Editor’s Note: Since Kotaku’s Richard Eisenbeis published an article relating to this topic, I figured I’d go ahead and finish this one off. I wrote this back in September, with the last revision being on Sep. 29. It was all written, but I lost interest in wanting to publish it. But now the topic’s flared up again, and I got back the motivation to publish it. Consider this an expansion of that article.

Some of you may already be aware of the fact that Japan and The West press different buttons to confirm or cancel when using a Playstation controller. So to those people, you probably don’t need to read this, but stick around for the end. As for everyone else, I’ll provide you with an explanation as to why the X and Circle buttons serve different purposes in Japan and The West. For the purpose of this article, X is “X“, and Circle is “O“. Now I know there are many gamers out there that play import games from Japan. Some of them are new to it and are still having trouble adapting to pressing circle for nearly everything menu based. Some of you probably don’t play import games, but encountered the Japanese Button Configuration in games that forgot to change it (like Xenosaga). Some could probably just brush it off as just something weird that Japan does (which is nothing new). But there is a deeper explanation as to why the X and O buttons are configured that way in Japan and why it’s different The West, and we may have Nintendo to thank for that.

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