My first impression of seeing the Switch 2 was probably like yours. Mumble mumble, continue, experience mumble mumble. You may be more relatable than I am, and I’m sorry for that.
However, when the appropriate sentence began to form for me, the first thing was something like: this will be a strange thing that is not a strange game. And that’s the difference? Then: this doesn’t feel like a next generation of hardware as much as it feels like… a sequel.
Has there ever been a real hardware device before? Not a follow-up, not a successor, not a change of dialogue in a new and exciting way: a proper sequel. I think the closest I can remember was probably the move from the NES to the SNES. Continuity is important, but this time it’s all you already know that you like to do SUPER. Perhaps the easiest in all video games. And what a new machine that is. But it seems bracingly new. Four face buttons, shoulders, type 7. Not, in my mind, a sequel.
Change 2 is a continuation. Yes, the name makes this clear, but just look at the machine. It follows the classic law, as outlined by Cliff Bleszinski: Bigger, better, more badass. It’s the main form you see, most of the content you see, and the tweaks, outside of the big ones, are subtle. Magnets for Joy-Cons, a suitable place in the place of the small bicycle kickstand the Switch has.
This made me think: I am not against this. Not at all. And I already know that because there is a place for sequels, I just didn’t really think about it before.
Usually I tell myself that I’m against sequels, but that’s because I still think about the first sequels I come across, which are movies. (Back to the Future doesn’t count, BTW – all three are perfect.) Sequels in movies are often sneered at, and so are sequels in games etc. too, all struck by the same sneery brush. But there is an important difference. Most movies are about stories, and stories tend to end in very different ways. It can be a real pain to think about the story again when you’ve done everything so carefully. But games are about machines a lot of the time, and machines don’t end the same stories do. You can go back, tweaking, subverting, finding things you forgot that make themselves new mechanics and new joys and whatnot.
Then there’s another thing the designer told me: at the end of the game, you’re really good. You are doing so well.
Back to Switch. Buying a wild new Nintendo machine would be good? That’s right. I can remember sitting in bed one morning and reading about the Wii after it was introduced and trying to figure it out, and that was brilliant. But it’s also a classic Nintendo idea to sequelise something like the Switch. And this is for a handful of reasons. As hardware, the Switch is innovative in a way that allows designers to create new things from it – I’m thinking here of the late game concept of combining the different screens together with swipe of the finger – but it is also real. It’s so good. It’s out of the way, in which it allows you to play it wherever you want to go, and it also gives you a clear path to it as a player. You don’t need Wii time, which a former editor once called “learning to eat with a knife and fork again, but differently.”
What I got was still being able to live in Switch, so tweaking things and improving things in ways that I wouldn’t even pretend to understand. It feels hyper-evolved, in that it gives you to play where you need the least fuss. And it reminds me of the technology that has always been talked about with Nintendo. It’s not that the technology is old and cheap as much as the company sees old and cheap tech that has ideas and potential lurking in it that hasn’t been tapped yet.
So, Switch 2? Yes please. And while I wait I’m going to rewatch Back to the Future 2 and remember how great the sequel can be.
