Sony has swapped the usage of the X and Circle buttons for the PlayStation 5 user interface in Japan, meaning X is now used to confirm settings, while Circle is used to cancel.
This is, of course, how PlayStation consoles and games have operated in the West for 25 years. But it’s a big shift for Japan, where X has not historically been used to mean “accept”, “X marks the spot”, or “X to Jason”. There, X typically means “cancel” or “quit”, whereas the “O” of Circle means “OK”.
The detail comes from Famitsu, one of several Japanese outlets to get more details on PlayStation 5 over the weekend, and which has now reported a further wrinkle.
Perhaps even more confusingly, the Japanese versions of PS5 games will still use the previous definitions of X and Circle, separate and contradictory to the PS5 hardware itself.
“Wow, this is big news for UI/UX,” Famitsu editor Kenji Iguchi wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Muscle memory frustration for the nearly 10 million PS users in Japan coming up.
“In Japan, the ‘Circle = Good, OK, Correct’ symbolism has been common knowledge for many decades. When designing the original PlayStation controller, it was likely that the placement of the O/X were hence made to match the Super Famicom’s A/B, and were utilised similarly.