Nintendo president Satoru Iwata recently addressed the issue of the 3DS XL’s lack of an analog nub. The feather-haired warrior, ever-ready to deflect criticism, had his list of reasons all planned out, with the ultimate message being that you’re just going to have to deal with it.
“Attaching a second analog stick is possible but it would have made the system even bigger,” he told IGN. “It perhaps puts a burden on people that really want that second stick, [but] it’s a call we had to make and these people will have to live with it. When we looked at the design of the 3DS XL we had to look at various factors. One was battery life, one was the overall size of the unit, and we had to make some trade-offs. The choice, if we were going to include the second analogue stick, was to reduce the size of the battery or make the unit much bigger. ”
A surprisingly blunt comment from Iwata on the subject of people who wants that second nub. Telling them to just live with it? Harsh.
The second nub would be nice, but I do get why it’s excluded. That’s the problem with iterative handheld releases — when you’ve committed to one design, you’re rather limited in what you can do once your pathological compulsion to redesign it takes over. The easy fix, of course, would be to not release a new version of a damn system so regularly but … it’s not like anybody’s going to make that move.
