A cute and functional contolle
I own a lot of controllers and slowly I’m trying to get around to reviewing all of them.

First I’m going to say, don’t buy this controller if you’re expecting great ergonomics. I bought this for form over function, so I won’t be knocking points off of it for ergos. Let’s just say, I unexpectedly found myself fighting a special FATE pop in FFXIV when I had just logged on to mess around with the controller and it was not a great experience for my hands. That being said, for the boxy shape of the controller in general, it’s easily bigger and more comfortable than similar options.

Getting that out of the way…

I selected this model in particular because I have a PC in my house that is sakura themed, and whenever I see good looking sakura accessories for it, I usually cave.

Features:

Face buttons are membrane but have good tactile feel.
dpad is old school feeling membrane with center pivot.
Bumpers are tactile, somewhat noisy.
Triggers feel somewhat light to me (subjective)

The controller minimizes the discomfort from the form factor by providing you with a wider controller and small contours on the back.

Special Features:

The standout features that attracted me to this controller were….

– Aesthetics and Collection nature
– The compact form factor & the amount of modern features packed into such a small form

Cute and collectible things are always a plus to me, even if it’s not always practical lol. Also it’s cool that this controller has features such as app based firmware updates, remapping, programmable back buttons, and hall sticks in such a small package and a decent price.

Functionality:

The controller looks great, paired easily with Switch and over Bluetooth to my PC, and works perfectly. I was also able to pair it to my phone to check the rarity and update the firmware without a hitch. The only thing that sometimes happened is it sometimes seemed to not want to connect to Switch, even after waking it up without an issue. Maybe take a half star off for that, but it still rounds up.

The responsiveness of the controller didn’t seem terrible via bluetooth for me. The placement of – and + doesn’t get in the way.

I typically don’t use back buttons on games I play on Switch, but I find the location of the back buttons to be perfect for my middle finger to actuate with enough space to keep my middle finger off of the button to prevent accidental presses.

The joysticks have good resolution allowing me to be able to select time fairly precisely in Genshin Impact, though it tends to jitter between two minutes similar to the 8BitDo Ultimate 2C.

A staple of my controller reviews… the Tetris dpad test. I play games on Tetris at as fast of a pace as I can (I’m roughly a 1 minute sprinter in modern Tetris games) and see how many false hard drops I get. Where the controller loses a point for me is in this test. I found it a bit too easy to trigger unintentional hard drops when trying to up my pace. I find that tactile dpads are usually unbeatable in this test and my Mobapad M6 HD joycons (with cross dpad) are my current leader for Switch, followed by my trusty 8BitDo Pro 2. Sadly, Nintendo’s own first party Pro Controller is the worst offender in this test. That being said, this is a subjective test. In some types of games, you may want more responsive diagonals… and in general if I slowed down my pace with this controller I would not trigger accidental hard drops… unlike the Pro Controller where it can still happen even if slowing down.

In Conclusion:

I could see myself playing retro games, or turn based JRPGs with this. The controller is easily suitable for those sorts of games that do not require lots of inputs in a short amount of time, and being flat and compact makes it a nice controller to just stick in a bag if you know you’ll be gaming and don’t want to bring a bulkier controller.

At the end of the day, I’m happy to add this controller to my collection of many. It’s good looking and fun and perhaps I’ll add the Famicom styled one in the future too, but the likelihood of using them for anything beyond the casual level is fairly low. I think they are a good functional option if you’re looking to game casually in style.

Edit 9/18/2024 – Changed Formatting more like my other controller reviews.