I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I did actually think about that but ended up not going that way for a couple of reasons. The first is that the games Minima strives to be like all use the "a" key for "attack", too, and anyone who's used to those will probably have the whole "a -> direction" sequence pretty well entrenched in muscle memory already. The second is that there are a couple of areas in the game where it makes a difference. One of these I won't go into because I don't want to give anything away that players can figure out by playing themselves, but the second is that whether or not bumping is forgiven makes a big difference in towns.