Nintendo Really Needs to Let You Remap Buttons on Switch

A few things are inevitable while playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:Too much time will be spent climbing a mountain just to see how high it goes, I'll die a surprising number of times, and when asked to press the Y button, I'll end up pressing X—and cursing loudly. I've put a solid number of hours into Breath of the Wild, but I'm still smarting over this button thing.

I don't usually have this much trouble swapping between controllers, but when I switch between and Xbox One and PlayStation 4, the symbols are completely different. My brain can handle that. The Y position on an Xbox One controller is triangle on a DualShock. When it comes to Switch, the Y is an X. Nintendo also uses the X/Y/A/B structure (and has since the SNES days) but the order they're placed in is totally different, as seen above.

The platforms this wouldn't ever be a problem on is PlayStation 4 and Xbox, as Sony and Microsoft both implemented system-wide button remapping, letting players do whatever they want to make games feel comfortable. (It's also an a great feature for accessibility, letting those with disabilities customize their experiences, based on their particular needs.)

This is something Switch could really use!

It'd solve another frustration I have with the button mapping in Breath of the Wild, too. Right now, the only control modification options Nintendo gives you is to swap running and jumping between the X (top) and B (bottom) positions. But neither allows you to easily accomplish what a person might often want to do while running forward in a game all about exploration: running before jumping.

The only way to pull this off, at the moment, is to get awkward.

(How come I can't just click the left stick to run? Grr.)

I'm not confident Nintendo will add something like this—it doesn't seem like them—but I'm holding out hope. Because this won't be the only game that ends up confusing.

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