Style Switching and d-pad.

Since active actions require a lot of precision, I consider obvious why melee, style and jump must be in the front buttons. So let's analyze weapon and style switching.

Why are styles in the d-pad and not somewhere else?

The reason is not related to the frequency of use per se, but more because of the logistics in high or decent level of play (in some chops it's perfectly possible to find more style switches than weapon switches, especially if Dark Slayer is used).

First of all, Weapon Switching and Style Switching have something in common: they are both passive. You don't need a perfectly accurate timing for them, compared to active actions like using melee, JCing, style actions, etc.

Switching weapons or styles simply has to happen before you really need the action related to the weapon/style you want to use after another one. It doesn't matter exactly when (SS cancels aside, some nuances with DSD...).

Let's analyze then, why they make sense in their respective parts of the controller, and not so much in others.

When you do an action with A weapon (even the Sword Master ones), the most of the times it will have a minimal duration. Which means you will have time almost always to switch to the next weapon X while the action from A still takes place. Even if you want to cancel it early with JC (or SinDT, guard, and even weapon switching itself for some moves).

Shotgun JC into other gun weapons is one of the few exceptions to this.

Styles are passive as well, in the sense that they don't translate directly in active actions for Dante either, but they have more varied applications. It can happen that you need to switch fast between 2 or 3 styles at some point, because there are very short style actions... Like air trick, sky star, guard... On the other hand, it can also happen that you stay with the same style for 3 or more seconds, like when you do a JC loop that only requires SM.

This means that you basically don't need absolute precision with either of them (usually), but you need comfort for each one of them in different ways:

Styles need to be accessible always with one input/button press (2 at max with Balrog's passive switch and SM actions), for those occasions where you need to switch styles pretty fast (even if they don't require as much precision as active actions themselves, which is why they are on d-pad and not front buttons).

Weapons don't need immediate access because you will tend to have an active action going on while you switch them, but it must be at the same time a button that let's you switch fast enough during the duration of the specific action of the previous move, for double or tripple switching. Which is why the best parts of the controllers for them are R1, R2, L1 and L2.

In general, d-pad should never be set with actions that require too many button presses anyway, like using left-right as devil arm wheel, and up-down as gun weapon wheel (or some nonsense like this). Because that would mean (if you don't claw) that your thumb will be mostly busy with the d-pad instead of L3, which is obviously relevant for directional moves, to direct or re-direct inertia, etc.

Why not use d-pad at all?

Not using the d-pad would clearly handicap other types of actions in terms of precision and speed of inputs. Even if sometimes considering the most absurd nonsense can lead to a good idea, I don't thing this is the case.

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