Until all developers start using the same control scheme for all PlayStation games, the issue isn’t going to go away. What the new software does do, however, is let you change which button is used to select in the console’s system menus, meaning that if you’re playing a Western game on a Japanese PS4, you won’t have to switch between two different control schemes.ĭifferences first cropped up between Sega’s and Nintendo’s consoles back in the ‘80s and ‘90s Many games have their controls hard-coded in, so whether you use X or O to confirm will come down to the region your games were produced in rather than your console. Version 6.50 of the PS4’s software doesn’t fix this problem entirely. However, over the years, many have since switched to using X in their Western releases (sometimes controversially, as with Metal Gear Solid’s fourth entry).

Numerous Japanese games over the years have used O instead of X for their confirm button, including entries in the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Zone of the Enders series. It’s not just the Metal Gear Solid series that used the Japanese control scheme in their Western releases. I was being kicked back out to the game’s title screen because I was continuously pressing the cancel button. Of course, all that had happened was that I was pressing the button we commonly think of in the West as being the confirm button (X) in a Japanese game that used the opposite (O). Version 6.50 of the PS4’s software doesn’t fix this problem entirely I literally thought my disc was defective. Eventually - and I promise I’m not making this up - I actually went back to the shop where I bought the game and exchanged it for a new copy. I blinked, confused at what had happened, and tried to do the same thing again. To my intense surprise, the game instantly kicked me back to the title screen.

I loaded the console up, popped the disc into the drive, pressed the “Start” button to move from the title screen to the main menu, and then tried to start a new game. The game was the second one I ever owned for my PS2, which was my first console. I first encountered this phenomenon when I tried to play Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty on the PS2. But the more interesting part of this story is why Japan and the rest of the world ended up settling on opposite control schemes for one of the most basic pieces of a console’s functionality in the first place. Version 6.50 of the console’s firmware update finally fixes this annoyance, allowing owners of Japanese PS4s to manually set how they want the two buttons to work within the system’s menus. I first encountered this phenomenon when I tried to play ‘Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty’

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