The co-founder of Platinum Games criticised how the Switch home screen is laid out and the console’s lack of organisation options in a series of tweets earlier this week. One hopes this high-profile critique might help finally get the Switch’s menu fixed.
Hideki Kamiya, the director of games like Resident Evil 2 and Bayonetta, called out the fact that there’s no way to sort games in the sale section of the eShop or organise games into folders on the home screen. He even goes so far as to call the Switch’s home screen “shit“ because of how it displays just a few massive icons of the games most recently played while the rest are buried in the “all games” section.
Kamiya, currently working on the Nintendo-published Bayonetta 3 for Switch, is known for being outspoken and not mincing words, whether hating on the Wii U box art for Bayonetta 2, video game review scores, or this publication, so it’s not surprising that he didn’t hold back in trashing the Switch’s limited feature set. But it’s something that needs to be said, again and again, until Nintendo improves it.
Every other console has some sort of folder system for organising game libraries, including the 3DS, which got the option in a firmware update just a year after the it launched. That was over seven years ago. Meanwhile, the Switch is nearing its third anniversary but only has the option to sort the order things appear in in the “all games” section, where great but hard to remember titles go to die. Oh look, there’s Moonlighter, a game I totally forgot I wanted to play more of on Switch.
The eShop is similarly ill-served by the lack of sorting options. As Kotaku editor Chris Kohler pointed out in his 2019 “State of the Nintendo Switch“ retrospective, the bare-bones storefront remains a discovery nightmare, with some developers racing to slash prices on their games to try and game the Best Sellers list so people might actually see them. With new and old indie games coming to Switch all the time, an easier browsing experience, both in the store and on the home screen, is way overdue.
Hopefully, fixing that stuff is one of Nintendo’s New Year’s resolutions.
Comments
3 responses to “Bayonetta Director Calls Out The Nintendo Switch’s Crappy Menu”
Yeah I agree with those comments. Both the eShop and Switch menu could use some work but it’s been years now so I can’t see it changing, Nintendo seems happy enough with the “good enough” approach to the menu which is a shame. Being able to sort, show more rows to make it more like the Wii U menu or set favourites shouldn’t have been too hard to add.
Also a few new themes wouldn’t hurt.
The Switch UI may be awful, but the Store UI is absolutely atrocious and should be used as a prime example of how not to do UX Design. They don’t even have shopping carts, a concept that has been around for more than 2 decades and every purchase is a game of 20 questions. That’s assuming you can even find what you want using their exceptionally limited search function.
I think it’s just that it’s such a brief interaction (in the total of time spent using the system) that people let it slide so much because it’s unpleasant at the time but then the negative emotions fade quickly. It’s just a shame that we’re in 2020 and storefronts/console/PC library UIs still haven’t figured out how to do things right despite having so many historical examples.
“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”.
I actually think the menu is particularly *good*. It’s much simpler than the menus on other consoles. Folders would be a good addition, but I personally wouldn’t use them, and I don’t think anything else needs changing. The eShop interface is a horrible, unresponsive mess though.
I agree with his comments, especially the ones about kotaku being sensationalist media