No I get it. I rebinded a lot of buttons in the settings, but I don't remember touching that thing because I didn't even know how it really worked, but it's possible it was already binded to something by default, or that I accidentally binded some d-pad thing or other.... ahhhhh xD
I beat the game last night, I really enjoyed it. The story was whatever, dumb at times (the early Robin Hood subplot left a sour taste in my mouth, but there was some decent amount of nuance regarding Romn, the knights, prison corruption, etc. later at least), but serviceable enough for Ys and better than VIII at least.
Difficulty-wise... it's a bit disappointing that Hard was too easy but Nightmare was way too hard. I chickened out and kept it at Hard but I rarely struggled outside of a few mid-game bosses. That's OK though, the game made up for it by being meaty enough so I wouldn't have wanted to spend hours retrying a simple boss, probably.
Anyway, GOTY. :)
Got an ending question:
In one of the very last images, you see a woman (Aprilis?) pushing an elderly person in a wheelchair... anyone know what's up with that?
Yes, that is Aprilis, and the elderly person in the wheelchair is Zola after he returned himself to his original body as a form of atonement. There's an interview where Kondo explains more about the game and its ending right here.
Look, I really like the game. But Falcom needs to cut like half of the text boxes out of their games. It's just endless, boring, pointless chatter for the sake of chatter, holy shit. Trails games dialogue excess really creeped into Ys big time.
I'm currently playing Ys VIII on Switch. I enjoy it a lot, so I'll probably pick up IX too down the line. How's performance of IX on Switch? I heard it was quite rough on launch, but maybe there were patches?