Nintendo has now fully revealed the Nintendo Switch 2, including details about the hardware upgrades, future games, and backwards compatibility with the original Switch. It looks like a decent enough upgrade from the original Switch, but there’s not enough here to get me interested.
I grew up playing a lot of games on the Nintendo Wii, DS, and 3DS, and I still occasionally go back to them—I even made an open-source replacement for Nintendo’s image sharing service for the 3DS and Wii U. I got an original Nintendo Switch a while after it was first released, and I had a lot of fun with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Clubhouse Games, the BioShock remaster, Super Mario Odyssey, Pokemon Shield, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and others. Like most people, I missed out on the Wii U, so finally getting to play all those games in a truly portable format was great. I replaced it with the OLED model when that became available.
Eventually, I started to become frustrated with the platform. The third-party ports became rougher as the Switch’s hardware aged, and my breaking point was the Switch port of The Outer Worlds, where the worst performance was only noticeable after a few dozen hours of playtime, even after updates that were supposed to improve performance. Meanwhile, the games coming out of Nintendo weren’t all that appealing to me or were disappointing—Kirby and the Forgotten Land was cute, and Super Mario Bros. Wonder had some fun levels, but I didn’t feel compelled to finish them. I also bought Mario Party Superstars after Super Mario Party, hoping the second game would fix the first game’s problems with online multiplayer, and it did not. Fool me twice, shame on me, I guess.
The original Nintendo Switch just isn’t an appealing platform to me for most games, and I was hoping the Switch 2 might change that and give me a better experience for all the Switch games I ultimately skipped. It doesn’t seem like that’s happening.
The Good
To clarify, I don’t think the Nintendo Switch 2 is a total failure or anything like that. The original Switch achieved tremendous success with its hybrid form factor and game library, and the main request from players was just faster hardware. The Switch 2 delivers that—Nintendo said in a press release that the “Nintendo Switch 2 has significantly improved CPU and GPU performance over Nintendo Switch, resulting in faster processing speed and enabling new visually advanced gameplay.”
The screen is back to LCD, but it’s 1080p instead of 720p, and supports HDR. An OLED option would have been nice, but that will probably come soon enough. It has more internal storage, and Nintendo is still staying away from proprietary storage technology for expansion (looking at you, Xbox), this time with microSD Express instead of microSD. The dock supports up to 4K 120FPS. It’s backwards compatible with nearly all Switch games, and some games will offer free or paid graphical upgrades for less than the price of a new game. Those changes are pretty much exactly what I wanted in a Switch 2.
Related
The Nintendo Switch 2 Is Finally Here, And It’s $449.99
The Nintendo Switch was one of the hottest hits Nintendo has made in recent history. And because of that, its successor has been wildly anticipated. After Nintendo confirmed the existence of the Nintendo Switch 2, the company has finally unveiled the console in full, and it looks amazing.
Nintendo also showed off some games for the Switch 2 that would have been compromised experiences on the original Switch, or just not possible at all. Split Fiction, Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, Street Fighter 6, Borderlands 4, Yakuza 0 Director’s Cut, Star Wars Outlaws, and many other current-gen games are on the way. That’s great!
The Switch 2 also has confirmed pricing of $450 in the United States, which seems fair to me given the hardware upgrades. If the original Switch is anything to go by, you won’t have to upgrade for a long time, and the holiday sales will probably kick in later this year or in 2026.
The Bad
The Switch 2 is still disappointing to me for a few reasons. The big one is game pricing: Mario Kart World is advertised as $80 in the United States, and even though Nintendo will sell it in a bundle with the Switch 2 for $500, that makes me worried about most big Switch games being priced at $70-80. This is a trend we’re seeing in the rest of the video game industry, but sales are much more common with other game publishers than with Nintendo.
I’ve been able to slowly build up my game library on Xbox and PC by waiting for sales, but that’s much harder on the Switch. If you walk into a Best Buy right now to buy Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, you will have to pay the full original $60 price, even though it’s an eight-year-old remaster of an 11-year-old game. Nintendo clearly doesn’t need to lower prices, because plenty of other people are still buying Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for $60. For me, though, it turns every game is an investment that needs to earn its dollar value, rather than a fun break from real life. I don’t always feel that way about new games—I pre-ordered Starfield and had a lot of fun with it—but Nintendo has let me down a few times.
The high pricing is also evident in all the first-party accessories. I wasn’t a big fan of the Switch Pro Controller, but the Switch 2 incarnation is a whopping $80. A pair of Joy-Con 2 controllers are $90—hopefully those won’t fall apart on their own like the original incarnation. A replacement dock is $110. The microSD Express cards are understandably more expensive than regular microSD cards, but you might also run out of internal storage quicker than with the original Switch, because some Switch 2 cartridge games will require full downloads.
Then there’s still the same problem as the original Switch: the portability is a limiting factor for many games. Sure, the Switch 2 will get Cyberpunk 2077 and Borderlands 4, but they will almost certainly be compromised experiences compared to the same games on other platforms. If many of them will be the same prices as the same game on other platforms, that’s an even harder sell for me. When I was still actively buying Switch games, I didn’t enjoy doing the “do I want the worse version that is portable, or the better version I can play at home?” thought process with every game purchase.
Maybe Next Year
I know my reasoning won’t apply to everyone. Some people don’t have or want to get another gaming platform, and some value portability above all else. The Switch 2 doesn’t seem like a terrible gaming platform, and I would still recommend it to most people over a Steam Deck or other PC handheld—the Switch doesn’t have games that randomly break or make you change refresh rate settings to get acceptable battery life. The Switch 2 is just not for me, personally.
For now, I’ll stick with my older Nintendo consoles and Xbox Series X. I might be tempted the next time a mainline 3D Mario game comes along, but I’m happy to continue working on my backlog in the meantime.
