Like many, the last game I played before Tears of the Kingdom was Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. It’s been many years since I played the games that preceded both of these sequels, and I had a similar experience starting out in each one as I relearned the controls and adjusted to changes both major and minor. In each case, I had a hard time adjusting to the button layout.
In Survivor, I didn’t like that attack was on the left face button and dodge was on the right. That spacing made it difficult for me quickly bail out of a combo for a reflexive dodge, and I found myself instinctively pressing the bottom face button in an attempt to dodge, which would only make Cal jump and, more often than not, get swatted out of the air by whatever attack I was trying to avoid. After a few frustrating deaths, I decide to stop fighting the controls and just remap jump and dodge. After that, I never thought about the controls again, and it was a lot easier to enjoy.
I’m having the same kind of problem with Tears of the Kingdom, though the solution isn’t nearly as straightforward. If you’ve played it, you’ve probably noticed how difficult it is to run and jump at the same time. It seems like this should be a simple input. Most games let you run and jump, and TOTK has you jumping from cliffs, diving into pits, and leaping off of floating platforms constantly. It’d be a lot more satisfying to take a running start before throwing myself off the edge of a mountain, but you can’t really do that because run is mapped to B and jump is mapped to X.
To run and jump you have to either turn your thumb sideways and wedge it between A and Y to hit both buttons, or try to make an uncomfortable claw with your hand and press X with another finger. I’d like to swap jump with interact to make jump easier to press, or swap run with crouch so I can run by pressing in the left stick instead. For reasons I cannot comprehend, Tear of the Kingdom does not allow you to remap the buttons.
There’s a lot of confusing and unintuitive inputs in Tears of the Kingdom. Because I haven’t played Breath of the Wild in years, I’m still struggling to adapt to some of the control changes, like activating abilities by pressing L instead of up on the d-pad. TOTK has some pretty unintuitive button combos that feel like they could be simplified too. To do something as simple as throwing a bomb flower, you have to hold R to throw your weapon, then hold up on the d-pad to open the item menu, then tilt the right stick to scroll to the bomb, then release everything except R to ready the bomb, then aim and release R to throw it. It feels like that sequence and others like it could be simplified with custom button mapping, so why can’t you?
Back in 2019, journalist Jason Schreier interviewed Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma for Kotaku and asked him why Zelda games don’t allow players to remap buttons. Here’s what Aonuma said:
“When we have a button arrangement, we very much put thought into how we do it, because there’s a specific way we want players to feel. In some ways, if we freely let players do customizations on key assignments and such, I feel like we’re letting go of our responsibility as a developer by just kind of handing everything over to the users. We have something in mind for everybody when we play the game, so that’s what we hope players experience and enjoy as well. But we understand also that players have a desire for free customization.”
This explanation doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s not as if anyone is asking for a blank control map that they have to fill in themselves when starting the game. The Zelda developers create the control scheme that they think is best for the game, and it's the default setup when you start playing. If players want to make an adjustment for the sake of comfort, accessibility, or any reason they want, how does that in any way compromise the developers’ responsibility? It’s a particularly bizarre statement from the makers of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, two games that quite literally hand everything over to the user so that they can freely explore, experiment, and create in whatever way they want. How can a game that epitomizes freedom be so strict about the controls? It's a decision that is at odds with the core design philosophy.
Schreier even points out to Aonuma that people with physical disabilities might not have the ability to use the control scheme that the developers have created. Even if there was somehow a perfect layout that was objectively the best way to play the game, button remapping would still be necessary. Aonuma acknowledges this, says they will keep it in mind, and then apparently decided they don't care.
You can remap your Switch inputs at a system level, but this changes the buttons for every game and a lot of people don’t even know it exists. There’s just no excuse not to have native button remapping options in any game made today, no matter what platform it’s on. Nintendo is behind the industry in a lot of ways, but a game as remarkable and forward-thinking as Tears of the Kingdom should not be held back by these kinds of outdated, anti-player ideas.