The Regions Had Flipped Controls Since The Beginning
A few of you may already know that the confirm/cancel are flipped for PlayStations in the East/West. Unlike the “X” to confirm and “O” to cancel you are familiar with on your console, those buttons are flipped in Japan. You might have encounters situations where a Japanese PS game was ported to PC, only to find that these controls are flipped, and your muscle memory constantly screws you over. Well, apparently this will no longer be the case, as going forward, the Japanese version will adopt the Western control schemes on PlayStation 5.
On top of the general confusion, the PC porting thing seems to be one of the greatest concerns for Sony making this decision. Sochika Nishida from AV Watch said in a translated interview, “Due to such circumstances, in the past, PlayStation often broke up with “â—¯” decisions for Japanese games and “×” decisions for Western games. You can switch between them in your system settings, but not all games follow, and playing games on your PC or Xbox was confusing.
While this is great news for western gamers, it will take some time for the Japanese gamers to adjust to the new muscle memory. We believe the reason to change the native controls instead of the western ones was due to the wide audience of the western market. Thank you for your sacrifice, gamers of Japan, we love you!