Nintendo Switch

Hardware Type: Hybrid Console

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Review:

With the Nintendo Switch 2 releasing soon, I thought it would be a good idea to go back and review a few of the basic pieces of hardware associated with the original Nintendo Switch, eight years after the console first launched. How have they held up?

Of course, the piece of hardware most-associated with the Nintendo Switch is… well, the Nintendo Switch itself. Released in 2017, the Nintendo Switch came packed in with a pair of Joy-Con Controllers, a Joy-Con Grip, a pair of Joy-Con Straps, and a Nintendo Switch Dock and AC Adapter, with no software bundled in at launch. The Nintendo Switch would see three hardware revisions in its lifetime – a stealth release in 2019 of new model HAC-001(-01) which used a more efficient chipset for improved battery life, the smaller portable-only Nintendo Switch Lite also released in 2019, and the Nintendo Switch OLED model in 2021 with an improved screen, more internal memory, an improved kickstand, and a redesigned dock. However, as it pertains to the hardware of the Nintendo Switch, this review is specifically for the launch model Nintendo Switch.

As I am not a tech expert, I cannot comment on the specific details of the hardware architecture and programming of the software of the Nintendo Switch. I can only comment on the end-user experience. So let’s look at that, shall we?

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Out of the Ashes

The Nintendo Switch comes on the heels of the disastrous Wii U console, which suffered from poor sales due to multiple factors, and it can be argued that the Nintendo Switch was in many ways an answer to the complaints that people had about the Wii U. The big one being a relative lack of games and specifically big, groundbreaking games in franchises like the 3D Mario games and the Legend of Zelda franchise, as well as other franchises like the mainline Kirby series, Animal Crossing, Mario Golf, Fire Emblem, Luigi’s Mansion, Metroid… yeah, when you start to list out the big Nintendo franchises that were no-shows on Wii U, its failure only becomes clearer. Not so on Nintendo Switch, though I’ll get more in-depth on this later.

Another issue with the Wii U was unclear branding, but that was never an issue with Nintendo Switch, which not only freed itself from the “Wii” name, but made it clear in its name that this was a game console built on its central concept, its “Switch” between portable mode to docked mode. Which points to yet another Wii U complaint – that the central tablet of that system seemed like it would be ideal to remove and take with you, but the Wii U wasn’t built to support any such feature. The Nintendo Switch, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up to be a hybrid console, not only replacing the Wii U, but also the Nintendo 3DS.

Ah yes, the Nintendo 3DS. Nintendo’s previous handheld system still hung on for a little while after the Nintendo Switch was released, even getting some major games like Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Metroid: Samus Returns, and Pokemon Ultra Moon and Ultra Sun. However, within a year of the launch of the Nintendo Switch, the writing was on the wall for the Nintendo 3DS, and after two and a half years the number of new releases on Nintendo 3DS slowed to a trickle.

Nintendo’s prior platforms all fell by the wayside after the launch of the Nintendo Switch. So let’s have a closer look at what would become the future for Nintendo, now that we have the benefit of hindsight.

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Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons and Dock

The Nintendo Switch itself is a combination of multiple components, as I noted above. It’s difficult to think of the Nintendo Switch as a platform without also including the pair of Joy-Con controllers and Switch dock as well, as the actual Nintendo Switch itself is rarely seen without one or both of those other devices.

The design of the Nintendo Switch is pretty ingenious, allowing players to instantly swap between handheld play and play on a TV using the dock, and the removable Joy-Cons gave users an instantly-accessible controller or pair of controllers to use with the Switch itself, depending on how you used them.

I went further in-depth on each of these individual accessories in their individual reviews, but since you can’t really separate those pieces of hardware from the overall topic of the Nintendo Switch itself, I’ll briefly touch on them here.

The short version is, while each of these elements was a clever and creative way to deliver on the concept of a hybrid platform, with tons of potential for versatility, in practice they were kinda’ a mess. The Joy-Con controllers were small and uncomfortable for many to hold, especially when you were using each as its own controller. They lacked analog triggers, had lacking motion controls compared to the Wii remotes, and they’re the poster child for one of the worst problems to plague the Nintendo Switch – “Joy-Con drift”. What’s more, both these Joy-Con controllers and additional docks were absurdly expensive.

While I know many Nintendo fans have fond thoughts of the Nintendo Switch itself, the accessories that were an important part of what made the Nintendo Switch what it was were good ideas executed poorly. And as for the Nintendo Switch hardware itself…

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Nintendo Switch Hardware

The Nintendo Switch is pushing the limits of what can be considered a handheld far more than any prior Nintendo portable device. Unlike prior Nintendo handhelds, the Nintendo Switch is far too large to fit in the pocket. And while other subsequent portable devices like the Steam Deck, the ROG Ally, and Nintendo’s own Nintendo Switch OLED Model and Nintendo Switch 2 all take things even farther with bigger and bulkier hardware, the original Nintendo Switch is still a device you’ll likely want a carrying case to house if you’re going to be bringing it out and about. The Nintendo Switch Lite version of the device addresses this issue somewhat, though at the expense of the ability to dock to a TV.

Without its Joy-Con controllers, the Nintendo Switch itself is little more than a tablet device with a 720P screen, complete with a capacitive touchscreen, as opposed to a pressure-based touchscreen, like what was in the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii U. The only buttons on the hybrid console itself are a power button and buttons to adjust the volume up and down, all located on the top edge of the Nintendo Switch, along with a headphone jack and a slot to pop in Nintendo Switch game cartridges. The bottom of the Nintendo Switch has a USB-C port, the only way to power the Nintendo Switch (via a dock or an AC adapter), with this port also potentially being used for a wired USB-C gamepad.

On the back of the device is a kickstand, a pretty terrible rubbery piece of plastic that does a poor job serving this function, difficult to pop away from the Nintendo Switch, far too easy to accidentally pull off of the system entirely, and only really adjustable to one position. Behind this is a slot for a MicroSD card, the only way to expand the Nintendo Switch’s memory.

Speaking of memory, the Nintendo Switch has 32GB of built-in memory, with further memory being added via that MicroSD Card (the Nintendo Switch OLED model has 64GB of internal memory). It needs to be mentioned that game saves and some expansion content for specific games can only be saved to internal memory, meaning that if you play a lot of games this space is at a premium. While this can be a good thing, since losing or trading away your game no longer means you lose your game save, it also means that transferring your save from one Nintendo Switch to another becomes a huge hassle, and partly for this reason Nintendo introduced a cloud save feature partway into the Nintendo Switch’s life, as a part of the Nintendo Switch Online service (more on this in a bit).

In terms of technical capabilities, I can only venture a rough estimation of the Nintendo Switch’s graphical and processing abilities, but I would estimate that it is about on par with the Wii U, if not a little bit more advanced. While this means the Nintendo Switch offered a graphical advancement that was negligible at best, it was still impressive for a handheld gaming device, at least when the Nintendo Switch was launched. However, this would place a huge restriction on multiplatform games releasing on Nintendo Switch, which would often need to see severe graphical limitations and cutbacks when being ported from other modern platforms, if they were ported at all.

Games that had 60FPS framerates on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One would routinely be slashed to 30FPS on Nintendo Switch. Many games never got ported to Nintendo Switch at all. And then there was the odd phenomenon of “cloud games”, titles that were streamed to Nintendo Switch from an online server rather than playing on the console natively. This latter trend was one many Nintendo Switch owners would strive to avoid, as not only did these games’ need to be tethered to an internet connection run counter to the idea of a game platform whose entire point was the ability to pick it up and play on the go, but the resulting input lag made them worse to play, yet they were still priced the same as games you had on your actual game console.

Players who preferred to stick to physical games instead of going digital also faced frustrations. The high cost for publishers associated with Nintendo Switch game cards meant that many publishers only included a small portion of the game on a game cartridge, requiring a download for the rest. Other publishers didn’t even include a game cartridge at all, simply including an eShop download code in the box, making these physical releases not really physical at all. Of course, that leads me to the eShop…

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Nintendo Switch eShop

The Nintendo Switch’s version of the eShop, the platform’s digital storefront, is… well, it’s an absolute mess. Retaining the same Nintendo accounts that were on the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, the eShop did one thing right in maintaining a unified platform for players to be able to refer back to in order to track or re-download games that are all tied to their account rather than the console itself, but that’s about all it did right.

The Nintendo Switch eShop was pretty slow and clunky early on, and it only got worse with time. Long wait times for pages and icons to load, the inability to select and purchase multiple items at a time, and poor navigation all make this thing pretty terrible to use. But then on top of that, there’s the problem with all the junk crowding out the eShop.

At some point, publishers figured out that they could inflate their presence on the eShop by routinely putting their games on sale at rock-bottom prices. The high rate of sales that followed would ensure these games would be listed at the top of best-seller lists that determined what games the eShop would display to those viewing its shops. Nintendo revised this practice after a few years, making it so that these sales numbers didn’t count games sold for less than $2, but this just meant that these publishers changed their routine sales to $2, meaning this change accomplished nothing. In 2025, in the lead-up to the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo revised the eShop again, this time highlighting only games that had high sales in terms of dollar amounts. While this did succeed at de-prioritizing all the “shovelware” games dropping to $2 every other week, it also meant that indie game publishers would have a massive uphill battle to get their games noticed at all among the pricier “AAA” games.

This wasn’t the only issue with the eShop. Publishers like RedDeer.Games and Qubic Games started to get in the habit of cutting their games up into countless smaller pieces of free DLC, then packaging them in different configurations on the eShop, giving them an excuse to release the exact same game dozens of times. As a result, the eShop’s pages started to fill up with these games, muscling out other, original games in the process. Then there’s publishers like SC Ovilex Soft and Midnight Works, which included game descriptions and screenshots that didn’t actually depict the game being sold, as well as publishers like Pix Arts, who sold asset flips of Unity Store assets instead of actually creating games themselves.

To say that the Nintendo Switch eShop’s lack of proper curation is a problem is a massive understatement. Where “Joy-Con Drift” seemed to represent everything that was wrong with Nintendo Switch’s hardware, the eShop seemed to represent everything wrong about the software side of things. Oh, and just as an added bit of disappointment, the Nintendo Switch eShop didn’t even have the background music that the Wii, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS digital storefronts had, making it feel like it had a lot less personality.

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Nintendo Switch OS and Software Features

Speaking of a lack of personality, let’s talk about the Nintendo Switch OS itself. Unlike the Nintendo 3DS, which had plenty of fun themes, the Nintendo Switch only ever had its “light” and “dark” themes. And while the Wii, Wii U, and Nintendo 3DS all offered players the ability to create folders to sort their games, the Nintendo Switch had nothing of the sort, only throwing players a bone with “groups” multiple years into the Nintendo Switch’s lifespan. These groups could be accessed from the All Software menu.

Speaking of the “All Software” menu, as someone who owns literally thousands of Nintendo Switch games, I can say that this menu is a nightmare to navigate when you own a significant number of games. These icons load slowly, cannot be searched (they can only be sorted, and by a limited number of criteria), and due to a design flaw of the Nintendo Switch, once you own more than 2000 games, they disappear entirely from this menu, unable to be downloaded or accessed until you delete games. To be fair, I am sure I am in the extreme minority here when it comes to struggling with this issue, but I will say I struggle with it a lot.

I already mentioned the Nintendo Switch’s frustrating requirement that games be saved to internal memory, but over time having numerous save files causes this memory to get massively bogged down, to the point where I have to wait literally fifteen minutes between deleting each save file I want to get rid of because of how long it takes to load. Again, not an issue most gamers will face, but it has been an absolute nightmare for me.

In 2025, Nintendo introduced “Digital Game Cards”, a feature to let players more easily share digital games, though “more easily” needs to be used in quotations there, because the number of requirements and conditions that come with this feature is pretty significant. And just to make matter worse, this eliminated a previous way players could share games on Nintendo Switch via swapping accounts, a method that was odd and unintuitive, but endorsed by Nintendo themselves.

I suppose I should also add here that Nintendo Switch continued support for Amiibo figurines and Mii custom characters that were introduced in prior hardware generations, though these were largely an afterthought – support for Amiibo figurines in first-party Nintendo games was spotty at best, and there were only a small handful of games that made use of Mii characters.

I should also mention that support for bluetooth headphones was only added in a later firmware patch, yet another afterthought for a feature that probably should have been included at launch since this is, after all, a portable device.

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Nintendo Switch Online

For the first year or so, Nintendo Switch’s online functionality was… pretty much just that, just online functionality. Games that could be played online… played online. Simple, easy. However, Nintendo warned players that things wouldn’t remain like this indefinitely.

A year and a half into the Nintendo Switch’s lifespan, Nintendo introduced Nintendo Switch Online, and this was both a good thing and a bad thing. Let’s start with the bad – for the first time ever, Nintendo was now charging gamers for the privilege to play their games online. To be fair, Microsoft and Sony platforms long ago started charging players to play games online, and Nintendo’s $20/year fee was much less than either competitor, but it was still a disappointing change in one area where Nintendo had always previously been generous to their players.

They had good reason to be generous too, as Nintendo was generally known as having pretty terrible online play on their platforms, and this remained the case even after Nintendo Switch Online’s introduction. Well, terrible some of the time, at least – it really depended on the game – games like Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe had excellent online play, while games like Super Mario Maker 2 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate were so bad to play online that many saw them as virtually unplayable.

However, Nintendo tried to sell Nintendo Switch Online as a positive thing, and one way they did so was by offering cloud saves… though not on every game. Some games, like Animal Crossing: New Horizons would require an overly-complicated system transfer process just to move the game to a new Nintendo Switch platform, while other games would allow you to save directly to cloud storage easily and without any issue. The inconsistency was baffling.

Really, there was one positive to offset all of this negative, and this was the Nintendo Switch Online legacy apps. Starting with a Nintendo Entertainment System app, Nintendo offered as a perk of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription an app that included numerous games from the Nintendo Entertainment System to play for as long as the player was subscribed to the service. While it didn’t include a huge wealth of games at first, new games were slowly added at a trickle to the service, over time building up this library. After a while, the Super Nintendo platform was added, and then the Game Boy platform (which also includes Game Boy Color), also building up their game libraries at a slow trickle. Now in 2025, that $20/year seems like an absolute bargain given the number of games this includes – currently there are 78 Nintendo Entertainment System games, 73 Super Nintendo Entertainment System games, and 38 Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.

It wasn’t just legacy apps, either. Nintendo Switch Online subscribers gained access to a selection of games at no additional cost, games like Tetris 99, Super Mario Bros. 35, Pac-Man 99, and F-Zero 99, games that had players facing off against numerous opponents in retro-style titles.

Partway into Nintendo Switch’s life, a second “tier” of Nintendo Switch Online was introduced, the Expansion Pack. Costing an extra $30 per year, this more expensive version of Nintendo Switch Online wouldn’t include any additional online functionality. Instead, it would enable access to new retro apps for Nintendo 64 (and later the N64 Mature 17+ version), Game Boy Advance, and eventually Sega Genesis, with an additional GameCube app available to subscribers of this tier on Nintendo Switch 2. Currently, there are 34 games available on the Nintendo 64 app (plus four more on the N64 Mature 17+ app), 25 games on the Game Boy Advance app, and 50 games on the Sega Genesis app.

In addition, those who paid for the Expansion Pack would have free access (for the duration of their subscription) to otherwise paid DLC for games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, with Nintendo Switch 2 owners who subscribe to this tier getting free upgrade packs for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

While it took a while to build up, I would argue that both tiers of Nintendo Switch Online ended up being more than worth the price for entry due to the value of the content they enabled access to. I just… don’t think that value had much at all to do with actual online functionality, even though Nintendo made Nintendo Switch Online a requirement to play Nintendo Switch games online (save for free-to-play games, which don’t require any subscription).

And after all that, it’s time to finally talk about the games.

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Nintendo First-Party Games

If there’s one area a Nintendo game system needs to get right, it’s the first-party games. I’ve already noted that failing this was one of the things that led to the downfall of the Wii U, but even beyond past successes or failures, this has become what sets Nintendo apart from more powerful competing systems – many gamers got either a PlayStation or Xbox console for Call of Duty or Madden, but when you get a Nintendo system, you’re getting it first and foremost to play games featuring Mario, Zelda, and Nintendo’s other first-party franchises.

Nintendo came out strong right out of the gate both with its launch and its first year overall. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is widely regarded as one of the greatest games of all time (a sentiment I agree with), and in the year that followed the Nintendo Switch received numerous major first-party games like Super Mario Odyssey, Splatoon 2, and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Over the years, this stream of games has ebbed and flowed somewhat, but I would argue that it has overall been pretty steady, and I would further argue that as Sony and Microsoft entered their latest generations of hardware with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo’s output of great first-party games has far exceeded the first-party output of both of those competitors combined.

However, it’s not just quantity that’s impressive, it’s quality. Not only has Nintendo revisited most of its franchises with new games, but in many cases these are in contention for the greatest games ever released in their own series. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom are both strong contenders for “best Zelda game ever made”, Super Mario Odyssey is a contender for best 3D Mario game, Super Mario Party Jamboree is my pick for greatest Mario Party game of all-time, Luigi’s Mansion 3 is possibly the best in its series, Animal Crossing: New Horizon is a contender for best game in its series (though New Leaf fans may argue otherwise), Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is arguably the greatest game in its franchise (Melee fans notwithstanding), Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Pikmin 4, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Splatoon 3, Bayonetta 3, New Pokemon Snap… the list just keeps going on.

Then there’s the entirely new games, like Astral Chain, Ring Fit Adventure, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle and Sparks of Hope…

Okay, look. There was a version of this review where I tried to detail, briefly, every great first-party game on Nintendo Switch, just giving each game a single sentence. That section would have lasted thirteen paragraphs long. So yeah… some really great first-party games.

And to be fair, some stinkers as well. I don’t think many people will look back fondly on 1-2 Switch and its sequel, most of the Mario Sports games were generally seen as middling, and if it wasn’t for Pokemon Legends Arceus, New Pokemon Snap, and Pokken Tournament DX, this generation would be seen as outright miserable for the Pokemon franchise.

Plus, for every franchise brought to its peak this generation, there are still some that were left behind. No new Donkey Kong games. No Star Fox (Starlink: Battle For Atlas is great, but not the same). No successor to F-Zero GX (F-Zero 99 is nice and all, but it’s not the same). No Pilotwings. No Nintendogs. No Wario Land. No Pushmo. No new Advance Wars game. No Kid Icarus, Chibi-Robo, or Earthbound. This is hardly a massive failure on the Nintendo Switch’s part – there hasn’t been any Nintendo platform that had all of those franchises make an appearance. But it’s still worth noting that for all that Nintendo Switch had going for it, there was still room for even more.

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Major Third-Party Games

First, yes, I should start by pointing out that some of the games I’ve already named are technically third-party, depending on what you consider that term to mean. Ubisoft developed and published the Mario + Rabbids games. Platinum Games developed the Bayonetta series and Astral Chain. Bandai Namco developed Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Pokken Tournament, and New Pokemon Snap. Omega Force and Team Ninja developed the Hyrule Warriors and Fire Emblem Warriors games. And then there’s the fact that neither HAL Laboratory nor Intelligent Systems are actually owned by Nintendo, even though they tend to develop exclusively for Nintendo platforms using Nintendo-owned IP. Same goes for Game Freak, makers of the mainline Pokemon games. I’ll just say that Nintendo has blurred the line between what is a first-party game and what is a third-party game.

However, moving on, we see the third-party situation on Nintendo Switch is both really amazing and also kinda’ disappointing. On the one hand, you have a few major developers creating outstanding games specifically for the Nintendo Switch… but you also have major third-party releases coming out on every major modern platform except the Nintendo Switch, due in part to the limited power of the Nintendo Switch hardware.

There are some absolutely massive games that released on other platforms but not Nintendo Switch – Cyberpunk 2077 and Elden Ring (both coming to Nintendo Switch 2), Grand Theft Auto V, Diablo IV, Baldur’s Gate III, Lies of P, Street Fighter V and VI (the latter coming to Nintendo Switch 2), Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (the former announced for Nintendo Switch 2). Plus entire franchises that skipped the Nintendo Switch, like Madden, Call of Duty, Like a Dragon, and every modern Assassin’s Creed game.

Some games did finally show up on Nintendo Switch, but far later than fans wanted, like the Batman Arkham games and the Persona series. Then you had games that were released on Nintendo Switch, but in pretty severely compromised form, like No Man’s Sky and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt. Make no mistake, these games are rightly called “impossible ports” due to how amazing it is that they work on Nintendo Switch at all, but they are still really rough compared to other versions of the game.

There’s also a nasty trend of games “released” on Nintendo Switch as “Cloud Versions”, such as Control, Resident Evil Village, and Kingdom Hearts Integrum Masterpiece. As mentioned before, this kinda’ runs counter to the whole point of the Nintendo Switch, since you can only play them while tethered to an internet connection, and even then you need to contend with a delay in the controls.

That said, some multiplatform games reached Nintendo Switch in inexplicably fine form. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim runs great on Nintendo Switch, Ori and the Blind Forest and its sequel are phenomenal on Nintendo Switch, Diablo III is a perfect fit for Nintendo Switch, Alien: Isolation is in many ways best on Nintendo Switch, Doom Eternal and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice work better than they have any right to on Nintendo Switch. There are indeed multiplatform success stories on Nintendo Switch, they’re just more uncommon than the alternative.

In addition, while it’s not the most common thing to find on Nintendo Switch, there are some third-party exclusives on the platform worth celebrating. Octopath Traveler, Bravely Default II, Monster Hunter Rise, and Shin Megami Tensei V are all major releases on Nintendo Switch, though most of these have since been ported to other platforms. In addition, Nintendo Switch versions of multiplatform games have also received exclusive features and content, such as Starlink: Battle for Atlas, Dragon Quest XI S, and Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition.

Of course, we’re just talking about games from major publishers, and we haven’t gotten to one of the biggest contributors to the Nintendo Switch game library…

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Indie Games

At this point, the Nintendo Switch is likely second only to PC as the platform for great indie games. If there’s a great indie game you want to play, odds are pretty good you can play it on Nintendo Switch, and there are some great indie games that released first on Nintendo Switch, or didn’t even release on other consoles at all.

Fast RMX, Hades, Vitamin Connection, Golf Story, Alekon, Cytus α, Voez, Baba is You, Dandy Dungeon, a huge library of great Visual Novel games like Jack Jeanne, Paranormasight, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Astrologaster, and If Found… and… I could keep going, but we’d be here for a while, because great indie games are a large part of the reason why the eShopperReviews page for Nintendo Switch Exclusive Games has literally hundreds of games listed… and that’s after I cut things off at games with a B- grade or better.

Now, it bears mention that Indie games have had an increasingly more difficult time getting noticed thanks to the terrible state of the Nintendo Switch eShop I’ve already commented on. But there is an absolute treasure trove of great games on Nintendo Switch, the likes of which the average player will likely never be able to get through in their lifetime.

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A Note on Pricing

One other thing I need to address here is the topic of pricing and value.

First, when it comes to the hardware of the Nintendo Switch itself, I think most people are generally fine with it. $300 for a standard Nintendo Switch (plus a dock, two Joy-Cons, a Joy-Con grip, and two Joy-Con wrist straps) seems decent enough, as does $200 for a Nintendo Switch Lite and $350 for a Nintendo Switch OLED model. We can complain that there was never a price drop for these platforms, and the most we ever got as far as a deal was a yearly Mario Kart bundle every holiday that tossed a digital copy of that game in with the base unit at no added cost, however this generation we’ve seen other game consoles actually rise in price, so compared to this the Nintendo Switch actually fares quite well.

This is less the case when we start to talk about accessories and games. Buying extra Joy-Cons or a more traditional Pro controller from Nintendo would cost an arm and a leg, and not only was an official Nintendo Switch dock expensive, but early on third-party docks frequently resulted in a power surge that destroyed your Nintendo Switch, meaning until third party hardware manufacturers got a handle on this issue, Nintendo essentially had a monopoly on this expensive piece of hardware. Likewise with its controllers, Nintendo seems to have clung onto some sort of proprietary knowledge that meant that it was many years before controllers could regularly wake the Nintendo Switch from sleep mode wirelessly, and even to this day it’s rare to find a third-party controller that can scan Amiibo figurines.

Then when it came to games, Nintendo was notoriously stingy, rarely putting their own first-party games on sale and never reducing their price permanently. What’s more, with third parties, we saw an alarming trend many gamers dubbed “the Switch tax”, where Nintendo Switch versions of a game would be significantly more expensive than other versions, often for seemingly no reason.

Because of these issues, even though the Nintendo Switch was the least expensive game platform to own, it ended up nevertheless being just as expensive if not more so once you factored in these added costs.

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In Conclusion

To some extent, it’s not quite right to give the Nintendo Switch a grade just yet, because it’s still going strong, with multiple potentially great games still on the horizon, games like Metroid Prime 4, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Rhythm Heaven Groove, Marvel Cosmic Invasion, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, and numerous others. However, by this point I think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what the Nintendo Switch has to offer, its strengths and its weaknesses. And I think we can sum all of that up into an overall assessment.

So, let’s start with the strengths. Many people will tell you that the absolute most important thing for a game platform to get right is the games, and Nintendo Switch largely succeeds there, though it’s a lopsided success, heavily due to Nintendo’s first-party games and indie games. And make no mistake, in both of those areas it is an absolutely massive success, though there are still some weak points here and there – performance issues, the Pokemon franchise as a whole, some disappointment in the Mario sports titles… this obviously isn’t a perfect track record here. Furthermore, this is a lopsided success because we can’t ignore the lacking support of major third-party publishers, though there are exceptions to this as well. However, as a whole I think we can all say that the Nintendo Switch offers a game library that is either on par with, or even better than, pretty much every other game platform in history apart from PC and maybe mobile devices.

Another success I think we can add here is the overall concept of the Nintendo Switch itself, a portable device that can be docked to play on a TV in a very user-friendly manner. This was what many gamers wanted the Wii U to be, and I think Nintendo largely succeeded on the promise of a hybrid game console that can join Nintendo’s handheld and console platforms into one.

And while it didn’t look like a success at first, I think we have to say that Nintendo Switch Online has gradually come to prove its value, even if that value isn’t really in any of its online features. But the massive library of great retro games available for a relatively small subscription fee has become more than worth the price, I think.

Now, when it comes to weaknesses, I think we have to address the fact that the hardware was underpowered compared to other platforms right from the start, which was a part of what led to lacking third-party support, and often caused performance issues in games on the Nintendo Switch. We have to look at the Joy-Cons, which may have been great in theory but ended up being a drifting, uncomfortable mess. We need to recognize that the Nintendo Switch eShop has become a horrible dumpster fire. We need to be sure to note how the Nintendo Switch OS is a clunky dinosaur that is far from ideal.

I think that an overall assessment of the Nintendo Switch needs to take into consideration all of this, all of the good and the bad. In the end, I think the good easily outweighs the bad. I’ve had plenty of times where I was incredibly frustrated with my Nintendo Switch for its numerous problems, but at the end of the day, it’s hard to think too harshly of a platform that lets me play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Hades, Monster Hunter Rise, Animal Well, and literally hundreds of other incredible games, all on my TV or on the go.

It’s not a perfect game console by any stretch, and it’s difficult for me to say if it’s the best game console ever (though it certainly would be in contention). However, the Nintendo Switch is undeniably a great videogame console, a true must-have for anyone who enjoys Nintendo games, an excellent choice for anyone who enjoys indie games, a solid choice for fans of RPGs, Platformers, Visual Novel games, Graphic Adventures, Shmups… really almost every genre except Sports games and to a lesser-extent Real-Time Strategy games and modern First-Person Shooters. But overall? The Nintendo Switch is just a great game platform for gamers, full stop.

tl;dr – The Nintendo Switch certainly has its flaws, from clunky hardware, a terrible eShop, and bloated prices for everything but the console itself. However, these issues are far outweighed by the absolutely massive number of great games on the platform, especially first-party games and indie games. As a result, despite its numerous issues, the Nintendo Switch has become an absolute must-have gaming platform.

Grade: A-

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