What's the problem with yakuza 0's UI? Was straight forward to me but then again been playing yak games for a decade so maybe I'm immune to it. I'm also used to jp jank, not that I think yak is jank.
Yeah, as a longtime fan who also just said the game has always been this way, I'm guessing you're well used to it. And you play many more Japanese games than I, so you're inured to it.
Just so that I can speak coherently about the things I am complaining and droning on about, I fired up the game and I am looking at the menus that bothered me so much. I'm just going to focus on the pause menu and the notebook as a worthy sample.
Tooling around the Pause Menu, I'm torn between wanting less choices or more on the first screen. They could have easily taken the
nine headings and better pared them down by category. It's also inconsistent because the Title Menu displays "new" every time there is new information or data under a category. That is not used here so there model is inconsistent.
These Pause Menu headers are not straightforward. As an example
Notebook/Help immediately presents a choice of
Notebook or
Characters. This should've been an
additional heading on the Pause Menu, or an L1/R1 tab choice, just as
Inventory handles its own subcategories. Additionally, offering a "Notebook" and "Characters" choice after selecting the similarly worded "Notebook/Help" header is disorienting and sloppy.
Once I'm in Notebook, there are a wealth of "new" marked headers showing. This is all useful information, but the "new" label
didn't propagate to its parent on the Pause Menu or even the notebook/character selection dialog, so it's effectively invisible to the player unless they drill down out of curiosity.
Lastly, on this Notebook, there are a set of four headers on the left, and their subcategories on the right. Using a directional input on any left column category will automatically display its subcategory headings on the right column. The left and right columns
do not distinguish themselves as which one is active. The buttons display at full brightness and identical border treatment in either case, and even have an identical glossy highlight, so the only way to tell what is actually selected is to wait for an intermittently animating flash to move across the button. In fact the left column of categories sports
a giant drop shadow, so just moving the drop shadow to the right-hand column when it is active would have gone a long way to emphasizing where the focus is, just as Windows and MacOS have done for 20 years. On top of this, to actually move between the columns requires and except or back choice rather than just letting the player use left and right to move between them. It's a small note, but would alleviate player stress in the UI.