Last year had multiple “Game of the Year” worthy titles, and unlike in certain past years, there was a clear divide about what was the true “best of the best.” While a certain awards show went for a game with a cute robot, others looked to the latest Atlus RPG, Metaphor ReFantazio, and gave it the highest of honors. It’s not hard to see why they did so, as Atlus put a new team and a new idea to work, and it paid off big time. This game wasn’t just about saving the world but saving it in a way that its people could truly benefit from and showing off very real-world issues in rather believable ways.
However, there were also fantastical elements that couldn’t be ignored that helped the game pop, including Atlus once again going full-tilt with its UI screens. At GDC, Eurogamer got to talk with UI designer Koji Ise about how they went in a new direction for Metaphor ReFantazio and how the team wanted the UI to be different from the other RPG franchise Atlus is known for:
“There are various ways of interpreting cool. But if we’re simply looking at the aesthetics, it should be pretty simple and easy for designers to create that. The important part is to tie [the UI] in with the tone of the game and weave that into the game narrative. Being able to tie all that together with the game itself is what I consider to be something that’s cool.”
For those who haven’t played the game, the UI isn’t as “stylized’ as other recent Atlus games but merely shows the various body parts of the characters as you go from one menu to another. It’s a simple idea, but it comes off well, and it’s entirely different from what’s been done before by the Atlus team, and Ise knew that:
“It was an established and big presence for us and it felt like we were in its shadows. But the director at one point pulled me aside and told me ‘hey, don’t focus on that too much, focus on what you want to do on this title alone’. And that really gave me [a chance to] step back and look at Metaphor as it is and focus on what expressions we want to make for this game specifically.”
The team went even further with one of the screens by using the legendary Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci to help highlight certain elements of “the perfect man” and such.
