You guys are pretty good at killing the hype for this thing.
The big problem I personally have with the 3DS is it's the kind of system we get from Nintendo when they feel they have no competition. There are a lot of truly WTF design decisions that probably wouldn't have been overlooked had they felt they were in hot water (obscenely high price? complete disregard for lefties, despite your most prominent game designer being one himself?). It also utterly shatters most of the foundations laid by the original DS. As just mentioned, any games that use both buttons and the touch screen will likely be inaccessible to lefties, and from a game designer's standpoint, that's terribly irksome. I'd want everyone to play my games.
Also, because of "TEH 3DZ!!1", there probably won't be as many touch screen games that use both screens (think TWEWY). Switching between the non-3D, smaller touch screen and the larger 3D top screen would be incredibly jarring. And games that use book mode? Kiss that goodbye, because 3D doesn't work when the screen is vertical. The whole system is an asymmetrical mess of a design.
But perhaps the biggest problem I have with the system is that it doesn't bring enough new things to the table. Sure, it has some things that the DS didn't have - gyro, motion sensing, AR, ONE "slide pad". But aside from the latter 2, most mobile gaming platforms have those things already. And the fact that the touch screen still isn't multitouch - seriously, why? I understand that most of the time you'll be using a stylus, so it might seem redundant, but it would have been nice to have the option there. And this is where it gets really ironic - the NGP does everything the 3DS does and more, all the while pushing more polygons at once. The only thing the 3DS has that the NGP doesn't is in its name - 3D. And what does that bring to the table other than last generation graphics with a slightly twangier twang? The NGP has everything the 3DS should have - multitouch, rear trackpad, dual analogues. Aside from sales (admittedly a large factor), there literally won't be any reason for developers to not port their 3DS games to NGP or make nothing but multiplatform games (see the early 360/PS3 situation). And judging from Yoshinori Ono's recent comments, developers are already complaining about 3DS's [lack of] functionality - going by this, I can't help but feel the same fate will fall the 3DS late in its life that happened to the DS - that is, nearly all major Japanese support being dropped in favor of its competitor (compare the 2009-2011 releases on the PSP compared to the DS. Come 2010, nearly all DS support by Jap devs had been dropped). I can already see Jap developers switching over to NGP later in its life like they did with the PSP.
And that's the problem - Nintendo just doesn't seem like they're being competitive enough with the 3DS. Like they don't care if the same fate befalls the 3DS that befell the DS (with regard to Japanese support), or if it really is lacking in functionality/processing power (if rumored specs are to be believed, larger environments are a bit of a pain to pull off on the 3DS). And once again, it shatters the foundations of the DS and Wii by bringing little to the table gameplay-wise. Sony's next portable has more inputs than Nintendo's. They're not just trying to take a slice of the cake anymore like they did with Move. They're trying to take the whole cake. But does Nintendo care? Why should they? They're riding off the most successful portable of all time (+ OMG 3D). They don't have anything to worry about, right? Well, they don't seem to think so.
At this rate, the only reason I'm considering buying one at launch is because my DS broke last summer and I've still got a massive backlog of games I'd like to play. If not for that, I probably wouldn't be buying a 3DS for 2-3 years after it launched. I backed the DS before it even launched and was a pretty big fan of the system throughout, but I'm really disappointed with what I've seen of the 3DS so far. Granted, the 3DS will eventually have its own wonderful lineup of games (every system does), and it'll eventually be a "worthy" gaming system. But as a Nintendo portable and a successor to the DS, I can't help but say I expected a little more.
TL;DR
spoiler (click to show/hide)
3DS is Nintendo sucking its own cock
