Persona 5: The Phantom X’s Ugly, Crowded Menus Are One Of Its Worst Features

knows how to make a good-looking, hard-hitting user interface𝓀. When launched last year, countless critics went starry eyed at the heavily stylised, beautiful UI and menu design. took 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’re 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:difficult to make, because they’re entirely unique, fit perfectly within the game, and do exactly wh👍at they need to, no more, no less. Nobody does menus like Atlus.

Neverness To Everness, multiple characters in a red car.

Neverness To Everness Preview: One Of The Most Ambitious Gacha Games I've Ever Played

Neverness To Everness raises the bar𒀰 for gacha games - we're in a gacha golden age.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: 𒅌 ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ

Persona 5: The Phantom X Is Crowded With Gacha Nonsense

joker and phantom x character surrounded by mission cards.

Maybe , the latest spin-off in the Persona universe, doesn’ꦦt quite nail the menus because it isn’t actually designed by Atlus. The gacha game, available on mobile phones and Windows, is de🌳veloped 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 can 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 mechaꦏnics 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 Per💎sona 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 Almost Felt As If The Raidou IP Itself Had A Will Of Its Own”: Raidou Remastered Director On Bringing A Classic Aওtlus JRPG Back To Life

Director Kazuyuki Yamai talks about development, inspirations, and how the messaging 🔯and themes of Raidou Remastered are still relevant today.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: ☂

It’s Definitely Persona 5, But Sadly, Worse

persona 5 phantom x protagonist with the phantom theives.

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 c𒐪ase 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, the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Subway Slammer, highlไights 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 men𝔍us, 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 ꧙new 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.