Let’s face it: theNintendo Switchis boring.
Counterpoint: No It Isn’t
Not the actual hardware. The two-in-one gimmick remains a fantastic idea. I’ve always preferred playing my games portably, and the Switch made it possible to experience console-quality games in the palm of my hands.
When you want to play with other people, having the option to use it on the TV is great, too, as is the option to play with the detached Joy-Cons while on-the-go. From a hardware perspective, it’s as well-designed a console as I’ve ever seen, with the Big N showing clear foresight on how to make a system that would work in any situation, anywhere you needed to take it.
I’m also not talking about the games.The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,Super Mario Odyssey,Tears of the Kingdom, andSuper Smash Bros. Ultimateare among the best gamesNintendohas ever produced, third-party triple-A games likeThe Witcher 3andDoomare a cool addition too, while indie games likeStardew ValleyandHollow Knightkept the console busy between big first-party releases. You’d be hard pressed to find a library as impressive as the Switch, and that would ring true whether or not it was a hybrid machine.
Not to mention that its library eventually grew to include nearly every first-party game released on theWii U.
It’s one of the all-time great consoles, with a stellar library, and its status as the third best-selling console of all-time is reflective of that. But there’s one area where the Switch fell down on the job: its UI is boring as hell.
The Wii Made Menus Exciting
This might not stand out to you if the Switch was your first Nintendo console. After all, it gets the job done. It’s clear how to start a game, how to buy new games in the store, how to swap users, how to connect to Wi-Fi, all the basic stuff. Though it doesn’t have themes like the PS4, the PS5 doesn’t have those anymore either, so who cares? The Switch is a platform for games, and the games are great, so why does anything else need to matter?
Well, it matters because Nintendo set a higher standard for itself. TheWii— Nintendo’s first console to have a home screen — showed how much fun the experience of interacting with a console could be. Miis were the most obvious example, with Nintendo letting you make cartoon versions of yourself, your family, and friends, then play as them in Wii Sports and other games. I spent hours and hours making everyone I knew (and plenty of fictional characters, too) in the Mii channel. On the Switch, these aren’t available anymore, and if they are, they tend to be locked to specific games and never representative of the console’s identity as a whole.
The Wii was also absolutely loaded with original music tracks that made the console feel like more than a piece of tech. It had music for the home screen, it had music for its shop, music for uploading photos, and several instrumentals for its weather app alone. In fact, there’s a Wii Channels playlist on Nintendo Music and it has23 tracksfor57 minutesof music. That’s nearly as much music as Metroid Prime (25 tracks, 1 hour and 2 minutes) and more than Ocarina of Time (37 tracks, 56 minutes). Nintendo treated the console itself like a game, and that extended from the hardware design to the bouncy tracks that enhanced the experience of using it.
By contrast, the Switch is dull, sterile. It has clean menus that get the job done, but that Nintendo spirit of play is absent. If theSwitch 2is just going to be “the Switch, but better,” I hope that it takes that mission statement as a mandate to bring fun back to the most mundane moments of using a console: scrolling through menus.
