Bottom line is Nintendo made a terrific piece of hardware with fantastic performance for the price range that will be able to handle a lot of PS5 tier games reasonably well if a developer is willing to put a bit of effort in.
Can't ask for any better of a result than this given it's a freaking portable platform that's way thinner and smaller (remember the Joycons don't have any actual processing hardware inside of them, so to engineer this, Nintendo needed to make a much smaller and thinner system) than things like Steam Deck or ROG Ally even let alone a wired to the wall console.
A-tier franchises like Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil and Madden NFL returning to the Nintendo ecosystem says it all.
For $450 in 2025, you're not getting any better than this, the only main complaint I have is I wish this system could have been out last year (2024), but they obviously would have been short on games as Mario Kart and Donkey Kong probably wouldn't have been ready in time.
And yes I do think there will be a Switch 2 Pro model this time around because they inevitably are likely to fall behind the Switch 1's sales pace as that system had a monster surge with COVID, and to keep pace with that they'll need more aggressive model revisions. This is a different Nintendo president with a completely different (and younger) hardware team, I said this many time but basing everything on "well but this is what happened in the past" is not really relevant to the present or future.
There is a lot of overhead unused on those existing CPU cores too, like if Nintendo really wanted to they probably could clock them higher.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 14 October 2025
