Nintendo Switch 2 is a year old today and we still don’t know what to make of it

As the Switch 2 celebrates its first birthday, GameCentral looks back at the highs and lows of Nintendo’s most recent console and tries to predict where it goes from here.

Since the internet, and the real world beyond it, increasingly only deals in extremes it’s difficult to talk about the Switch 2 in any kind of nuanced fashion. It is neither the best thing ever nor the worst and determining exactly where it sits along that gradient is not easy. Today is its first anniversary, which is slightly awkward as there’s reason to hope there’ll be a major Nintendo Direct next week which will, possibly, answer some of the questions we’re about to pose.

Looking at the console with the benefit of 365 days of hindsight, we’d say that that the hardware itself was largely faultless. The design hasn’t changed much, of course, and it could do with a longer battery life and maybe a better screen, but for the price it’s almost perfect, with the click of the magnetic Joy-Cons still seeming magical to this day.

It’s still baffling that Nintendo has made no attempt whatsoever to demonstrate the power of the console – we didn’t get so much as a tech demo pre-launch – but multiple third party games have made it clear it’s far more powerful than you would expect, with excellent versions of everything from Resident Evil Requiem and Cyberpunk 2077 to Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Star Wars Outlaws.

The remake of Star Fox 64 does seem to be a step up, in terms of technical prowess, but other upcoming games, like Splatoon Raiders and Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, still look like Wii U games. Nintendo games are rarely sold on their graphics, but the Switch 2 clearly has raw power to spare and yet it’s not being used – one of many strange decisions orbiting the console.

Ever since the unveiling of the console and its games in April last year, it’s seemed as if Nintendo was only showing and doing the bare minimum. Despite having eight years to prepare, and no deadline to meet in terms of when the console had to be released, everything to do with the Switch 2 has felt hurried and poorly thought out, like a student who was out partying the night before their big report was due and only just scrabbled together what they needed.

That impression has not changed over the last 12 months, but it has morphed into an industry default for most publishers who, in their wisdom, have decided that it’s best to have as little to look forward to as possible and to know as little about what is announced as can be contrived.

That logic obviously makes sense to someone, somewhere, because it’s taken deep root within so many different publishers, but Nintendo has taken it to an absurd extreme, to the point where it’s now June and we haven’t had a single large scale, first party Nintendo Direct all year. That in turn means we have no idea about anything coming out after July (except that supposedly Fortune’s Weave and FromSoftware’s The Duskbloods will be along at some point, if they haven’t been delayed).

At exactly the point where a first party Direct would seem the most useful to both Nintendo and its customers – considering a price rise is on the horizon – they’ve decided to say less about their future plans than they ever have before.

This seems to be in large part because of the industry wide problem of games costing too much, and taking too long, to make. The Switch 2 may be impressively powerful, but Nintendo’s not used to working with that kind of hardware and that’s no doubt part of the reason behind some of their stranger decisions.

We had hoped, before the Switch 2 became a reality, that Nintendo, who have always benefited from keeping a tight rein on their budgets, would cope better than most with the issue, or demonstrate some new way of avoiding it, but sadly that hasn’t happened.

Instead, the software line-up has been a strange mixture of A-listers and deeply underwhelming lower budget games. Mario Kart World as a launch game makes perfect sense, but the strange way the open world was handled – which was exacerbated by the misleading marketing – left a bad taste in the mouth of many fans. While the continued lack of any DLC at all (why does Donkey Kong only have one extra costume?) is impossible to explain.

Mario Kart World is a good game, and Donkey Kong Bananza is even better, but in hindsight the latter would’ve made a much better Christmas release, rather than having the line-up fizzle out with the deeply disappointing Metroid Prime 4. You can see the sense of releasing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment early on, because it meant at least some kind of new Zelda game was available, but surely there was a better choice than yet another brain dead Dynasty Warriors knock-off.

Kirby Air Riders does have its fans, even if we’re not amongst them, but why did Nintendo feel it was so important to release a second cartoon racing game within the launch window? Especially one that was only ever going to be popular in Japan. They did later admit that they’d focused too much on games for their home audience, but surely Nintendo has been in the business long enough not to make that mistake in the first place?

There are many other strange decisions beyond that, including the highly experimental Drag x Drive, which might have been a cult hit if hadn’t been so utterly devoid of content that you could see all there was to see within a couple of hours. Does Nintendo really not employ enough people that they couldn’t have whisked up a quick single-player mode or a proper tournament structure? Or, you know, used any colour other than dark grey for the graphics.

Why did the marketing for Yoshi And the Mysterious Book make it seem like a game for pre-schoolers when it’s actually one of the most inventive and open-ended platformers Nintendo has put out for years, and much better suited to adult players than anyone else.

And how is it that of all the games Nintendo has released in the last year a Minecraft clone by the makers of Hyrule Warriors turned out to be the most compelling? That certainly wasn’t on our bingo card and it clearly wasn’t on Nintendo’s either, who were caught out by the success of Pokémon Pokopia and have been scrambling to leverage it ever since.

One of the most encouraging annoucement this year (not that there have been many of any type) was the reveal of Pokémon Winds and Waves, which does look like a generational leap from Scarlet and Violet. Having that next year does seem a useful anchor but the overriding problem with the Switch 2’s line-up is the mystifying logic behind how Nintendo has been prioritising its various franchises.

Kirby Air Riders is one thing but why on earth is Star Fox deemed so important all of a sudden, such that it was shore-horned into the Mario Galaxy movie, of all things? A decision that takes on reality-bending levels of bizarreness when you realise that Nintendo hasn’t yet breathed a word about a new Super Mario game since before the Switch 2 was announced.

Why are we a year in and there’s still no sign of Splatoon 4 and instead it has to wait in the queue behind a primarily single-player spin-off? And why was a new Fire Emblem announced so early on when we still haven’t heard anything about far more mainstream games, like a new Animal Crossing?

Not furnishing Mario Kart World with constant updates is one thing but we felt sure that the reason support for Animal Crossing: New Horizons – the breakout hit of the entire franchise – was cut short was so the team could get a new game ready for early on in the Switch 2’s career, so that it could benefit from new content throughout the whole of the console’s life. But instead Nintendo announced a Switch 2 Edition that adds almost nothing of note and implies a new game is several years away.

Nintendo not making sense might seem like their natural state of being, but in reality everything they do is perfectly logical, from their point of view, and only becomes so to others over time. The Switch 2 has been stretching credulity since the beginning though, to the point where everything feels like they switched to Plan B sometime in 2024 and they’ve been on that track ever since.

Even if sales at Christmas were less than hoped for, the Switch 2 is still the fastest-selling console of all-time and well ahead of where the Switch was at the same time in its lifetime. But you could tell the Switch 1 was special before its first Christmas, with a GOAT launch window line-up that Switch 2 hasn’t come close to matching.

The changing nature of game development may make the Switch 1’s achievements impossible to repeat (especially given the boost it got from being able to use Wii U ports to fill gaps in its schedule and provide a cast iron classic of a launch title) but that still makes it impossible not to be at least a little disappointed with the Switch 2.

We’ve long ago learnt not to try and predict Nintendo, or believe any rumours about them, even if the one about a Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake is very persistent. Who knows what they’ll announce next week, if there even is a Direct next week, but while we’d welcome a modernised version of Ocarina Of Time as much as anyone, what we really crave is something new, in terms of both IP and gameplay ideas.

Nintendo always delivers eventually but they’ve certainly not made it easy waiting for that to happen with the Switch 2, which continues to be a great console supported by a merely good games line-up. Other publishers would be happy with far less but the problem with Nintendo’s reputation is that they’ve trained people to always expect the best thing ever, and this time that hasn’t happened. Or at least not yet.

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