Atlusknows how to make a good-looking, hard-hitting user interface. WhenMetaphor: ReFantaziolaunched last year, countless critics went starry eyed at the heavily stylised, beautiful UI and menu design.Persona 5took a different tack, leaning on pop punk aesthetics that remind me a lot of being a teenager and reading Kerrang! while listening to Paramore, but the menus and UI were equally striking.
With Atlus, a menu is never just a menu – it’s tactile, animated, elaborate. They’redifficult to make, because they’re entirely unique, fit perfectly within the game, and do exactly what they need to, no more, no less. Nobody does menus like Atlus.
Persona 5: The Phantom X Is Crowded With Gacha Nonsense
MaybePersona 5: The Phantom X, the latest spin-off in the Persona universe, doesn’t quite nail the menus because it isn’t actually designed by Atlus. The gacha game, available on mobile phones and Windows, is developed by Chinese developer Black Wings Game Studio, with involvement from Persona 5 developers in project supervision, character design, and composer roles. That means that while Phantom X has most of the trappings of a Persona game, you’re able to feel a significant dip in quality in all the ways that matter.
Maybe I’m biased – I’m a gacha hater, after all, and while Phantom X feels very much like a mainline Persona game in places, it’s when the gacha mechanics creep in that it feels, and looks, the worst. Case in point, the menus. For the first hour, you’re spared the worst of it. Once you finish the introduction, though, things start getting hectic.
There’s a “Daily Hoot-n-Loot” crowded with log-in rewards, and your phone is full of apps where you can spend and collect currency. The “Awards” section is full of mini-challenges you can complete for rewards. The “Shop” tries to sell you the game’s many currencies in exchange for, of course, real money, and you can also purchase the “Phantom Pass” battle pass. All of this is couched in Persona 5’s visual language, so it’s at the very least aesthetically in keeping with the rest of the game on a surface level.
It’s Definitely Persona 5, But Sadly, Worse
But there’s still something deeply ugly about how it crowds the screen, disrupting the careful flow that the Persona 5’s original menus so carefully facilitated. I hate that the text on your level up screen is perpetually obscured by pop-ups detailing all the currency stuff you’ve gained. And instead of the systems in the game feeling deep and intuitive as they did in the original, they’ve been made unnecessarily complicated (in the case of leveling and enhancements) or shallow (in the case of combat), making them in opposition to the things that were great about Persona 5.
It’s a shame, because a lot of Phantom X is actually quite fun. At the core of the game is what seems to be an interesting Persona story, complete with gorgeous animated sequences, plenty of dialogues, sprawling dungeons, and of course, social links. The first villain, theSubway Slammer, highlights a real social issue (men shove women around in subways for their own entertainment or deviant pleasure) but in a way that’s surprisingly funny – for better or for worse.
But the gacha mechanics aren’t just ruining the menus, they’re seeping into everything. I find that I don’t care as much about my party members, because the game wants me to keep indulging myself in gacha pulls to get new party members. Every minute I spend with the game is a reminder that this isn’t Persona, it’s Persona-lite, made simpler to extract more money from me. The hollowness starts with the menus, but it doesn’t end there, and that’s what feels the worst about Persona 5: The Phantom X.
