Kojima’s New Game Really Needs Better Menus Than Death Stranding & MGSV

Hideo Kojima is one of the very few video game developers whose name alone has wide recognition. Games such as Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain are known as Kojima games. The two are equally strange, with convoluted stories, absurd naming systems, and painfully awful in-game menus. The menus in Kojima’s last two games have been terrible, which is odd for a developer usually so focused on the minutiae of a game’s design.

The menus for both games, on a macro level, work fine. They are aesthetically pleasing, fit the style and color palette of the game itself, and are usually tilted or presented in some way to make them feel as though they are a part of the game’s universe. They are not entirely diegetic since the characters don’t interact with them, but their overall appearance does a fine job of keeping the player’s immersion intact. That said, the menus in Death Stranding and MGSV fall apart completely when it comes to functionality, making the games more annoying to play. The menus’ overall appearance comes off as too sleek, too over-designed, and cluttered.

It sounds odd to complain about menu design, since they are UI elements, but they can greatly affect the enjoyment of a game. Menus may not be considered part of gameplay itself, but they are instrumental in how a player interacts with both Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid V. Creating unapproachable and obtuse menus have a very real possibility of swaying player opinion on a game, even subconsciously, and better menus would greatly help the accessibility of whatever Kojima’s new game will be.

Death Stranding Suffers Greatly from Poor Menus

It is commonly said that Death Stranding will not entice everyone who tries it. The game is notoriously divisive for its gameplay, and its menus are a legitimate and common critique, especially because so much time is spent using them. Menus are used everywhere in Death Stranding; for taking on new orders, purchasing equipment, organizing inventory, reading emails, loading vehicles, and so much more. Death Stranding‘s systems are tightly designed around one another, but everything in the game, even Sam’s pod-bound Bridge Baby, has its own menu.

The menus are all blue, and the text is an inconvenient size with lines tightly spaced, and some text is even smaller. The controls for the menus are also listed in blue. The map is all blue. Most of the HUD elements are blue. The game over-explains a lot of things to the player, but does a very poor job of communicating all the little, hardly discernible symbols that are scattered all over every menu in the game. Death Stranding’s narrative is compelling, but the menus are even more frustrating to use than the ones in Metal Gear Solid Vwere, which is made even more disappointing because that was Hideo Kojima’s fifth main entry in that series – one which, at least during games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and MGS3, had fairly intuitive menus.

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