The Nintendo Switch 2 Direct featuring both the new system’s toolkit and announced titles for the coming year received a somewhat muted reception according to my home’s four-person survey. My youngest was wowed by Mario Kart World and thrilled about an open world to explore, and thought the addition of GameCube for Nintendo Switch Online was “neat”. My oldest son was interested in the voice and video chat features but lamented that he knows no one interested in a new Switch, saying “I guess I could just facetime them” with a look of disappointment. Both were bored to tears for most of it, making me fast-forward through a litany of announcements that were meant for nerds like me. The end announcements of Kirby Air Riders and Donkey Kong Bonanza deflated their balloons completely, with questions of “Why wasn’t 3D Mario here?” and my oldest telling me “I’ve wasted two hours between last week’s Direct and this one”. Welcome to Nintendo fandom, kid.

With post Nintendo Direct-clarity, I can’t help but reflect on the transition from the Wii to Wii U. Nintendo has a long-standing focus not only on what you play, but HOW you play. The Wii was a tectonic shift in how people played games and lowered the barrier for a wider, more casual audience to grasp and rewarded Nintendo with their second-best selling console to date. The Wii U with its gamepad was a control scheme that was in some ways ahead of its time but was used more as a complementary tool to more conventional gameplay experiences, ultimately losing the magic promised in the advertising material and reverting back to the mean. The Nintendo Switch being an all-encompassing console that can seamlessly transition from TV to handheld, with its “play anywhere” pitch and the iconic Joy-Con click reimagined how gaming can fit into people’s day-to-day life and the offered in-the-box multiplayer, if challenging for people with big ol’ mitts. A saying often misattributed to Mark Twain goes “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”, and what we’ve seen so far from the Switch 2 reveals another attempt of recapturing a genie in the bottle.

Swiss Army Console

A big focus for both the Wii U and Switch 2 has been a Swiss-army console approach. Nintendo knew the shadow Wii cast on its next console, with how many families had a pile of Wii Remotes, Nunchucks, Balance Boards, and so many plastic golf club and wheel accessories. With that, they announced that all of these would be compatible with the Wii U, and many games even offered motion control options for those wanting to keep their waggling arm strong. Over time, control options went off the deep end, with Smash Bros for Wii U allowing Gamepad, Pro Controller, Wii Remote, GameCube controllers, and even 3DS options if you’re a glutton for punishment. It was a subliminal admission that the Wii U would be a harder sell for the bigger “blue ocean” owners of the Wii, and an attempt to make an upgrade purchase easier to swallow for those who were asked to buy a $40.00 remote, $20 nunchuck, $20 classic controller, and Wii Motion+, multiplied by however many people wanted to play Wii Sports & Resort. Nintendo learned a hard lesson – you can’t be everything to everyone. Many attribute the miniscule name change for people’s perception that the Wii U was just a tablet, but it’s Nintendo’s indecision in picking a controller lane that made people wonder what they were pitching.

Being a true console sequel, Switch 2 attempts to pull off the same trick. Some of the new joycon’s unique features are quite cool (Hello, mouse controls!), there’s a bit of refinement for comfort and durability (Bye, Joy-Con drift!), but otherwise they are functionally close to the originals. Both the Joy-Con and the Pro Controllers share the addition of a C button which gambles on social features that haven’t shown to be a lynchpin to core game features yet. The Pro Controller hews to the industry standard layout (with one aggravatingly small difference to Xbox’s button designations) that is common tongue to players by now. Features like game sharing among multiple consoles in the same location do offer a more complicated control structure, but it’s a special feature, not the main attraction. The conglomeration of these controller formats has made the hardware backwards-compatibility more of a logical extension of the prior generation rather than a grasping for the past like the Wii U did.

Socially Awkward

The Wii U generation also saw Nintendo stepping foot into social features, attempting to build a walled garden mirroring the popular social media platforms of its time. Miiverse was a quirky image message board, both having its own forum-like topic pages for games (Funky Barn was a particularly silly hotspot) as well as in-game integration, like replies to Mario Maker levels. Their approach to moderation was three-pronged: word filters, user flagging of inappropriate comments, and a moderation team of unfortunate souls working at Nintendo who had to witness the horrors of human creation. Lewd drawings of Splatoon characters in compromising positions, skirting text filters with random symbols, and a metric ton of phallic drawings meant learning the lesson internet forum and reddit moderators learned years prior – content moderation is hard, time consuming, and thankless work. Having these scars led to the closure of Miiverse, paring it down to separate in-game analogous experiences, and a Nintendo Switch decidedly pared down in social features with a minimalist UI design. Wii U also had a built-in camera with the gamepad, which had occasional in-game integration as well as a Zoom or Facetime-like web call feature that largely fell on deaf ears (or blind eyes?) because of the console’s meager customer base.

Switch 2, much like the Wii U, employs social features that mirror today’s landscape. In a world of Discord channels where you can group up with friends to chat and share your screen while playing, Nintendo once again superimposed industry standards with their own shade of red. They’re more than happy to sell you a camera for the full-fledged streamer experience if your game group is missing that “body superimposed on gameplay with a pseudo green screen” feeling. But in pure Nintendo fashion, they have a missed opportunity to offer Twitch streaming integration similarly to how Xbox’s tools allow. Like the Wii U, it’s going into the pool missing the stairs on the way down and belly flopping. Theoretically, all the pieces are there for it to be feasible, barring technical limitations of the console I’m not quite aware of. But a key differentiator is where the onus lies for managing the user experience. Wii U had Nintendo as the gatekeeper of its social features, with all the ills associated. The player is responsible for maintaining friends lists and how often you deal with those friend’s antics. It’s a different, smaller walled garden of your making, and that ultimately is one of the most sensible choices Nintendo has made in reimagining what social features can and should be.

The Couch Co-Op Anywhere Experience

Tying into the subparallel between the two, both Switch 2 and Wii U tried to extend what it means to retain and envision an environment that encourages playing together. Wii U came at a time when Sony and Microsoft had both shifted the focus of multiplayer, understanding the players that once sat on the couch together had grown up, moved distances from each other, and entered adult life with all the obligations that eat up hours of the day. Nintendo saw this from the sidelines during the Wii with its extremely limited online multiplayer gameplay, but its success in keeping in-person multiplayer was thanks to its approachability and common tongue of people using remotes as an interface. Wii U’s clever pivot to asynchronous multiplayer was novel and in some ways ahead of its time now that games like Dead by Daylight have found healthy audiences, but without the ubiquity of Nintendo’s “A Wii in Every Living Room”. The one-to-one translation of the average person’s understanding of sports to swinging a Wii Remote at the screen turned it into an ordeal to not only know someone that had the system, but also a learning curve to teach others how to play and sell the experience as worth the investment.

Switch 2’s position is more than a half-measure in meeting the moment of multiplayer. Tariff-based cost-increase grievances aside, the ability to pop on a camera when playing Mario Party with friends turns it from an anemic experience to a chance to get their real-time visual expressions as you take away a star or coins from the person in last place. In a recent Switch 2 ad, we had the pleasure of Paul Rudd reprising his role as ‘90s gamer to show off some unrealistic G-rated smack talk while playing Mario Kart World with friends. For nerds like me, the smartest feature is being in these groups while each playing different games, and the ability to share what you’re doing with your friends either as an audience or looking for help. During my Saturday nights in college, you’d commonly find me in a living room with two TVs, with a different game being played on each. How great will it be to be in a chat room with friends and being asked why I’m playing Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts for the hundredth time?

No free pack-in game? In this economy?!?

I don’t think the Wii would have been as successful as it ultimately became without the inclusion of Wii Sports in the box. Putting aside Reggie Fils-Aime’ assertions that he ultimately deserves praise for this decision, the $250 package effortlessly showed off its potential to anyone with eyes and the ability to swing their arm. The contents in the box were filled with such value that it led to articles about how many owners didn’t buy any other games, as well as anecdotes that those at Nintendo felt the retail price was too low given how difficult it was to get them on the shelves for a time. The Wii U had the aforementioned, unenviable task of teaching those who grew up with the Wii how to frame their mindset about its handheld tablet and ideas of how to use them. From my seat, Nintendoland is their best pack-in game since Super Mario World. Even with the inconsistent experiences between their different minigames, the compilation felt like a celebration of the console’s launch and clever ideas, even if they teased me by making an F-Zero minigame after years of drought.

Comparably, Nintendo has bungled the pack-in situation with Switch 2, full stop. Switch made this choice too, opting to sell the closest thing to it, 1-2 Switch, at a whopping $50. This title was a bizarrely themed mix of FMV snippets and haphazard minigames that tried and failed to sell features like “HD Rumble”. That said, Switch was a case where the value of the system was inherent in its form and function and less specific control features. Switch 2 still has that play on TV or on-the-go feature, but now it’s old hat. The Switch click doesn’t have that Pavlovian response of “this is new and cool”. Because so much of the Switch 2 Direct focused more on software features than hardware ones, it’s inexplicable that Switch 2 Welcome Tour doesn’t come pre-installed on the device. If it’s meant to be a tutorial of the system’s features, it should be included at no charge. If it’s meant to show off clever ideas of how to use the control scheme, it should be packed in. Irrespective of the modest $10 price, the point is to onboard the new player and be a fun interactive user manual – why wouldn’t you want to hand the keys to the owner? It’s also in the shadow of the PlayStation 5’s Astro Bot pack-in, a polished and fun platformer that’s a love letter to their hardware and software history, and in so many ways they give players the chance to taste the different bells and whistles of their haptic feedback controllers. They’ve got to sell these things; if “a new, more powerful one of these” isn’t enough of a sales pitch, then they’re in for a bad time.

Same song, different verse.

I don’t profess to have insider knowledge, but I do have a business background and a window’s view from the vantage point of someone who has followed Nintendo news beat-by-beat since finding Nintendo World Report near the twilight years of the Wii. A truth I learned a long time ago is never count Nintendo out from following-up a wildly successful piece of hardware with an iterative piece of tech that doesn’t meet the moment. Switch 2 is in a better position to find its stride and be a successful hardware generation, even if I think it’s more likely it’ll be a slower adoption than its parent. It being “the-Switch-but-better” may be enough to skirt by the identity crisis the Wii U had, with controller backwards compatibility being a tangled web of confusion compared to the straightforward, unchanged control scheme between Switches. But if it's just “another one of these”, how does Nintendo elevate it from a nice-but-expensive purchase to a must have for the family? I don’t think they’ve made that clear, and it’s an echo of their last big failure. I’ll reiterate “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”, because it won’t be long before we see how close this song and verse sounds to the prior baton-passing disaster.