Press A to blow away your loot

In The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, some of your most useful abilities are attached to companions who follow you around. To use an ability, you approach the relevant Sage and press A. This sounds straightforward enough until the person you need to approach runs away.

The Sages are also AI-controlled combat companions. They move towards enemies, reposition themselves, and generally have their own ideas about where to be. Those ideas do not necessarily involve standing somewhere convenient while you try to activate a shield.

To make matters worse, A is also the button for picking up items. And one of the abilities you can activate with A is a gust of wind that blows items away.

Useful, if you were hoping to pick them up somewhere else.

Your button has left the area

There is an interesting interaction problem here. A companion is a character in the world, with movement and behavior that make them feel like a participant. But when that companion is also the control for a player ability, the player needs to be able to reach them reliably.

Those two roles compete. A Sage moving towards an enemy may be behaving sensibly as a combatant while making a terrible button. A Sage moving alongside you may be keeping formation while frustrating your attempt to get close enough to talk to them.

The individual abilities make this particularly awkward. The Sage of Water provides a shield for Link, but getting that shield requires reaching a companion who also wants to fight. The Sage of Fire fights at close range while providing an ability you can aim at a distance. The place where the character wants to be and the place where their ability is useful need not be the same place.

Instead of selecting an ability, you end up managing the position of its interface.

A is doing a lot of work

Context-sensitive buttons are usually a good thing. A controller has limited buttons, and dedicating a different one to talking, picking up objects, opening things, and so on would quickly become impractical. Reusing a button works well when the context makes the intended action clear.

Here, the context can change because somebody else moved.

You're near an item and a companion. Both offer an action on A. The difference between collecting something and activating an ability depends on which interaction the game currently offers. Even if the prompt accurately describes the selected action, the player has to keep checking it rather than relying on the action they were already performing.

Picking up a collection of items is a fairly repetitive task. Having a companion wander into that task with an ability that scatters the collection is, frankly, rude.

Potential improvements

I'd start by separating ability selection from the companions' positions. A dedicated selection menu, or a modifier combined with a direction, could let the player choose an ability while leaving the Sages free to move and fight. The companions could still perform the action and retain their personalities. They just wouldn't have to double as moving controls.

That would require decisions about controller mappings and how combat behaves during selection, of course. There's no unlimited supply of conveniently unused buttons. But the existing interaction already imposes a cost: locating the right companion, reaching them, and confirming that A now means the thing you wanted.

A smaller change would be to make the companions easier to approach when the player is trying to interact with them, and to give item pickup priority around loot. Ability activation could also require a more distinct input, especially for an ability that affects nearby objects. Adding a confirmation dialog every time would be a fairly miserable solution; the distinction needs to fit the pace of the game.

The broader issue is that an interface element shouldn't acquire competing goals of its own. Games can deliberately make an action difficult, but I'd prefer the difficulty to come from the enemy rather than from persuading my shield button to stop running away.