The Nintendo Switch 2, hands-on: It’s pretty good!

Summary

At a presentation unveiling the Nintendo Switch 2, longtime Nintendo producer Kouichi Kawamoto revealed that at one point, he considered calling the Switch’s successor the “Super Nintendo Switch.” It would have been a nice nod to Nintendo’s second console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which followed the original NES about 35 years ago. But Kawamoto, along with directors Tetsuya Sasaki and Takuhiro Dohta, didn’t think that “Super Nintendo Switch” was quite the right fit. It’s not that the Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t super – I’ll go out on a limb and call it the Pretty Good Nintendo Switch. Rather, the Switch 2 tries to take a console that’s already beloved and simply just make it better. The Switch was well-received when it came out in 2017, but it exploded in popularity when the world went into lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, with sales more than doubling between March 2019 and March 2020. But even before the Animal Crossing: New Horizons craze, this trio of Nintendo bigwigs was already plotting the Switch’s successor. “The three of us were assigned to [the Nintendo Switch 2] back in 2019,” Kawamoto said. “Even before that, the hardware team had always been looking into what kind of hardware can be used in the next iteration of the hardware, so it’s really hard to tell what the exact [start] was.” Suddenly, Nintendo was trying to solve what has to be a really good problem for any company to face: There was so much demand for the Switch that the company couldn’t keep up with production. “COVID certainly had a large impact in the development and design process,” Sasaki said. “Even with the chip shortage, we were working with our partners to be creative to work our way through that.” Though we’re five years since the pandemic hit, chip shortages persist, thanks in no small part to the generative AI boom. That could be less than good news for the Switch and Switch 2, both of which use Nvidia processors. Maybe that’s why Nintendo took so long to make what’...