First off, I want to say I really like the game and genuinely want it to succeed. That said, coming from Honkai Star Rail, which has some of the most polished and intuitive controller UI design out there, my first impressions here have been heavily affected by the lack of polish and quality-of-life features.
Menu navigation on controller is, frankly, the worst I’ve experienced in a modern game. It feels clearly designed for mobile or mouse, and using a controller is frustrating as a result. The “hover selector” doesn’t feel anchored, often isn’t even visible, and requires moving the stick just to “wake up” the cursor. When it does appear, it can show up in seemingly random positions. Sometimes it legit won't even move at all so you just have to give up, close the menu and try again.
Here are some of the most frustrating issues I’ve run into so far, but please feel free to add anything I missed.
- Dailies menu: You end up spamming the stick in different directions hoping the cursor lands where it should. Why isn’t there a simple “claim all” or even a “get rewards” button after completing dailies? Instead, you have to manually navigate to a reward at the top of the screen every time.
- Awakening UI: The controller experience here is extremely poorly designed and unintuitive.
- Photo mode: It’s not clear or intuitive. I frequently end up exiting the camera entirely by accident, especially when trying to open filters.
- Phone UI: Every time you exit a menu, it resets. If you were on the second page and go back, the cursor jumps back to the first slot (mall). Maybe I'll just use the mouse? Wow, turns out that is horribly implement too lol.
- Apartment decoration UI: Controller support here is especially clunky and frustrating to use.
Other issues:
- Various bugs, like the map cursor not centering on icons, sometimes requiring a full restart to fix
- Missing basic QoL features like “claim all” across menus
- Poor flow when tracking materials: you have to remember the item, get teleported via the source menu, then manually find it again.
- The time-of-day clock is borderline unusable
- General UI jankiness and inconsistency