I REALLY disagree because he actually didn't considered the most important point of ALL the UI he mentioned: the colors and the shapes. Sakurai actually already said it, he makes his UI so that the main options are bigger and the icons must make them obvious. In SSBM, the UI shape was very consistent, and because you could see the sub menus in advance, it justified its simplicity, but many people forget the main point of why that particular UI was good: the background. The background made you feel you were inside a motherboard or something, it made you feel you were in plain control of the game. The same goes for the options icons, even the sfx when you confirm your choices follows that regards. It jsut made you feel you were TRULY controlling the game instead of making you feel like you do.
Brawl UI lost the background, but gained a lot in simplicity and ease of use. The buttons were clearly defined by having simple lines and curves....which guess what? Yes, the same point was made in the Paper Mario series UI, this is a big point I actually loved because having the shapes being very simple and yet, defined something, all that makes the options very easy to navigate and you feel you have everything in front of you. But the main point....is the colors. The colors were quite bright, very bright. This brightness added with the simple shape made the options to be perceived and saw more quickly and the very high differences of colors made these options VERY distinctive each other.
The result?
Let's say you want to play a simple 2 minute smash game. You pass the tittle screen to get to the main menu and because they know how trivial a smash game is made of these standards, they made the options bigger. But because you had experience with the game, it became sort of a symbol to you that red = smash. It just not only makes sense with the color, but also got into your head very quickly because of how easy such an association is to do for your brain. You could also easily use the shape and position as these are again, clearly distinct. What happens is that JUST before selecting smash, you see the colors and you just WANT MORE TO CLICK IT. The colors makes you want to go there since it just makes even more obvious what you want. By wanting to go to the options more, you basically want to play the game even more and thus, improving your enjoyment of the game in the end. This is proved for many reasons to be a DRASTIC factor in how you love a game.
SSB4 took brawl AND MADE IT EVEN BETTER! The colors are bright as almost the best possible, the shapes being way bigger are even more simple and clear and most importantly, THERE'S LESS GRADIENTS! Brawl art style was really criticized by me and many others for having too much gradients which conflicted with a lot of series artstyle, but ssb4 becoming more less gradients and bright oriented, the UI got the same improvements. There;s just way less gradients everywhere and the colors are brighter. When we talk about UI, we talk about everything that is the interface between the software and the user so stuff like the percentage counter was MASSIVELY improved with having brighter colors AND slight gradients instead of having none on ssbb.
As for the placement of the options, it actually doesn't matter much if you consider the shapes and colors. Trust me, you will see the square before seeing the text and probably the color before it with how bright it is. Basically, the options will become quickly used to you when you use the UI. Options is made smaller for changing global settings which affects everything. The manual is by no mean an option and actually, it just makes sense to have it on the main screen so you'll be sure where to look if you don't know how to use the software. The amibo thing is more of "misc" options. In fact, what @
Relax Alax seems to not really get is that games & more is just a friendly name for misc. Smash tour, although can be in that option, remember how this game targets people. It doesn't matter your opinion on the mode, it is just made to have an easy access for people interested in playing on multiplayer. Whether or not you enjoy it, it logically makes sense to be there considering that....this game is targeted for everyone. If you don't like the mode, well, that; too bad, but they had other consideration. You might think this choice to consider people would use this mode a bad philosophy, but the important here is consistency and it was consistent. As for the solo mode, It can again, be explained by design philosophy. Maybe they concluded that people actually preferred to battle competitively and locally way more than solo to warrant solo being in the misc option and made the smash way bigger since most would use it. As for the coop mode having the same option.....I just never got anything wrong with it.....it is again targeted for everyone, it just made sense to me naturally.
As for the rules, yeah, they could have loaded it when you load the CSS which would feel a bit better, but what if they expected you to use the default rules for simplicity? Also, I might be wrong, but I do think they remember the last configuration if you don't shut down the game or go back to tittle screen. They basically didn't expected you would change the rules EVERY TIME so they actually optimized it by making the rule load ONLY if you want it. By default, they expect you to have a 2 minutes survival and considering it is actually something that is played by a lot of person, it just was expected that you would only touch the rules if you want. The rules before the CSS is actually another optimization so that you would say that you KNOW you will change these before even attempting to go to the CSS. In fact, what would NOT make sense is to have the rule before the CSS, but not IN the CSS. Having it only on the CSS means you have to load the CSS before getting to the rules, but what if you had a specific ruleset to apply that requires several tweaks? It feel easier to go to the rules THEN take care of the CSS as it would be preliminary.
I honestly never saw anything wrong in the logic of that UI, it not only felt logical, but several points were ignored such as how the options were made that I think matters much more than these "issues:.
The ONE thing I will say that feels weird about the menu is the actual mapping of them. Using the stick often confused me on the main screen as I I was wondering why some options were a bit trickier to get with the stick, but that honestly was only present on the main menu screen, no other screen had that much of an issue and it was only in the smash tour and games & more area, nothing else.
I think that's it. To me, this is a great UI that is a big improvement over brawl.