For our third and final hands-on with the Nintendo Switch, I got to spend an entire day behind closed doors going hands-on with the console, alongside final versions of Mario Kart World and Welcome Tour. It feels like a distance memory, but the Nintendo Switch probably doesn’t get the credit it deserves for being an absolute power-seller for a company that was feeling the heat after the Wii U’s colossal failure.
As a manufacturer, Nintendo has famously tended to burn the shed to kill the rats, opting to go down the costly, drawn-out research and development rabbit hole. I consider them to be renowned risk takers, but if there were ever a time they’ve earned the right to rest on their laurels, it’s with the Nintendo Switch 2—a form-perfect iteration on one of the most successful video game consoles ever produced.
Over the equivalent of a working day, we spent quality time with both Mario Kart World and Welcome Tour. For whatever reason decided by the boffins at the top, we weren’t permitted to dive into the console’s innards and surf the operating system, however, we spent enough time with the hardware through these two launch titles to know that the original Switch’s sunset is here, at last.
Shannon recently published a piece tackling all of the misinformation out there, and if there’s one particular point he picked apart that I sort of disagree with, it’s the idea that the Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t just a bigger version of the original console. It kind of is, however, this is a reductive statement that disregards all of the finer improvements Nintendo has made on the hardware side of things.
What I mean by “I think that’s actually right” is that Nintendo didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. They’re aware that the original Switch, a pioneering handheld-home console hybrid, was lightning in a bottle, and to rework the quintessential “Switch experience” would be a misstep of monumental proportions. It is still the Switch you know—it is bigger, it’s more powerful, and it has a trick or two up its sleeve, but it’s everything we hoped for out of the Switch Pro that the industry speculated about for years.
A bigger console, of course, opens the door to bigger experiences, and it’s no secret that Mario Kart World began life as an original Switch title. Throughout development, this version was abandoned, and it was decided that putting it out on the Nintendo Switch 2’s struggling predecessor would force concessions of a title that otherwise comfortably flexes the capabilities of the new hardware.
It has a reasonably dense open world that’s designed to play to the franchise’s strength of pure, unadulterated fun, and you’re able to experience it with more players than ever. Every single amazing step forward Mario Kart World takes for the franchise is thanks to the improved hardware.
While everything I played ran like butter, these are launch titles we’re talking about—they should be optimised. With performance comparable to Xbox’s Series S, a rather cost-conscious SKU, it’s hard to know whether the 3.1 teraflops and 12GB of RAM onboard will be the same kind of roadblock, in the long run, that we’ve seen in the aforementioned, family-friendly Xbox model. We’ve seen third parties struggle time and again to get certain features running on these, for lack of a better term, weaker machines.
AMAZON NINTENDO SWITCH 2 CONSOLE PRE-ORDERS
- Nintendo Switch 2 Console – $696 with free shipping
- Nintendo Switch 2 Console + Mario Kart World – $766 with free shipping
Baldur’s Gate III’s co-op is perhaps the most famous example of this.
With that said, I can’t imagine an alternate configuration of the Switch 2’s specs, with increased memory, that wouldn’t have caused the price to balloon even further towards a knife’s edge of “hard to justify” for consumers. Value for dollar has already been such a hot topic, I have to believe the right move was made in keeping costs under control.
As nice as variable refresh rates and the resolution bump to 1080p in handheld and docked outputting at 4K, the one feature I’m most excited about is the ability to seamlessly transform the Joy-Con 2 into a mouse. It’s so intuitive and simple, it reminds me of the genuine surprise I felt seeing how well the Switch’s docking worked eight years ago. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge fan of the left-hand set-up for keyboard and mouse. I’ve long imagined what a hybrid control scheme of stick and mouse could look like.
How it stands up as a viable option will be put to the test by Metroid Prime; however, even as an alternative means for browsing both the system’s menu, store, and back end, it’ll work wonders. The fact that you’re able to plug in other external mice is a surprisingly consumer-forward move that I didn’t quite expect. It speaks volumes about just how much Nintendo is valuing the experience this time around, which ties directly into their online infrastructure and feature push.
All in all, I left Nintendo that day, dreading the thought that I had roughly a month left to wait for launch. I’m someone who’d only ever dust off my Switch, or rob it of its purpose as a paperweight to the books I totally read on my bedside table, for the big exclusives, or the quaint indie I’d want to play in bed.
Of course, Mario Kart World is going to be huge, but I’m far more invested in the idea that, being a souped-up version of one of the world’s most ubiquitous pieces of technology, the Nintendo Switch 2 could fast become everyone’s first choice—a destination console.
A console that, unlike its predecessor, can perform, we hope, without compromise and deliver an experience for third parties that the Nintendo of old couldn’t.
