see how it can irritate others.

So UI of "Persona 5" is bad if definition of UI doesn't include supporting UX.

Considering Sakurai's Wife is behind the UI of Smash rawl and 4 (and not only ultimate melee and the original one) The UI can be both not much stylish and neither well organized. Smash 4's UI was a mess, a horrible mess and doesn't look better than melee or brawl's UI

So persona 5's ui isn't bad necessarily but does more with its style that obscures it a little which only works in the context of a jrpg. So bad in theory great in practice.

The year is 2026. After being harshly criticized by Golden Owls UI design professor, the Persona 6 team decided to follow every rule of business software material UI design. Now Persona 6 looks exactly like Facebook, or any other cheaply thrown together web ui. Perfectly readable.

Calling persona 5 a bad ui is a clickbait and the reason the professor said it is probably to get attention of the class. Sure it's harder to read than normal but it's not unreadable.

For God so loved the world he gave. His one and only son that whoever believes him shall not perish but have eternal life John 3:16

So what I got from this video persona's ui is one of the worst. However it's ux is one of the best

This analysis is nonsense. Multiple times I'm being told that the UI is suppose to simultaneous lack clarity, but also have information in a readable and logical place? Do we have a different definition of clarity? You say the line between background and important statistical information is blurred, and then your only example is the "Total Exp" in the character stats screen. Which is not something I would categorize as "important statistical information," it's tertiary information at best. The comment about "imagine having to learn to navigate a menu in another game" sounds silly. It's a turn-based RPG, the game exists in menus. It'd be like playing DnD and saying "I have to learn how to read my character sheet?" Also, it's just not hard to navigate, you even say in the video that information is in a logical place. Saying that the Persona UI wouldn't work in a different game genre is inane. Trying to use it as a criticism of its UI would be like trying to criticize Halo's gun play because it wouldn't work in Mario. So, the criticisms of the UI are: One piece of unimportant information is not as prominent as the more important information, the UI wouldn't work in a different game genre, and you have to learn how to play the game to play the game. Oh, and of course, the constant insistence that the UI lacks clarity but it's okay because the information is logically laid out, which sounds contradictory. Ultimately, the examples given are either too vague or irrelevant. Also, the guy behind Smash Bros is maybe not as big of a win as you seem to believe it is. I wouldn't place him some unquestionable god of game designs. Just engage in some Smash Bros discourse and you'll find I'm not alone in that assessment. Also, I just wouldn't say that Smash Bros has good UI, or at least, it does not have easily navigateable menus. At the very least, I would not turn to him for UI/UX advice.

Video is a huge swing and miss.

Yeah I, a guy with no knowledge or experience, am gonna disagree with Sakurai because I am a contrarion and I just like disagreeing!

Bad UI is a pet peeve of mine, and I could have told you that the P5 UI is pretty terrible. People are just used to most of the design flaws because it's a JRPG. I does *look cool* though.