Under the leadership of the late, great Satoru Iwata, Nintendo shunned the technology arms race of Sony, Microsoft, and the rest of the video game business, and pursued a series of wild experiments that worked out brilliantly (Wii, DS) more often than not (Wii U). Iwata’s final innovation, realized after his untimely death, was to combine the company’s handheld and home console businesses into a single device — 2017’s Switch.
Suffice it to say that Iwata really picked his moment. He had anticipated a closing gap between the capabilities of portable and home hardware, and an audience that wanted gaming to be more adaptable to their lives. The 152-million-selling Switch will soon be Nintendo’s best-selling system ever, and may yet claim the all-time title from PlayStation 2. What a legacy.
Now, Nintendo is betting that the Switch has been so phenomenally successful that it doesn’t need to innovate any more. Nintendo Switch 2 — while it has a few minor eccentricities, like the inclusion of mouse controls — is an aggressively rational sequel. It’s bigger, sleeker, faster, tangibly made to a higher spec. It comes with a list of tech upgrades as long as your arm: more pixels, faster frame rates, better controllers. But it’s a deeply familiar device.
Like setting up a new iPhone, Switch 2 slips your gaming life into a shiny new package as if it was nothing
In fact, it’s so familiar, it’s almost radical — as far as game consoles are concerned, anyway. You’ve never carried your experience from one console generation to another as seamlessly as this. The user interfaces of Switch and Switch 2 are almost identical and a simple data transfer process sets up your new console exactly as your old one was, with all your games and settings. Like setting up a new iPhone, Switch 2 slips your gaming life into a shiny new package as if it was nothing.
But Nintendo’s laser-focus on continuity is about more than just ease of use, and more than the new console being able to play the older console’s games. The two platforms are in a two-way conversation, clearly designed to exist side by side in households (like mine) where they will mingle with each other. New features common to both systems emphasize this: virtual game cards for digital games, that can easily be swapped between family members; and GameShare, which allows a Switch 2 to stream local multiplayer games to nearby Switches.
It’s a fascinating turnaround from Nintendo, which has a spotty record on backward compatibility and has been as guilty as any of its competitors, if not more, of brute-forcing its customers into buying everything all over again. But the video games market has changed, and Nintendo seems keenly aware of it. Ubiquitous megagames like Fortnite and Minecraft transcend the systems they’re played on, and gamers rightly expect their game libraries and progress to follow them from one device to another. The Switch 2 is a console built for the current moment, where hardware platforms — even Nintendo’s — have ever more porous borders.
That being the case, though, the hardware needs to make a case for itself. After a week with the Switch 2, I believe it really, really does.
Photo: Nintendo
Look past its comforting familiarity and classy understatement, and you’ll find a device that is a powerful flex from Nintendo’s designers and engineers. It still has the playfulness and tactility inherent to Nintendo’s approach to hardware design, embodied in the little triggers that pull the Joy-Con 2 controllers off its sides, and the immensely satisfying magnetic snap with which you reattach them. But this is clothed in a sleek, engineered look, a silky matte finish, and noticeably improved build quality and materials, down to the steel shoulder buttons on the Joy-Con 2s and the sturdy metal kickstand.
For the first time in a long while, Nintendo is launching a dedicated portable gaming device against competition, in the form of the new wave of PC handhelds led by the Steam Deck. Rather than attempt to outgun these machines on power, Nintendo has outclassed them — almost humiliatingly, to be honest — in the quality of its industrial design. Switch 2 is about as powerful as a Steam Deck and the other entry-level PC handhelds, and it’s lighter, thinner, infinitely quieter, more genuinely portable, more versatile with its TV dock and detachable controllers, better ergonomically (apart from its lack of hand grips), and far, far prettier. My Steam Deck suddenly feels clunky and basic by comparison.
The Switch 2 is closer to the technical cutting edge than Nintendo has been since the launch of GameCube and Game Boy Advance in 2001 — if not in raw power, then in how efficiently its power is applied. Early signs are that this is a surprisingly, even impressively capable gaming device. Nintendo has two big advantages over the PC handheld competition (including the forthcoming ROG Xbox Ally): custom Nvidia hardware, with the magic bullet of Nvidia’s DLSS AI upscaling technology; and the fact that it’s a fixed platform, playing games engineered to run on it specifically.
The Switch 2’s screen is also a great asset. Whilst it can’t compete with an OLED screen on colours, brightness, or image quality, and the HDR implementation is a little weak, it’s capable of 120 frames per second and has variable refresh rate, which ensures that any momentary drops in performance are less noticeable and all games feel smoother to play.
A beast of a game like Cyberpunk 2077 looks great and runs very solidly, whether handheld or docked (and without a whisper of noise from the console’s fans). Visually, the gap between Cyberpunk on Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 is far smaller than that between The Witcher 3 on Switch and PlayStation 4. The gorgeous Mario Kart World appears to run at 1440p resolution when docked, and delivers four-player split-screen racing at a flawless 60 frames per second. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom don’t even touch the sides — their Switch 2 Editions are pure perfection, incredibly crisp and responsive.
Chances are that a decent chunk of your Switch library is improved on the Switch 2, and not just games that have received free updates, like The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (previously very choppy, now immaculately smooth). Switch games that had performance issues or unlocked frame rates run far better, even without a patch. Digital Foundry reports that the infamously bad Batman: Arkham Knight is now basically fixed, while one friend excitedly texted me that A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism runs three times as fast on his Switch 2. Load times are much improved, too, thanks to the Switch 2’s faster memory. (Perhaps the biggest performance upgrade is reserved for the eShop store, which is unusably cluttered and laggy on Switch, but swift and well-organized on Switch 2.)
Nintendo’s engineers have found some novel applications for the Switch 2’s horsepower, too — and somewhere to use the investment in video streaming its engineers poured into the ill-fated Wii U. With GameShare, one Switch 2 can push video feeds out to multiple consoles from one copy of the game — either locally or online, over the new GameChat service. I tried it locally, sharing Survival Kids, a fun, simple, co-op crafting game, with two other players using Switches. There was some fuzzy artifacting from time to time on the other players’ feeds, but their games were perfectly smooth and playable. It’s a magical, generous technology that will work well with simpler multiplayer games, although who knows how well-supported it will be.
Image: Nintendo
Less novel, but more central to Nintendo’s vision for Switch 2, is GameChat. It’s not revolutionary, sitting somewhere between the voice chat rival consoles have had for decades and a full-fledged communications platform like Discord. But it’s pretty rich in its features, with impressive noise cancelling, smart video, and the ability to stream your game screen to your friends. As you would expect from Nintendo, it’s backed up by robust parental controls in the Nintendo Switch smartphone app, and very focused on consent – you can pre-approve your existing friends individually for GameChat, and so only hear from people you want to.
GameChat has the glitches of any video chat platform — chats can be muffled at the start, and on one call, I was haunted by a distracting echo of my own voice. It’s very pandemic-coded, too. You can feel Nintendo, a company that has always shown a preference for in-person over online experiences, straining to make voice chat as much like being in a room with someone as possible. But that’s not a bad aim, and GameChat’s seamless integration at a system level is a huge leap into the present day from a company that has previously held online gaming at arms’ length. In fact, GameChat’s features, social controls, and general friendliness put it well ahead of Xbox and PlayStation’s chat services, and make it a genuinely viable alternative to Discord.
Nintendo is also making great strides in accessibility, another area where it has long lagged behind its competition out of a stubborn insistence on the perfection of its control schemes. System-level accessibility options include the ability to create and save multiple button-mapping presets, so you can adjust your preferences on a per-game basis, as well as adjustable text size, color inversion and grayscale, mono audio, and more. GameChat even features speech-to-text and text-to-speech transcription.
Image: Nintendo
It’s all so sensible, so modern, so forward-thinking. But still, sometimes Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo. When news of it first leaked, the idea of turning a Joy-Con 2 on its side and using it as a mouse seemed like a joke. It’s not. Mouse control is as fast and precise as you could wish, and a genuine bonus for strategy games like Civilization 7 and first-person games like Cyberpunk — if you can get used to the strange, delicate feeling of holding the slender controller sideways and swiping it across a sofa cushion.
Mouse control is such an odd inclusion, though, secreted away on the side of the controller and on the very edge of the console’s possible use cases. It’s like a hardware Easter egg, thrown in by the engineers just because they could. I can imagine even Nintendo itself exploring it in a couple of games and then forgetting it’s there; at the same time, it will be a small but welcome enhancement for many indie PC games making the jump to Switch 2.
The clash between Nintendo’s quirkiness and its newfound tech fetishism is nowhere more evident than in the hilariously awkward launch game, Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, with its delightful demos and minigames, desert-dry presentation, and daringly boring cataloguing of the new console’s specs. Mostly, however, Nintendo allows its weird-uncle personality to peek out modestly and tastefully, like the rings of cyan and coral around the thumbsticks, and the pleasing little clicks, pops, and chimes of the UI. That’s fine. Nintendo’s games give it a big enough canvas for all its colorful creativity.
Instead, Switch 2 finds Nintendo in Apple mode. The company has brought its considerable engineering and design skills to bear on making a smooth operator of a console that’s powerful enough not to break a sweat, and completely frictionless to use. It has perfected the design — and, when compared to the Switch 2’s closest competition, justified the price.
Nintendo has, quite deliberately I think, cast the Switch 2 not as a replacement for the all-conquering Switch, but as a seamless extension of it. The new console wears the mantle of its game-changing predecessor lightly, and broadens its capabilities in inclusive ways. The Switch 2 has the supreme confidence of a continuity candidate who thinks the election’s in the bag — and who, for once, is probably right.
