Same as all UI principles:
- Relevant info
** Show information when and where players need it. For example, when at a shop, showing stay deltas and who can equip an item. When in a fight, highlight in-UI elements which will be affected by the currently-selected item (i.e., targeting info, HP deltas on party members, and enemies if you’re a full-information game).
** This is easiest to tune by watching people playtest and looking at the actions they perform, or have to repeat because they forget contextual information, and trying to solve those problems. - Clean priority
** Watch that your menu presents information in a logical flow. Does the player’s eye have to move up, down, left, right to get everything? You saw later SNES RPGs like Chrono Trigger running into issues when they tried non-linear layouts, but lacked the font and color gradations to imply priority.
** Utilize your aspect ratio. Modern RPGs tend to have both a horizontal and vertical track I. the UI: party members & info taking up wide space, and a thin column of selections (you generally don’t want text wider than 100 characters, or it gets hard to read). - Cozy style
** Don’t be a Square, use nice fonts and borders. The nice thing about pixel art is that you don’t really have enough rope to hang yourself.
Steal from modern stuff. Look at late handheld RPGs (DS, 3DS, PSP), they have similar restrictions as this older style but more modern sensibilities.