#and I'm pretty pleased with how I mapped its complex inputs

[polwigle]

As a fully-grown adult who can still fit into some child-sized gloves (and who plays a lot of Nintendo games), I have too many thoughts on this to just put them in the tags!

I love the size of the joy-cons, they fit perfectly in my wee hands! Full-sized pro controllers aren't impossible for me to use, but they're far more unwieldy, and take more thumb movement to get between buttons. I also have a beloved third-party pro controller that, according to the box, is 20% smaller than normal. It's my go-to for PC gaming (I'll leave a tangent about that in the tags).

Here's a size comparison:

Not having to combination press anything (i.e. press multiple buttons at the same time) was mentioned briefly above, but I want to highlight how big an issue that can be for small thumbs on large controllers. The normal resting position for the right thumb is usually the middle of the button diamond, right? Ideally, from that position, a player could slightly angle their thumb to hit any of the face buttons. That... doesn't work so well when the buttons are too big.

On controllers sized for my rated-T-for-teen hands, I can reach all the buttons easily in quick succession, and could even combination press neighbouring buttons with relative ease. On the big one, though? I have to lift and move my thumb to press any one button comfortably, especially X or Y, and some simultaneous combinations (A+B, X+Y) feel nearly impossible to hit reliably.

And if I need to hold, for example, the B button, and then do something else with that thumb? Not happening!

(I'm convinced this is why the default control scheme in Super Mario Bros. Wonder is hold Y to dash, press B to jump — if I'm holding Y, I can at least rock my thumb back and hit the B button below it.)

Also, even on the smaller controllers, I've never been comfortable with the described "gamer grip" with two fingers on the shoulder buttons. I rest my index fingers on the triggers (ZL/ZR), and move them up to hit the bumpers (L/R) as needed. So I appreciate games that never force you to hit both shoulder buttons on the same side simultaneously (e.g. Splatoon series), or even let both sets of shoulder buttons do the same thing, so you can use just L/R or just ZL/ZR, whichever is more comfortable (e.g. Mario Kart 8, the above-mentioned Kirby games).

(thank u for coming to my ted talk)

“I went to school for game design! I am highly qualified to talk about any game out there!”

I bet you don’t even know how big an 8 year old’s hands are.