Damn You Muscle Memory / Role-Playing Games

Examples of Damn You, Muscle Memory! for Role-Playing Games.

---

• A fun part of RPG mechanics. Roll your first character as a melee tank, for example, then roll a second that's a ranged healer. Watch chaos ensue for a while when you have to swap between the two.
• A rare example of muscle memory failure within a game: in Achaea, there are multiple worldwide chat channels. Each message typed is directed according to the prefix at the start. This can lead to players getting used to automatically rattling off their favourite channel's prefix — which is fine... until they're trying to say something private, and forget not to do it.
  • This is true for most any MUD, MUSH, or MUCK that has worldwide channels, and it's frequently hilarious.
• Here's an example that applies to game mechanics rather than button layout. When sneaking past a surveillance camera in Alpha Protocol, your only options are to stay out of the camera's line of vision or disable it with an EMP grenade. If you attempt to shoot the camera, which disables security cameras in nearly every other stealth video game ever made, it instantly triggers the security alarm and puts every guard in the map on maximum alert. The game tells you this exactly once, during a (completely optional!) stealth tutorial, and expects you to remember it for the rest of the 10+ hour campaign. Have fun!
• Brandish for the SNES has a default control scheme that gave many unsuspecting players a nasty shock when they found out that pressing left and right on the D-pad rotates the game window 90 degrees instead of moving sideways (which is mapped to the shoulder buttons by default).
• All of the Breath of Fire games past 2 use something like: X - Accept, O - Run, Square - Menu, Triangle — Cancel/Special Action. A few of Capcom's other games followed this pattern too.
• The vast majority of MMORPGs use a fairly standard control scheme, with WASD reserved for normal movement while Q and E are for strafing. For reasons unknown, City of Heroes uses a default scheme wherein Q and E 'turn' rather than strafe, thus leading to infinite frustration if you're accustomed to other MMO schemes. It doesn't help that the game's right-click mouselook locks the camera into place after you release the key.
• Some very deranged individual on the Dark Souls dev team thought it would be a good idea to assign both blocking with your shield and aiming the bow and arrow in first person to the same button, in a game where your character can be adept with both melee and ranged weapons and benefit from such. What this means is that the same button that will protect you from death in close quarter combat becomes the one that will result in your death should you follow your usual combative emergency instincts.
  • The sequel changes the jump controls to clicking the left stick while running, which, while odd and confusing, is much more intuitive than double-clicking the button you're already holding. But come Bloodborne the L3 jump is gone and no option exists to put it back.
  • Speaking of Bloodborne, the game plays almost exactly like Dark Souls aside from a few key differences: Triangle, which used to two-hand a weapon now is the dedicated heal button while two-handing (or rather, switching stances) is L1. Magic no longer exists, and thus up on the D-pad now spends health to give you five more bullets. Shields are also no longer a thing, so blocking and parrying is now replaced by tapping L2 to shoot your gun to try and ripost enemies. The game is also much faster overall, rewarding aggressive playstyles and overwhelming offence, compared to the much more defensive Dark Souls. And finally, backstabbing is now performed by knocking the enemy down first with a Charge Attack then attacking.
  • Elden Ring remaps some of its controls to make room for a dedicated jump button. Expect veteran Souls players to spend the first couple hours of the game jumping every time they try to interact with items in the environment. The same goes for two-handing a weapon, which now requires you to press Y/Triangle + L1 or R1, making players frantically press Y/Triangle in the heat of the battle and wonder why it isn't doing anything.
• Speaking of BioWare, switching between Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect on the Xbox 360 is a pain.
  • Dragon Age: Start = Pause menu (save/load/options/etc); Select Back = Game menu (inventory/equipment/quests/etc)
  • Mass Effect: Start = Menu (save/load/options/etc AND inventory/equip/missions/etc); Back = throw a grenade.
  • In Mass Effect 2, Start pulls up the menu, and Back holsters your weapon. In ME1, you holster your weapon by pressing B. In ME2, B is the melee attack. (Which, in ME1, you automatically do when you press RT while standing directly in front of an enemy. Now, in ME2, RT always fires your equipped weapon, no matter how close you are to an enemy.)
• Dragon Age does this between games. While the controls remain mostly the same, the radial menu that handles most tactics has had its layout strongly altered between games. Strangely, most of the 8 items haven't changed, but only one of them (Talents/spells) is in the same place in both games. Most irritatingly, "Quick Heal's" spot in Origins is "Quick Mana/Stamina" in the sequel, so you may wind up burning your Lyrium potions/Stamina draughts as you die messily.
  • For PC gamers, the Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II Spacebar = Pause. For Dragon Age: Inquisition, Spacebar = Jump. Now imagine players' frustration when their controlled character just kept jumping while dying gruesomely (which usually just sped the process along) instead of pausing to take stock as that button had always done.
  • Nearly every console game uses the D-pad for navigating menus. In Dragon Age: Inquisition menus, the D-pad either does nothing or switches between characters. You uses the left stick for navigation.
• In Dragon Quest V, the X will do many things, including talk to people, open doors, and searching; it's convenient compared to the menu, so you'll probably use it a lot. Dragon Quest VI remaps this to the Y button; you'll accidentally be remembering a lot of conversations instead if you're used to the X button.
• Dwarf Fortress did this to itself. In versions 40D and previous, Space pauses and unpauses. Space exits most menus. F9 exits menus with text entry. In versions 31.X (the numbering scheme was changed after 40d) Space pauses/unpauses, Escape exits all menus. The idea was to simplify the interface and allow menus to stay up while you toggle pause. It was received poorly.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Go from any installment to any other installment and you'll run into this problem, guaranteed. A few notable examples:
    • In the PC version of Morrowind, "E" is used to jump while the Space bar is used to 'activate' things (pick up loose items, open containers, use doors, talk to NPCss, etc.). Oblivion and Skyrim switch the function of these keys. Going from one to the other in either direction leads to a lot of jumping in front of things you are trying to activate.
    • A particularly frustrating example occurs on the PS3 when going between Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion uses the R2 key to move items. Skyrim remaps it to use Shouts instead. Coupled with natural lag on the PS3 at higher levels, and the lag brought on from processing the bytes that make up the items flying around the room, an accidental press in Skyrim can be agonizing.
  • This can also happen when going between the Elder Scrolls games and their Fallout sister series, also produced by Bethesda from Fallout 3 onwards, which use the same or very similar engines. These games feature similar controls to Oblivion and Skyrim, particularly in the overworld. However, open a container and a muscle memory based button press can lead to some drastically different results. (Such as removing thousands of pounds of gear from your storage chest, making you over-encumbered and forcing you to put it all back one item at a time...)
• Eternal Sonata attempts to do this within itself. For most of the game, using the Xbox 360 controls, B is for defense when attacked, A is for attacking, as well as counterattacking in special defense circumstances, and Y is for Special Attacks. Achieve Party Level 6 and opt to use it, however, and these three buttons are subject to what's known as the Moving Command: every time you use a Special Attack, including at each point in a Harmony Chain, the functions are randomly reassigned. (All other buttons, including X for item use, retain their functions.) Why would you put yourself through Party Level 6? Well, that gives you the ability to chain 6 Special Attacks (usually both attacks for the appropriate light level for each character) together, as opposed to only 3. Players are thereby encouraged to check the onscreen control scheme each time they activate one.
  • Gaining the ability to (for Xbox 360) press A to counterattack after training your thumb to press B to block for over two-thirds of the game can be frustrating.
• There are numerous differences between Fable II and its predecessor. Sprint became magic, and one button got at least three more functionalities, depending on context (which are easy to miss...how many times did you accidentally jump over, jump off, or dive into something?)
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead came out within a couple months of one another. Woe to anyone who went straight from one to the other, for in Fallout 3, the right bumper pauses the action and zooms in on the enemy for a quick kill, while in Left 4 Dead, the same button does a quick 180 degree turn.
  • Playing Fallout 4 within the same time frame as Fallout 3 or New Vegas can have you accidentally bashing an NPC with your weapon when you wanted to enter VATS. Also, waiting in 4 can only be done sitting down and using Y/Triangle. Trying to wait standing up like in the previous games will cause you go into third-person.
• This happens a lot in the Final Fantasy games:
  • In Final Fantasy VI, Sabin's Blitz command is used by inputting button combos as in a fighting game, but the input is always the same regardless of which way Sabin's facing. If you're used to actual fighting games you'll likely instinctively flip the combos when Sabin faces the other direction during a back or a pincer attack, which causes the command to fail.
  • Final Fantasy VII had the same problem as Tactics, making the set controls the Japanese version. Unfortunately, though you can change the control scheme, the chocobo menu wasn't coded properly for the changed controls, meaning that you can't navigate it if you switched X and O as a fan of a later Final Fantasy would almost certainly do.
    • This actually leads to a minor Game-Breaking Bug in which in order to proceed, you need to dig up a Lunar Harp in bone village. The issue here is that it is buried on the upper floor and for some reason, the action button to climb the ladder will not work if you switched the controls. Which leads to another case of DYMM!
  • Final Fantasy VIII's default mapping was as follows: X - Accept, O - Menu, Triangle - Cancel/Run. Funny when its predecessor used the Japanese default controls and the successor used the US default controls.
    • Unlike almost every other game with a save function, the game also defaults to the last save slot that you saved to, not to the one you loaded from. This makes it ridiculously easy to save in the wrong slot, especially if you're sharing a memory card with someone else.
  • In Final Fantasy X, Triangle causes you to guard. In Persona 4, Triangle puts your party in Rush Mode (an auto-Attack! Attack! Attack! mode). This is even better if you're playing P4 on Expert difficulty.
• The battle system has little to no changes between Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2, except for the fact that the Ravager's spells are arranged by power in the former (e.g. Fire, Thunder, Blizzard...), and by element in the latter (e.g. Fire, Fira, Firaga...), leading to awkward situations where you may accidentally make your characters use high-level magic of the wrong element. The only saving grace is that you have to confirm an action queue before it is executed (but it still wastes time).
  • Lightning Returns has a drastically different battle system from the above two XIII games. This means that if you go back from LR to XIII or XIII-2, you will inevitably open up your Paradigm menu when trying to change strategies, due to the shared shoulder button inputs.
  • The Steam version of Final Fantasy XV averts this with prompts if you're playing on a controller. The first part is the game can detect if you're using a DualShock 4 or an Xbox controller and change the button prompt graphics accordingly. Otherwise, it has a clever way it has of showing which button to press when a prompt comes up: It'll show a generic diagram of the face-buttons while highlighting which button to press. Since most controllers have the same face button layout, this makes it unambiguous which button to press.
  • The US release of Final Fantasy Tactics uses O for confirm and X for cancel, while the other PlayStation Final Fantasy games use the reverse (in Japan, they all work like Tactics). This is more or less endemic; most US games default to X to confirm and O to cancel, and most Japanese games do the reverse.
    • The PSP remake of the original game reversed the reversal, making X confirm and O cancel leading to some problems for fans of the original since actions can not be canceled after being selected.
  • Switching between normal and arcade modes on Dissidia Final Fantasy can invoke this within the same game, since the characters available in arcade mode have fixed moves and button placements while normally both of these are available for customization. Protip: Either don't use the same character for each mode or match your moveset to the fixed one ahead of time and practice with it.
    • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, the Chase system allows you to follow an enemy after using certain attacks that knock them in the air. In the Prequel, Dissidia 012 Duodecim, the timing is drastically different, making dodging while being chased incredibly awkward for players of the first game.
• In 99% of PS2 games, the right joystick controls the camera. This is almost true in Final Fantasy XII, where it controls the view. In other words, to pan the view to the right, you push the joystick to the right. Sounds intuitive to you? WRONG! In many third person action games, pushing the joystick to the right moves the camera to the right, thus the field of view is expanded on the left. The same goes for up/down controls.
  • The same complaint goes to Skies of Arcadia, at least the GameCube port.
  • Fortunately, many, many games now allow players to select how they want that axis to function. Which is really standard and which is really inverted, however, is yet to be decided, leading to guessing before starting a game.
• Many fans of the Golden Sun series will find themselves playing through Golden Sun: Dark Dawn holding down B to run, even though your character is now always running. Both Golden Sun games on the GBA has Start open up the save/options menu and Select opening in game menus (magic, items, etc) while most other games have the two functions swapped.
• In Guild Wars 2, you have access to a variety of tools for slowing or stopping your fall if you, say, dive off a cliff (a surprisingly common activity in the game after the Heart of Thorns expansion.) You may become very used to having the glider, which you probably have set to activate by holding the space-bar (especially because it is slightly faster than running with the right Masteries equipped, making it a useful speedrunning tool). Now, step into other MMORPGS, where you don't have this function, or where equivalents are tied to different keys, and watch yourself fall to your death a lot. Or, worse, step into any of the game's pre-Heart of Thorns instanced areas, all of which lock the glider! (And a few of the new ones do on top.)
  • Not helped by the fact that the game also locks the glider and mounts when on most Jumping Puzzles... Except when it forgets to lock both out. Which is fairly often.
• The PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved allowed to map the buttons on a gamepad freely. The one for Halo 2 is restricted to four Bungie-chosen button setups specifically thought for an Xbox controller, and they aren't much different from each other (i.e. Southpaw just changes the triggers).
• Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 came out roughly at the same time. The controls are similar with the very important change that Halo's "pick up weapon / reload" button became "drop grenade" in Call of Duty. This led to multiple instances of one blowing oneself up, or other players.
  • Additionally, attempting to aim down the sights makes you go prone in every non-Call of Duty FPS.
    • Subverted by almost every FPS with iron sights released in the wake of Call of Duty 4. The default controls are almost exactly the same as Call of Duty 4s, with Circle/B as crouch and L1/LT is sights. In addition, many games that did not have Iron Sights in previous installments added them in.
    • The L Trigger, which is used to aim down the sights in Call of Duty, is used to throw a grenade in Halo 3. Ouch.
  • A similar "blow yourself up" bit appears when switching between Halo 3 and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2. A good example of this was shown in Achievement Hunter's Let's Play of the game, when Gavin Free, in his attempt to cover, reflexively hit the B button and was forced to run in a panic. Between his laughs and Jack's, Gavin sputters out "B is... B is not cover; B is grenade!" He attributed the mixup to recently playing Splinter Cell Blacklist. Geoff had earlier mistaken B as run, but had managed to get outside of the grenade's blast radius.
    • Or even between Halo 3 and the rest of the series.
    • Another Call of Duty button that got Geoff mixed up was the reload button; in the Call of Duty games that button's X. In Grand Theft Auto IV X is jump/vault; reload there is B. The mix-up happens partway into the first match of 'Wanted X', where after killing Ray Geoff hit X planning to reload only to suddenly vault over the nearby railing and plummet a ways down. He even shouted "X is not reload!" as soon as he saw his character vault the nearby railing.
  • Crysis 2 and the Call of Duty games both use L1/LT for sights and R1/RT for firing, Crysis 2 uses LB/L2 for armor and RB/R2 for cloak. What are L2/LB and R2/RB for the latter? Throw 'nades. Oh dear. Also, go from the former to any other recent game. Sprint and then crouch. Wonder why you aren't sliding.
  • In addition, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on the PC moved "melee attack" from V to E. When pounced on by a dog in either game, there is a quicktime-like event where the player must hit the melee attack key with a specific timing to prevent death. It's very easy to hit V, miss the window, and get one's throat torn out (not that the dogs ever played fair with the timing anyway).
    • Call of Duty 3 was the first game in the series where you could throw back enemy grenades. The problem in this game was that the button to pick up the grenade was the same one used to reload, while actually throwing it still used the standard grenade button. Call of Duty 4 fixed this, so that picking up and throwing the grenades were merged into using the same button.
    • Try going from Call of Duty 4 back to the first two games. Hit the Shift key when your allies get too far ahead and end up smacking one of them across the face with your rifle, because Shift is now your melee key and sprinting is not a thing outside of the first game's expansion.
    • Even better, try going from Black Ops 4 to literally any other Call of Duty before it. You've just been shot, you instinctively try to heal yourself... and you end up blinding yourself with a flashbang.
    • But wait, there's more! The next three games after Black Ops 4 all have a peice of equipment that functions identially to that game's healing stims, so theoretically this can now happen within a match. You could get used to a class with the stims equipped, then switch to a class with stun grenades, and...
  • And now we have Halo: Reach's default controls, which are quite a bit different from the default controls in any other Halo game. While the default controls place reload/action on X like it was in Halo 1 & 2, which can be easy to adjust to if you still play those two regularly, the biggest change is the placement of melee on RB and grenade toggle on B. Melee had previously always been on B by default, while RB was the default reload/action button in Halo 3. If you've been playing Halo 3 exclusively, you might find yourself meleeing when trying to reload or switching between grenade types when trying to melee. Fortunately, there's the "Recon" control layout, which is very close to Halo 3's default layout, with RB being reload/action and B being melee. However, even it differs from Halo 3's default controls, as grenade type toggle is on X instead of LB, while LB now activates armor abilities (in Halo 3, LB toggled grenades while X deployed equipment). Confused yet?
    • Not to mention if, while playing Reach, you get used to being able to zoom in with a pistol, or use night-vision—because you may find yourself stupidly trying to activate the latter in Halo 3, or wondering "where's the little crosshairs?" for the former. And don't even start with the differences between Reach's and any other Halo's Assault Rifle. What is this box-like thing I'm wielding?! However, in its defense, the H3 pistol is insanely powerful.
    • The muscle memory issues get even worse with Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians, since they adopt more Call of Duty style conventions to the controls (you can now sprint with LS, crouch has been moved over to B, and every gun now has a "Smart-Link" or aim-down-sights mode), Halo 5 adds mid-air thrusters not present in the classic games alongside mid-air ground-pounding and sprinting melee attacks, the D-Pad is used for switching grenade types, and while Halo 5 has a Halo 4 control scheme, nothing quite approximates the Halo 1 or 2 layout.
  • Also, Resistance: Fall of Man. Resistance was already hard. Stop making me go back over a section because you put 'throw grenade' where 'whack enemy across face until dead' used to be!
    • Especially aggravating because the player has seconds to sit and realize just how badly they screwed up before the grenade goes off. In an ironic twist, Resistance's grenades have decent and realistic splash damage as compared to other games' 'bunny fart' grenades. There's no way in hell you're getting away in time even with the three second delay; have fun with that, especially since you want to toss one specific type of grenade (Backlash) near yourself to make the best use of it.
    • Even worse with Killzone 2, where Resistance's grenade button becomes 'use'.
• Jade Empire's controls reset whenever the player runs the game. This is incredibly annoying since any custom scheme has to be remapped every time, and because the game is so old, it will never be patched.
• Kingdom Hearts manages to use three different camera control schemes in all three PS2 games that have been released to date, as well as three different battle schemes (although KH1 and KH2's are relatively similar).
  • The final boss of Kingdom Hearts II has a final attack you must alternate pressing X and Triangle to defend against. Everything else in the game uses Triangle.
  • On top of that, when Kingdom Hearts came out, the only other real Squaresoft action-RPG (not counting the RPG minigame in Ehrgeiz) was Vagrant Story. The movement controls are the same. The camera controls are exactly flipped.
  • Not to mention using "X" to attack and "O" to jump is exactly the opposite of... nearly every other PS2 game with a jump function.
  • Try having Aerial Recovery equipped for most of KH2, then switching to its more offensive clone, Retaliating Slash, assigned to the square button. Completely opposite of Aerial Recovery's circle assignment. Have fun wondering why you aren't attacking or at least recovering from a hit.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep has controls pretty similar to KH2's yet everything that was done with the Triangle button, opening chests, activating Save Points and talking to NPCs, is now relegated to the X button, with triangle being how you use commands in your command deck, making it really easy to waste a potion.
    • And then Re:coded came along, using a variant of Birth By Sleep's Command Deck system. The Air Dash has changed from hitting "dodge" in the air to hitting "jump" in the air.
    • And after that we have Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance] confusing things even MORE. Being on the 3DS, it has the attack and jump buttons in the same positions as Re:coded, but has the air dash on the dodge button like Birth By Sleep does.
    • Try going back to I after playing Dream Drop Distance. You'll find yourself trying to Flowmotion off the walls.
  • The biggest cause for most of the above muscle memory is the result of Kingdom Hearts playing like a menu-based RPG. If you've played... just about any Final Fantasy game aside from Lightning Returns, then thinking "menu" rather than "action" makes everything a hell of a lot easier.
  • In Dream Drop Distance, your "party members" are Good Counterpart Palette Swaps of the local Mooks, making it easy to mistake the former for the latter in the heat of battle and waste one of your moves attacking your own allies. Fortunately, they're Friendly Fireproof and your commands regenerate fairly quickly, but it is still annoying.
• The most irritating thing about the PSP game Legend of Heroes IV: A Tear of Vermillion is saving. The confirm button in-game is the cancel button when saving, and vice versa.
  • This problem crops up a lot in PSP games, as they use a standard save/load API built into the firmware—if the game and XMB disagree over which button is accept and which is cancel, the controls will normally switch here.
• A series that can do this within itself is the Mario & Luigi series. In the first game, the Start button switches leaders from Mario to Luigi, and Select opens the menu. In the second game, you can't switch leaders, and Start merely pauses the game — however, you can separate from the babies, and you switch between them by pressing one of their buttons (A or B for the adults, X or Y for the babies). I guarantee you you will try to switch from babies to adults or vice versa by pressing Start. The second game also has the added confusion of having the hammer in battle mapped to X and Y, rather than A and B like all the other games. Even worse, later on in the third game Bowser gains the ability to jump... by pressing Y.
  • Enemies can do it too. Just get used to dodging attacks from endgame enemies, which usually require inhuman reflexes, and then try to fight ordinary Goombas. You will try to dodge MUCH earlier than you actually need to.
    • Speaking of dodging, many attacks are dodged by jumping. Other attacks are dodged by...not jumping. Even if you work out whether or not you actually need to jump, it'll be hard to beat your reflexes and stay still, especially if the enemy changes back and forth between the two methods.
• The controls in the PC port of Mass Effect were as follows: E activates objects, L-Shift lets you sprint (or "Storm," as it is called in game), and holding Space brings up the power wheel. Mass Effect 2 completely reverses this, making the leap from 1 to 2 quite jarring: Space is now both the activate and sprint key, while holding L-Shift brings up the power wheel. E is then used to command one of your squad members. Fortunately, the keys are re-mappable.
  • In a similar vein, the PC port for Mass Effect had R as the default key for... throwing grenades, the key that EVERY. SINGLE. OTHER. FPS uses for reloading! Granted, Mass Effect 1 doesn't require you to reload, but muscle memory for FPS players will make you hit R every time you have a break in the action, meaning usually you've just wasted a grenade, or are going to have to run for your life.
  • In Mass Effect, the B button would take you out of the galaxy map entirely, however muscle memory from other games indicates that this should have zoomed out a level instead. Mass Effect 2 switched this around, but it was too late for those who had managed to train themselves on the original control scheme. Once suitably unlearned, though, it made Mass Effect's galaxy even worse.
  • The console version of ME1 has an in-game example: during normal mode, the right bumper brings up the "powers" menu, pausing the game. During vehicle sections, the right bumper fires the cannon. Players with a biotic Shepard could easily train themselves to hit the right bumper whenever combat started, only to find that in vehicle sections that instinct made them waste cannon shots firing into the side of a mountain...
  • Mass Effect 3 multiplayer can have this effect when switching between classes (or even characters of the same class). This is due to the fact that each class+race combination has its own active skills, which are mapped to the hotkeys (1 through 3 on PC) in a fixed order and cannot be re-mapped. So, if you are playing Asari Adept and you run out of ammo, you can zap the enemy with a weak but fast Throw attack ("3") before taking cover. If you then switch to Geth Infiltrator, you soon find yourself pointlessly switching Hunter Mode on and off again, while the enemy blasts you away.
• Considering the work gone into importing save games in Mass Effect 2, it's surprising that pause and run are now on opposite keys. In fact, pause is now on a completely different key to every other recent BioWare game. Going from ME2 to ME1/Dragon Age/KOTOR results in pressing the Shift key repeatedly, until you realise you should be pressing Space. Also: going back to ME1? Don't press R... in ME2 it's reload, in ME1... grenade.
  • Also, grenades only exist as powers in ME2. See that cluster of enemies that have grouped up in one convenient blast radius? I hope you like reloading.
  • Similarly, when going back to ME1, players who were fond of melee attacks in ME2 will find themselves holstering their gun in the middle of the fight. A lot. On PC it'll have you wasting med kits instead.
  • Hold X to change guns? When most shooters use Y instead?
  • In the PS3 versions of the Mass Effect series there are several changes. For the first game L1 brings up the weapon menu and R1 brings up the powers while L2 zooms in and R2 shoots. In the second game it's the opposite and presumably a good number of people going between the two accidentally fired off a shot while trying to hack an enemy mech (and cursed at wasting a thermal clip). In the third game it keeps the configuration from the second, but now the Renegade/Paragon interrupts are L1 and R1 while in the second they were L2 and R2.
  • In the Xbox 360 versions of the Mass Effect games, the back button's function (or lack thereof) is different in each game:
    • Mass Effect: Pressing Back throws/detonates a grenade.
    • Mass Effect 2: Pressing Back puts away your weapons^note which was B in the first game... while B in the second game performs a melee attack, which didn't have a dedicated button in the first game — Shepard will automatically melee enemies if you press RT while within punching distance of an enemy.
    • Mass Effect 3: Pressing Back does nothing whatsoever. BioWare removed the ability to manually put away your weapons, probably because the function is admittedly pretty useless.
    • In conclusion: Going from ME1 to ME2 results in a lot of pointless gun-holstering as you attempt to throw nonexistent grenades. Going from ME2 to ME1 results in a lot of wasted grenades (which you have a limited number of) as you attempt to holster your guns^note and a lot of pointless gun-holstering as you attempt to punch enemies. Going from either game to ME3 results in a lot of wasted button presses that don't do anything. Going from ME3 to either of the first two games results in completely overlooking the grenade/holster functions.
• In Metal Walker, throughout the game you've been bouncing your partner off of walls to make bank shots and inflict the most damage. In the last dungeon, however, the walls are electrified and will hurt you. It's easy to forget this.
• Monster Hunter Freedom Unite: Going from this game to any other third person game on the PSP will cause much confusion. The camera is controlled with the D-pad (leading to the infamous "claw grip" with the index finger on the D-pad), the shoulders control running and camera reset, and the joystick controls movement. This a setup unique to this game, and attempting to play Renegade Squadron or Valkyria Chronicles II afterwards is very confusing.
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri):
    • Going from the Monster Hunter Freedom games on the PSP to this game on the Wii or backwards can be very frustrating at first. While the actual controls in battle are more or less exactly the same, the confirm (A on Wii, X on PSP) and cancel (B on Wii, Circle on PSP) are shifted around. Also, bringing up the menu (done by pressing the Start button on the PSP) is done on the Wii by hitting the Minus button. The Plus button is another attack button.
    • If you've played a game where you fire a gun/bow/whatever on the Wii, you're pretty well used to using the B button for that. Guess what it does in Monster Hunter Tri? It has you roll forward, which has lead to many very dumb deaths.
  • Monster Hunter: World:
    • The game brings this back in full force for anyone used to playing on a PSP, 3DS or Switch. The biggest problem veteran players will likely face is hitting RB/R1 for weapon attacks per 3DS/Switch convention by default, instead of RT/R2 that World expects with the default controls; in fact, hitting RB/R1 makes you sheathe your weapon, which is the last thing you want to happen when trying to block or bring down the Charge Blade's axe form in the middle of a fight!
    • Then there's using the D-Pad to cycle items in World, only to go back to a 3DS and find that it's panning your camera, or to Generations Ultimate on the Switch and set off your Hunter Arts by mistake. And then there's how you can switch the top and bottom shoulder buttons in both Generations Ultimate and World to match one or the other, but sprinting with a sheathed weapon in World always uses the other shoulder button that sheathes your weapon in the first place, whereas it's the same button that makes you block or use different attacks in the older games.
• The original Mount & Blade default controls used 1 to select everyone, 2 for infantry, 3 for archers", 4 for cavalry and 5 for "Others", i.e. those who aren't selected at that moment. The expansions added depth and changed the tactical interface, and thus, the controls: 1 is to selct Group 1 (normally, infantry), 2 for Group 2 (archers), 3 for Group 3 (cavalry), etc., with 4-9 being customizable groups, which means that when you would have wanted your archers to hold ground while cavalry and infantry charged, your archers and an empty group are charging, your cavalry is holding ground and your infantry is given no new orders. Of course, it is editable, but still.
• Present in the Neptunia series. In Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, the Square button is used for Symbol Attacks^note If you hit an enemy on the map, you get an advantage against enemies while Circle is used for searching items on the map. In Hyperdimension Neptunia V, the Square button is used for searching, X is used for Symbol Attacks, and Circle is used for jumping. This can lead to players who try to symbol attack monsters finding themselves searching for an item on the map.
• Pokémon:
  • HMs in Pokémon Red and Blue require you to actually select the move from the Pokémon menu as opposed to simply pressing A in front of the obstacle to be cleared, as every other game that uses HMs would go on to do; it isn't rare for a fan going back to these games after a long absence to wonder if Gen I was glitchier than they remembered before recalling this.
  • In Pokémon Gold and Silver and earlier, you press left for Pokémon and down for your bag. In Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, they switched it to down for Pokémon and right for your bag.
  • For years, pressing the Start button opened the menu and an inventory item could be assigned to the Select button as a shortcut. Diamond and Pearl onward changed this so Start and Select aren't normally used; by default, X opens the menu and Y is the shortcut button, though you can go back into the settings to re-enable Start to open the menu.
  • In the Nintendo 3DS installments, you can rearrange your party by holding and dragging with the stylus, similar to rearranging Pokémon in the PC. Despite also having the party on the touchscreen, the Nintendo DS games only allow Pokémon selection to be done with button inputs. Cue players going back to Diamond and Pearl or Black and White and wondering why their touchscreen isn’t working.
  • In Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, an NPC can swap the positions of the "Deposit Pokémon" and "Organize Pokémon" functions in the PC so that Deposit is third and Organize is first (or return them to original). Those who disliked extra button presses to reach the "Organize" function may like the convience, only to find themselves inadvertently pressing the "Deposit" function when they don't want it because they've gotten used to said button presses.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon are the first main series Pokémon games to lack a grid-based overworld. Those who were accustomed to using the D-Pad in Generation VI to move along the fixed grid when not using a Dowsing Machine will promptly discover that the D-Pad can no longer be used to move at all; all movement is done with the Circle Pad and the D-Pad is used as a shortcut to activate Ride Pokémon.
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon brought two major changes to the Pokémon menu. The first is that you switch Pokémon by dragging them^note which was present in X and Y and mentioned by an NPC or pressing Y, instead of the option being in a list that appears when selecting a Pokémon. The other is that HMs no longer exist, with their functions now being fulfilled by Ride Pokémon. Therefore, it's not too uncommon for veterans to go into the Pokémon menu to use HMs (mainly Fly), only to back out and open the Ride Pokémon tab.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield: The Wild Area introduces a fully adjustable camera. Players who spend a lot of time there often find themselves attempting to use the camera controls after returning to the main areas that still have the same static camera as the rest of the games in the series.
  • Pokémon Legends: Arceus:
    • In previous games, the menu would be assigned to the Start Button, with later ones assigning it to the X Button. Neither of them bring up the main menu in this game. Instead, D-Pad Up brings up the menu; the Start/+ Button activates one of your mounts (which you switch between with D-Pad Left and Right), while the X button switches between the on-screen menus for throwable items and your Pokémon team. Best case scenario, you will hit the X Button and accidentally switch between these menus, forcing you to tap it again lest you forget and accidentally throw a Poké Ball when you need a Pokémon (or vice versa) a few minutes later. Worst case scenario, you immediately break stealth in front of the Alpha or skittish Pokémon you were sneaking up on because you hit the + Button and pop out of the grass to sit on the back of a mount or soar into the sky.
    • The B button hasn't been used to run for a few generations, but a lot of long-time players still held it when running out of habit without consequence. While it is used to dash when on mounts, unmounted it's assigned to the crouch function, tripping up said long-time players. To add insult to injury, the game does have an unmounted dash function—push in the left stick; and no, the game doesn't let you remap the controls.
    • In Pokémon Sword and Shield, you engage in battle with overworld Pokémon by running into them. In Legends: Arceus, this will just get you injured. The game does tell you that you have to throw a Pokémon of your own at the wild Pokémon to start a battle, but this is easy to forget in the heat of the moment.
    • Not nearly as major, but in the mainline games the move Double Hit was a damage-dealing attack. In Legends, it works a bit like Swords Dance in that it increases your damage dealt (and also has a lowered speed priority). If you recently evolved an Aipom into an Ambipom, this may leave you scratching your head until you read the changed effect.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV, the X button, the topmost button which is traditionally used as the menu button for many other RPGs, attacks enemies on the map. The Y button, the left-hand button usually used as an action button in most other games, opens the menu. This is backwards in RPG standards for seemingly no good reason and there's no way to change this.
  • Going between Shin Megami Tensei IV and either Persona 3 or 4 is just as bad. In Persona 3 and 4 in dungeons, pressing X, the bottommost button on a PlayStation controller, attacks enemies while exploring dungeons.
  • Similarly in Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, the Triangle button is used to bring up the map, as opposed to say Start. Menu is Square.
  • Persona 5 switched to a more dynamic in-battle interface where every action is mapped to a separate button instead of being chosen from a menu. This can make going between it and an earlier game difficult, especially the Triangle button. It's used to open the Persona menu in 5 (i.e where the majority of your skills are), but in 3 and 4, it puts your party in Rush Mode.
  • Some demons will change elemental affinities between games. What is considered a weakness for a demon in one game may be considered a resistance in another.
• In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the Item Creation system was completely changed. Instead of consuming special items and waiting a few seconds for the result, in this game you instead pile in several people to make the items. The muscle memory comes in with a vengeance when you realize that certain items can only be created with a certain creator at a certain price range, sometimes single digit differences between what you want and something else.
• And yet another from BioWare (but fairly minor): In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Imperial and Republic space stations are mirror-image flipped from one another. Switching from a character from one faction to an alt of the other often leads to going the wrong way to get to things like trainers and mission terminals.
• It isn't necessarily affecting anything badly, but a lot of people report themselves habitually attempting timed hits everywhere from Pokémon to Final Fantasy after playing though Super Mario RPG (and Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series), sometimes for decades.
  • Similarly, those who still play Paper Mario after playing enough Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door are likely to try to do Stylish moves. Thankfully, it doesn't cause any actual problems.
  • The timing for Action Commands is much tighter in Paper Mario 64 than Thousand-Year Door, leading to plenty of floundered jumps and strikes.
  • The timing for some Action Commands in Super Mario RPG changed slightly in the Switch remake. Thankfully, there is a cue that will let you know when to press the button until you're used to it.
• Tales of Innocence looks and handles not unlike Tales of Symphonia in battle, but Innocence takes a page from Abyss's book and allows the player character to free-run by holding R.
• Tales of Symphonia has a couple, one with a contemporary game, one with a later game on a different system:
  • The battle system in Symphonia handles very similarly to Super Smash Bros. Melee in the most basic respects: You angle the control stick and press A for normal attacks, B for special attacks. But in Symphonia, guard is mapped to X by default, while in Melee, X causes you to jump, and guard is mapped to the right shoulder button... which in Symphonia causes you to switch targets. Going from one to the other becomes frustrating very quickly.
  • In Tales of the Abyss, which is on PS2 instead of GameCube, the special button is O, while the guard button is the square. The positioning of these buttons on the controller is more or less exactly reversed from the GameCube controller's B (special) and X (guard) buttons. Fortunately, they can be swapped around by the player.
• Tales of Zestiria uses the Triangle button for guarding. Its prequel, Tales of Berseria, uses all four main buttons for attack strings, leading to guarding being now done by pressing and holding L1. Try playing one, then the other; you will either guard when wanting to attack or attack and get seriously injured by whatever opponent you are facing.
• Some of the controls for player spells between TaskMaker and its sequel, The Tomb of the TaskMaker were changed:
  • "Determine" (lowercase D) and "Examine" (lowercase E) in the original were merged into "Examine".
  • "Attack Multiple" (uppercase A in the original) was removed entirely.
  • "Heal/Cure" (uppercase C in the original) was changed to uppercase H. In the original game, uppercase H was "Haste", a spell not present in the sequel.
  • "Blast" (capital B) became "Strike" (capital S), and can now only be used by magicians.
  • "Grasp" (capital G) became "Steal" (lowercase S), and can now only be used by thieves.
  • All of the hidden spells were renamed, and many helpful ones were removed.
• The first seven games in the Trails Series has every combat command be selected by rotating a command wheel and clicking the accept button once it reached the desired command. Then came The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III, which mapped every combat command to a different button. While in most cases this doesn't matter too much because it's a turn-based combat game, the one command that is actually real-time (because it is used to interrupt the established turn order) is remapped to a different button.
• Play any modern first person games, then go back in time to Ultima Underworld. W is run forward, A is turn left, D is turn right, so far so good. S is walk forward, X is walk backward, E and Q are fly up and down, and J is Jump. Conventions hadn't really solidified yet at the point that this was released, and now it can be really difficult to get the hang of.
• Undertale invokes this; a player who plays the game like any other RPG — specifically, killing the monsters they come across - will lock themselves out of the Golden Ending. The game's Superboss even invokes this in-battle by keeping their attacks randomized in contrast to every other monster, as well as being able to change your SOUL's color (and therefore its mobility) mid-turn just to trip you into another attack.
• Valkyria Chronicles II has enough control differences from Valkyria Chronicles to cause more than a little frustration (and unnecessary character deaths). The aim button, for example, moved from R1 to X, which used to trigger several important map actions. X's hold function is now on Circle, which used to be the all-purpose cancel button.
• Most games use the X button to confirm, the O button to back out of a given screen; Xenosaga flips the two, resulting not only in moments of confusion while playing but also similarly irritating mixups while playing other games. Also, the Save Points and Menu? Reached with the Triangle button. To make matters worse, its predecessor, Xenogears also had this standard X-Confirm O-Back setup (although Square was the menu as Triangle was jump). Going from Xenogears to Xenosaga, in terms of control, can be rough.
  • The fact that this particular problem (the standard functions of X and O are swapped in the East and West) is mentioned four times on this page should tell you something about how annoying it is.
  • Xenogears was orignally proposed to be a Final Fantasy game. If you've played any of the older Final Fantasy games, you'll probably find yourself pressing the triangle button to open up the menu out of habit.

---