Not sure if serious.
Challenges and churn for franchises heavily reliant on the 3DS paradigm were completely expected. Layton is one of the prime examples. Others are Puzzle & Dragons, Etrian Odyssey, Phoenix Wright.
If your games transition to mobile easier than to the followup platform, it's not always the developers' fault. Nintendo wanted a clean cut and they got it.
It's a legitimate problem that I've been thinking about for a while, but it's a good thing they're at least trying. Hopefully they can make it work. Joy-Con for pointing might not be as intuitive, but it should at least suffice on paper.
It's part of why I've been wanting Capcom to announce they've got an Ace Attorney port for the Switch or the like in the works. Without
someone jumping in to show how to translate handheld experiences from the DS/3DS line to the Switch, I wonder if smaller franchises best suited to handhelds will just slowly disappear from lack of place in the console space.
Nintendo needs to hand out official "only works in handheld mode" stickers.
Couldn't they do touch with the IR pointer? I'd hope for handheld only, but I don't see why IR presents an issue if the puzzles are designed for it.
Probably the biggest issue in pointer controls, though it's the most obvious solution here, is a loss in precision and fluidity. For example, a game like Puzzle & Dragon relies on being able to shift pieces in one motion quickly. That works in touch controls - so long as your hand doesn't slip you can guide it where you want with good accuracy. With pointer controls, the correlation of motion to the result onscreen is
not 1:1, which means greater leniency is needed. So the experience might not be as good as with a touchscreen.
But then, the experience would at least be
there, where right now it's looking to be 'not at all'
