Whenever the game wants to make you focus on a particular game control, it displays a button graphic associated with said control. This, however, ends being misleading.
I don't use a Saturn gamepad (lol), so I don't have buttons A to C then X to Z. Not to mention that because you can remap your controls, the game making mention of said controls can become obsolete if you happen to shuffle them around.
Optimally, I would love to see the game use the appropiate bound button graphic instead of the one associated to the control.
This works well, however the graphics may not quite correspond to what's available in the physical device.
An approach would be using different graphic sets for the buttons, but I can see it not being an easy task considering not everyone uses the same joysticks, There are bajillions of controllers in the wild, and creating custom button graphics for every possibility is overwhelming and frankly, pretty annoying, but creating a few sets of buttons for the common ones (Dualshock, XBox, I think that's about it lol) should be doable.
A different approach to this is to allow players to display their own custom graphics - This is modding grounds, of course, but it can allow mod makers to release button packs for whatever weird ass controller is out there, or allow a more self sufficient player to make their own graphics for their own use.
In case that there's just no appropiate button graphic, or the player wants to get rid of graphics for some weird reason, then simply naming the control with its raw name is not a bad idea. It can make some text a bit too long with stuff like "Try R BUMPER!" or slightly less intuitive like "Try X BUTTON", not to mention tutorial dialogue, but it's better than no control indication at all.
This is what I've had on my head while typing this out:
In here, button names are minimized to just "PAD n" or "PAD AXIS n" as probably represented by the OS, and it works. It's short and descriptive enough to fit in places that prompt a button. Obviously a normal user would not be able to parse which button is button 21, but... at least it's not misleading, lol.
There are also graphics attached to a particular control. It's a good way to go about it, provided the joystick being used isn't mega trash and decides that a particular button should have a different button code than standard.