For years, the rule in Hollywood was pretty simple: familiarity but with a twist. Cheers, but it’s in a coffee shop, and everyone’s in their twenties. Lost, but it’s in LA with Joseph Fiennes. Sure, this didn’t always work – I still think fondly of you, FlashForward – but it worked a lot of the time. Crucially, it was easy to grasp why it should work. We love formulas, and we love gentle variations on the formula to keep us guessing, to keep us nimble. But at the heart of it there’s familiarity, and familiarity is a very, very lovely thing in the right circumstances.
This is Switch 2, then. And it’s also my experience of having the new console for a weekend. There are lots of things I am deeply, pleasantly familiar with, and lots of little tweaks within that familiarity – some of them surprisingly consequential. Top line: I love this console a little bit. I’m glad it’s here.
And it’s a lovely thing in the hands – larger and, it feels, slightly sleeker than the Switch. And that beautiful glossy screen makes its older sibling look a bit pokey, just as the Switch once made me return to the Vita and say, really? It was that small? And with the border? Just as the Vita once made me go back to the PSP and say…
You get what I mean. But it’s still dazzling. So bright and sharp and large, such colours and such lovely smoothness. The same but slightly different, ditto the Joy-Con, which now snap into place with a lovely magnetic thunk, and which are now removed with a bumpy trigger thing that still feels a little nerve-wracking each time I do it.
(Breaking sequence here to talk a little more about those Joy-Con, because they can now have their buttons remapped with layouts saved for individual games. You’ll find this under Accessibility on the System Settings menu, alongside a bunch of other welcome additions, like the ability to change text size, bold text, switch to high contrast mode, zoom in, change display colours, switch to mono audio, and enable text-to-speech.)
Once the machine is on – system transfer has definitely taken cues from Apple; I’ve done it for two Switch 2s now and it worked fine both times – the UI is very familiar, the pops and clicks and squeaks and pips as you strobe through the options are as pleasant as ever, and the meager on-board storage space proved to be slightly less meager than I thought. I got quite a bunch of games downloaded on it, and the only awkward moment was when I was then prying the astonishingly thin Micro SD Express I’d bought out of its plastic wrapper, certain that I had just bent something that cost me fifty quid. (This said, I now realise I had filled up the on-board memory in about thirty minutes, so maybe I’m being a bit generous with how chirpy I am here.)
With that out of the way, I spent a surprisingly long time just playing games I was already familiar with, because I had carried them across from the original Switch. A few thoughts here. The first is that, for whatever reason, the Switch has become home to a bunch of games that I’m never really finished with – Into the Breach, Outer Wilds, various Marios. I can’t get to the bottom of these games, and so it’s lovely to see them ported across painlessly so the fun can continue.
Secondly, the Nintendo Online offering has quietly become an absolutely stellar offer. Within minutes of firing the Switch 2 up I had played Tetris DX and ESWAT – I know, the heart wants what it wants. And I had experienced an absolute flood of melancholy nostalgia once I fired up The Wind Waker. It is wild to me that the GameCube is now a retro console of the kind that comes bundled in the Nintendo Online sub. Surely it was only two years ago that my friend Stu and I queued up on Oxford Street to see Miyamoto at the big HMV. Actually, no it was 22 years ago. But it doesn’t matter. The Wind Waker has not aged a day. I could spend a month with my new console just poking around these familiar islands and I’d be very happy.
As for new games, it’s not exactly a SNES-beating line-up, but the stuff I have played over the last two days is pretty lovely. For one thing, the two recent blockbuster Zeldas feel all but new again thanks to upgrades that can either be bought outright or are included in the premium Online sub. I have a proper piece on this on the way, but a quick dive into the Depths on Tears of the Kingdom revealed a game that was quietly transformed. The graininess had gone. The edges were sharp. I’m very happy to be finishing this generally unfinishable game with such a lovely refreshed version.
Elsewhere – and there’s a piece coming on this too – Cyberpunk feels like both a marvel and something that’s slightly – just slightly – shaky once you get into firefights. I’ve missed out on this game completely until now, and I’m looking forward to properly getting into it, even though it will always feel slightly out of place on Nintendo.
Onto the biggie. Mario Kart World. I’ve, perhaps foolishly, shared my thoughts on why I absolutely shouldn’t be sharing my thoughts on a new Mario Kart, but here in the context of the system itself the real winner in Mario Kart World is GameChat – which isn’t really Mario Kart’s win but Nintendo’s. Switch 2’s big launch game is a perfect match for Nintendo’s new social tool, in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. Free Roam is key, a mode devoid of any real direction and also semi-hidden on the game’s main menu. Hang out with friends here, though, and it’s the perfect backdrop to a much-needed catch-up. “How is the family? And did you see that P button next to the buffalo that’s just headbutted you into a central reservation?”
I didn’t expect this. And I appreciate that the Switch 2 is already pricey, and to hide this stuff behind a paywall (GameChat is free until 31st March 2026, but online play outside of F2P games does require a paid sub) is a bit naff and money-grabbing. Just as I appreciate that the launch line-up is thin outside of Mario Kart and that the basics of how the console works are pretty much known. I appreciate the battery life could be a lot better – it can work its way down very quickly. Even the stuff like the new mouse mode can feel a bit weird and undercooked. (Certainly don’t operate it by using it on your leg like I do if you have a fondness for wearing corduroy jeans like I also do.)
All of that, and yet I’m two days in and I’m still very excited. A new Nintendo console, with a bunch of games I already love, and a bunch of little things that may change the way I play and connect with old friends. And the promise, of course, of new things to come.
A Switch 2 console, launch games, and a smattering of peripherals were provided by Nintendo.