In an age where AAA games have become insanely bloated, I love that Nintendo still keeps their games to a nice manageable size.
Granted, it's easier for them to do so when they tend not to lean into super hi-res textures or extensive voice acting, but still, it's much appreciated, given even similar games on other platforms can be much less trim; Crash Bandicoot 4 on PS4 was 45GB for instance.

To date, Nintendo's biggest game ever is still Xenoblade Chronicles X which weighed in at 22GB; even Tears of the Kingdom weighs in at just 16GB.

The thing is if Playstation or Xbox tried to do simular, they would be called out for it.
Game doesn't need voice acting, we'll go with text bubbles and squeeky noises to signal someone is saying something.
Imagine how much space that takes up, playstation games sometimes have voice acting in like 14+ differnt languages.

Case in point, Crash bandicoot 4 (since you mentioned it), by activisions toys for bob, is fully localised in 9 differnt languges (ei. voice acting in all 9).
(xbox now)




Meanwhile I believe Xenoblade Chronicles X, only has English and Japanese voices, otherwise its all just text + english.
I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo decided to voice another 10 languages, that alone could add another 10 GB to the game or such.
If Nintendo decided to use higher resolution textures, again... its size would grow.

Its not nintendo magic that keeps something like Xenoblade Chronicles X, at a smaller size, but choices, not to do more work than is needed.

Which again, might be a good topic now with balooning game developement budgets ect.
Nintendo are just "sensible" to a degree that Xbox and Playstation are not.
They go out of their way to do all this extra work, to bring you "lifelike" games with great localisation... and it costs.

Nintendo get away with alot of it by being smart about it though.
Instead of chaseing ultra realism, and doing something they likely cant match xbox or playstation in, and have hardware limiting them, they go another direction. Something they are master at instead, with their own artstyle and a more cartoony look.  Nintendo don't view these things that make games gigantic in size, as important.  However the fact remains, its not nintendo magic that makes their games smaller, but design choices and cost cutting.

Xenoblade Chronicles X has massively more VA than Crash 4 does due to the kind of game it is though; a massive 100-hour RPG with tons of story sequences. Crash 4 has relatively little VA by comparison, and also uses intentionally low detail textures.

Regarding languages, I feel a better approach (if they don't do this already) would be to let the player decide what languages they want to download in order to avoid file size bloat.

There's no "magic" to Nintendo's approach per se, but there is a lot to be said for optimization, compression, and picking one's battles rather than letting game size balloon out of control.

Fingers crossed even most of the most gorgeous Switch 2 games keep it under 60 GB.

Even with Nintendo's skill in file sizes, compression, etc. there will likely be a good number of first-party games above 32 GB. 64 GB game cards are going to happen for Switch 2. I don't see Nintendo requiring you to download significant portions of your physical game purchase. 

Yeah even on Switch 2 I doubt we'll see first party games the size of many AAA PS4/XBO games; small file size has been a high priority for Nintendo on Switch, and I expect that to continue. The next Zelda or Xenoblade isn't gonna be 100GB, while I doubt most of their next gen releases will even be the size of something like Crash 4.

This.

Only problem here is game preservation. If you need to download the voice lines for a physically purchased game, then do you *really* own the game? I’d opt for file bloat honestly.

Yes, you own the game. What we are talking about here is that the game would ship with English voices on the physical medium as well as be sold digitally with only the English voices while all less popular languages would be individual separate downloads.

Sadly the ship has largely sailed in this regard; many physical releases nowadays are little more than a download key and don't actually contain the full game. It sucks, but it's just the way things are, so it's not like making languages additional downloads would change that.

I was thinking about that, and yeah, that’d make the most sense. If you purchase the American version, for instance, then the physical copy comes with English/Spanish in the cartridge. And if you purchase Japanese, then the physical copy comes with Japanese. If you want other language, you download them. 

That’s a fair point, I guess I forget that pretty much all PS5 games require downloads (NSW games have the benefit is being small enough to store everything on the cartridge).