Come on, Nintendo, "Switch 2sday" was right there and you blew it. Sega had this shit sorted back in the '90s… although given the trajectory they took shortly afterwards, probably best not to take too many cues from them on the hardware front.
Anyway. Yes! It is the Nintendo Switch 2 launch day and I have been fortunate enough to get one on launch day. I ordered from Argos when pre-orders first went up, and I was half-expecting my order to be cancelled. But no! It arrived mid-afternoon today, so I went through the whole "transfer" process from my original Switch, and I've been happily enjoying Mario Kart World and Ridge Racer this evening.
I'm going to write something more substantial about both of those games over on MoeGamer at some point in the very near future, so I thought today I'd talk a little about my initial experiences with the Switch 2 in general.
Overall, my impressions have been very positive. Outside of the thing refusing to connect to my Wi-Fi on one side of my study (a problem that is by no means exclusive to the Switch 2), everything has gone pretty much as smoothly as you would ever want.
If you're upgrading from an original Switch, there's a straightforward transfer process you can run. This involves putting the two consoles physically close to one another, presumably so they can establish a direct wireless connection between one another, and then triggering the transfer process from both ends, perhaps with a login or two along the way depending on how you have your accounts set up. It even asked for the microSD card from the original Switch to transfer over captured screenshots and videos.
When it was finished (about 15-20 minutes later), all of my saves, settings and account details had been transferred over to the Switch 2, and the Switch 2 made a start on redownloading all the digital software I had on my original Switch. This was fine for my purposes, though those who have larger digital libraries may have run into issues, since the largest microSD Express card you can get for Switch 2 (and it will only take microSD Express, except for the aforementioned screenshot library transfer process) is 256GB. OG Switch, meanwhile, would happily take 512GB or more.
The auto-download thing was fine, but for some reason it did stop partway through and didn't resume. I assume this is because I started doing something that talked to online — that's what generally happened with downloads on the original Switch — but I would have expected it to start downloading again afterwards. This didn't happen. Not a huge issue, since I can easily manually redownload anything I want to put back on the system, because the icons for those pieces of software are there, but it would have been nice for that to be fully automated.
One of the biggest upgrades is to the eShop. No longer a slow, annoying mess to navigate, the Switch 2's eShop seems perfectly functional, and it already has some hentai shovelware games ready to go. So the curation issue isn't exactly solved, but the painful user experience side of things is, at least, fixed now.
I briefly fired up the new Gamecube app you get with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and boy, those games sure do look lovely all HD-ified. I'm looking forward to having a play with Soul Calibur II and F-Zero GX in particular; I'm in no hurry to replay Wind Waker, meanwhile, since I played the Wii U version a few years back and while I enjoyed it, I also don't have much desire to play it again just yet.
Handheld, the screen looks lovely. While not OLED, it's bright, large and smooth. Games look great on it. I haven't tried any original Switch titles on it as yet, but Switch 2 stuff looked pin-sharp and super-slick. It's also a bit bigger than the original Switch, meaning it'll probably be more comfortable to play more complex games in handheld mode than the original Switch was. I will likely still keep it connected to the TV for the vast majority of the time, but I feel more inclined to play handheld with that lovely screen than I do the original Switch. No shade on those who primarily played OG Switch handheld; I just preferred the TV experience by quite a considerable margin.
Thus far, then, I'm happy with my purchase. I still have plenty of concerns about things like Game Key Cards, software prices and suchlike, but we'll see how things pan out long-term. I do find myself wondering if Nintendo will be able to capture the same lightning in a bottle that the original Switch was — historically speaking, they've tended to follow an astronomical success (Game Boy, SNES, Wii) with anything from middling-to-solid commercial performance (N64, Gamecube) to catastrophic failure (Virtual Boy, Wii U), so it will be interesting to see where Switch 2 falls on that spectrum… or if it will continue a run of good luck for the company.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter. I have one, I like it and I'm looking forward to playing with it some more. So I'm going to do just that before I head to bed. Mario Kart World calls me!
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