Is there a way to fix the Talk/Cancel bug in Shantae with an Xbox 360 controller? I've read that the buttons A and B on the controller are swapped in the game, and supposedly it can't be fixed in the Options menu. Is a third party program needed?

How do you bind both the Jump and Confirm/Talk keys at the same time?

Is this maybe something to do with the fact that this is originally a DS (DSiware) game? Microsoft for some reason decided to mirror the button layout when they designed the Xbox controller, so I'm wondering if this has caused some confusion in the porting? I'm not saying this isn't something they should have fixed, just speculating about the bug's origin.

As far as I know, there´s no way unless you use some external application like xpadder.

It´s the eternal eastern VS western button layout. In Japan they write from right to left, so the A button is always on the right, while the B button is on the left. That´s one of the reasons on Sony consoles most games used here X for accept and O for cancel, while on Japan used the obvious O accept and X cancel.

On Xbox360, a western console, the button layout is:
Y
X B
A

While on DS, an eastern console, (where this game comes from), is:
X
Y A
B

For playing and programming easier, they have the same position layout on both consoles, but that makes talking the B button on a Xbox360 pad. That´s the reason behind it, although I find annoying you can´t bind a button to two actions.

Hmm, while I was aware of the difference in layouts it never occurred to me it was to do with writing. Strictly speaking they don't write right to left in Japan traditionally, they write top to bottom in columns that are ordered from right to left. However, when Japanese is written in rows it goes left to right with the rows being ordered top to bottom, like in European languages. I believe this is because it is effectively the column system with the page rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise, and with the individual characters staying the right way up.

Personally I support WayForward's retaining the button layout. I was raised on Nintendo consoles, so when I occasionally use a 360 controller I have to get used to pressing what I think is A for no and what I think is B for yes. No reason that people used to the 360 can't get used to doing the opposite.

As discussed above it's not really a bug - but the knowledge of that won't comfort you at all.

It turns out that there is a way: you can use a hex editor to hack control settings straight into the save file. It's warned that it may cause some issues, but then again so does not being able to navigate menus. This comes from this post on the Steam forums. Basically you just find it and swap the bytes at offsets x560 and x570.

I tried it, it works. No glitches so far, but I'm just starting the game.

EDIT: Just finished the game with this hack. The mentioned glitches are not bad at all. Since jump and talk now share the button, Shantae often does a little jump when talking to an NPC, this is entirely cosmetic. She also can't really jump when an NPC is right next to her, because she'll end up talking to them instead. This slightly complicates getting to rooftops in the town to check if the people have anything funny to say, but it won't cause actual problems. If you are bothered by the controls, you'll think it a worthy exchange.

If one has to use a hex editor to fix this problem, that's clearly a bug. It's just a shame there was never a official patch to fix it.

Hmmm... I am strongly considering it.
Seriously, I can't utilize any functionality in the menus because accept/cancel are swapped. But I can't change that without moving "Jump" to something other than "A."

A proper bug fix would be assigning "Talk" to a different button instead of "talk" and "accept" being the same button.
Has anyone found a hex edit to do that? Would it hurt the game any if "talk" and "attack" were mapped tot he same button?

Game is basically unplayable the way it is now.

It's just a matter of what you're used to. I think all the titles on Nintendo navigate like that. I have a Wii U that I haven't touched in ages but whenever I did it took several days before I stopped sucking with the menu navigation. And after that when I moved back to the xbox/pc side of things, I sucked with menu navigation for another coupla days.

I'm afraid it's been a couple of years since that Shantae thing and I no longer recall this tweak or if it could have been done any different. You can try to experiment, but like I stated above, the downsides of Jump/Talk were really small and it was totally worth not having to twist your mind the way it doesn't want to go.