I have a weird game I play in my head when I’m playing a video game and I’m in a section of that video game that doesn’t require my full attention. I start to think about every button that the game is actually using, and I remove the buttons it doesn’t absolutely need to use in my head and make a new controller just for the game I’m playing. This happens a lot with Nintendo Switch games, which I play using the JoyCons almost always, which I sort of hate, and I think this is my way of escaping from them. I try to imagine a better life.

If you want to play the game too, you can start by visualizing the Atari Joystick, maybe the simplest controller. I guess you could make the joystick a directional pad and it would technically be simpler (less degrees of movement) but maybe the joystick itself only actually goes in 8 directions. That would make sense, but I don’t know and I’m not going to look it up. Anyway, I try to see if the game I’m playing can still work with just directional input and a single button. Today, I was playing Stray Children, and after dying in an area and having to fight a bunch of enemies over again I began my visualization of the Stray Children Controller.

Now, Stray Children uses at least 3 buttons with specific uses and while control is possible with the directional pad, the game does sort of accept input from the analog stick that would not be possible with the directional pad. You can point the stick down and to the left very, very slightly and the freakish dog child will not go down-left, but face downwards, walk downwards, but also slide over to the left a little while going down. If you wiggle the stick down at the bottom from left to right, you can make his downward facing sprite flip over and over again, another smaller game I’ve developed and employed to make walking around more fun, not that I don’t think the game is fun. Let’s say you need an Atari Joystick with at least three buttons at most.

The functions of the three buttons are the “Confirm” button, “A”, the “Back” or “No” button “B”, and the “Menu” button “Y”. The confirm button is used for speaking to NPCs, selecting action items from lists (dialogue options, items, options on what you want to do with said items) and for completing the quick time event spin wheels you use to attack and sometimes dodge attacks. There’s also some mini-games that use the “A” button for various other actions that I won’t spoil here! The “B” button simply backs out of menus and options that you have A’d yourself into. You might already be able to see where we can save space. If we patch the game to just include a “back” option into our lists, we can eliminate the B button completely. We lose convenience, of course, but I believe Stray Children already has the least amount of buttons you could possibly have while still being convenient anyway, which brings us to the last blockade.

Stray Children, like its ancestor Moon Remix Adventure RPG Game, cheekily calls back to games like Dragon Quest while also designing itself as something that is definitely not Dragon Quest at all. Actually, it’s kinda like what Undertale does, where it tells you about leveling up, and it shows you stats that you can increase, but you can’t really grind enemies in the same you can in a game like Dragon Quest. If you are playing the game correctly, the enemies will disappear and no longer spawn. Though saying that, I guess I have intentionally avoided playing the game correctly to raise my level, and doing that did actually raise my stats, and that actually did make me live longer in some battles. Well whatever idk. Anyway the point I was gonna make is that Dragon Quest, which did eventually get its own Confirm button (or maybe it did from the start… not going to check this either) actually just has you press A to open a menu before selecting a few actions, one of which (the default?...) was “Check” and then the one under it (? I just played one of these games. I’m watching someone play one now as I write this. I’m not going to check though.) was “Talk”. Stray Children’s confirm button does both of these in one, so we can just revert them back into a menu. Our Confirm button becomes a Menu button out in the field, with Talk and Check added to the normal menu. I guess we really only need Check though…

There we go then, we CAN actually just play Stray Children with the Atari Joystick, which I didn’t mention earlier is also called the DILDO by ~30 year old game reviewers circa the 2000s who, when they enter their 40s, will open a retro game store, and when they enter their 41s, close it. When I was playing just now though, I had another thought. A big button feels good. The Atari Joystick’s button is big, but I want something I can slam my hand down onto. Why did I think this?… Well the quick time event spinning wheel that I’m not good at kind of reminds me those shitty block stacking arcade games that steal your money at bowling alleys. Oh how good it would feel to actually win at one of those for once… right? So let’s put like a Pop n Music sized button on our Stray Children controller.

Ok… here it comes!

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