Press Y to Attack

With early Nintendo games there was always this rule of thumb about the controls: press A to jump and B for whatever else there is, like attacks. Super Mario Bros. and Zelda II - The Adventure of Link are good examples of this. And despite having more than two main buttons to use with later video game systems, this common understanding really persisted through the generations, where even some games on the Nintendo Switch might follow this formula for the controls. You press the A button to jump still in many games today.

However, things got more complex over the decades and there is really a variety of such understandings that have been established. The Zelda series for example heavily popularized the usage of the A button for context-based actions, like interacting with the environment in different ways. That's even still true today.

But with Nintendo's games you can also observe a new trend, one that might have been started by Breath of the Wild. This is not to say that other games haven't done this earlier, they have, but at least for Nintendo this change seems like it becomes more and more common now in the Nintendo Switch era. It's about how you attack. Most Zelda games in the past utilized the B-button to swing your sword – you still do this in the remake of Link's Awakening for example. But Breath of the Wild in all its unconventional wisdom changed this to Y, while the B button is used to dash.

The Warriors games did this long before Breath of the Wild, where Hyrule Warriors offered two different control schemes: one where your regular attacks are performed with B, like in traditional Zelda games, or with Y. Age of Calamity dropped this option and simply stuck to the latter, where the B button is used for dodging and dashing.

Another Nintendo series that has adapted this is Metroid, where both Metroid: Samus Returns and Metroid Dread let you fire with Y and jump with B. With the Pro Controller your thumb can comfortably rest on these two buttons, so you can do these actions simultaneously with ease thanks to this layout. And that's of utmost importance to the gameplay. Super Mario games also have offered an option to flip the controls for quite some time, so you can jump with B and dash / use your power-ups with Y, probably for the same reasons.

There seems to be a growing consensus that B and Y should be used for the most important actions, where B is usually your main movement action and Y your primary way of attacking. The X button then often gets used for a something that's still important, but not as central as the other two, like the Melee Counter in the modern Metroid titles or the strong attacks in Hyrule Warriors.

This is just a small observation and nothing extraordinary, but I've personally grown so used to this that I've even changed my button layout in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate accordingly. So, I jump with B and do normal attacks with the Y button, which also makes short hop aerials quite easy to perform. And the X button is used for Special Attacks. This matches most of these games quite nicely, so I don't have to adapt to different controls as much.

Luckily, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate let's you do this and it's of utmost importance that games let you remap or the change the controls to whatever you're most comfortable with. But this is rarely the case. While the Nintendo Switch system lets you alter the button layout at any time and even save presets for that, it's still quite inconvenient, because this changes it for all games. Ideally, there would be presets for each game, but since the Nintendo Switch doesn't have this, games need to implement such a feature for themselves. But having this in the game also makes it easier to understand what you're doing by setting actions to buttons, instead of swapping buttons. So, you want such control options in any case.