Secret of Mana: Why departing from default controls is a bad idea

          Currently I'm working through Secret of Mana and I'm finding it a bit of a struggle. This is because as opposed to all the SNES RPGs  I've played and every single game with a menu button in general, Secret of Mana has decided to concoct their own unique way of cycling through the menu. The issue with this new way of doing things is it isn't intuitive.
         Intuition is a hard thing to predict in controls. The best way to predict it is by paying attention to precedent. For example, R trigger tends to be the shoot control in FPSs. If a game decided to change that and not immediately notify the player (in-game, nobody reads those idiotic game handbooks), you'd find most players frustrated within their first few fights.
        When playing through Secret of Mana you have two common controls changed. First, the game is a real time RPG that allows you to move freely and hack and slash at enemies. Below you is a bar that shows the accuracy of your attack. After an attack the accuracy is reset to 0, forcing you to wait till it recharges again. The idea behind this is that it simulates the constraints of a turn based RPG fight system, while giving the player the freedom they would have in a real time system. I dislike this system because I find it to be inorganic. You could easily incorporate this system with the way weapons work in the game by forcing weapons to "recharge" to land hits. While, the combat system was frustrating, it wasn't completely unintuitive. Eventually, after killing a few bunnies, it becomes obvious that you must wait till the bar goes to 100% to land hits. No, my real issue is with menu.

And how am I supposed to know this leads to other parts of the menu? 

      The first thing I do in a game is click all the buttons there is. This tells me what does what and how much skill and time I need to put into making certain actions happen. In RPGs, button pressing is usually used for the former reason. You need to know how to fight and how to get to the menu. In Secret of Mana I clicked a button (I believe it was the y button) and it gets me to what seems to be a menu. All you see is the sword you are currently wielding and nothing else. It doesn't even say menu, it just shows the weapon. When you click on the sword it begins to flash, indicating absolutely nothing to the player. Nor does anyone in the town tell you how to use these things. In fact, after purchasing a few items from the shopkeeper (the logical person to tell you how to access items) he tells me "not to forget to equip my items". Thank you for the words of wisdom. It took me a good 30 minutes into the game to click the quasi menu button again just to incorporate using my d pad clicking up. If I clicked right it would just cycle through more of my weapons. It makes no sense. Nothing was telling me to do that and precedent doesn't tell me that all my items were in that menu. In fact there have been many games I've played where only certain functions can be accessed through the start button (save, load, journal, etc) and others are only accessed through the select button (weapons, items, etc). The system made no sense and it wasn't intuitive. It required random guessing and that's when a developer needs to place a tutorial. And as I just noted it would have been so easy to do so by making the damn shopkeeper tell you.
        Well that's enough ranting for me. I'm going to try to power through this game, though I won't lie this RPG really hasn't made the best first impression.