Rewinder's Switch 2 Field Report

So the Switch 2 is out, and I have been playing it a lot. Probably too much, considering playing it over the weekend is what made me realise I need to get a couch with more back support if I’m going to keep doing this gig for years to come. 

I’ve played the Switch 2 games on my living room TV. I’ve played original Switch games on my desk’s second monitor. Played Mario Kart in handheld mode in bed. I played Kunitsu-Gami undocked on a table with split Joy-Cons. I played The Witcher 3 while watching a five frames per second video of Scott playing Cyberpunk via GameChat. Hell, when I was at my lowest, I even played Yakuza 0 with a GameCube controller for a while. I’ve played the Switch 2 in every configuration I can think of, and I booted up nearly every game I own on the platform just to see it, y’know. And now I am here to provide a public service announcement (or at least justify barely going outside for five days straight), by rounding up all my experiences with Rewinder’s official Switch 2 Field Report.

NEW GAMES AND OFFICIAL UPDATES

Let’s start where I started by loading The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Playing this first felt fitting since this was my first Switch game, and it got me through a pretty spectacularly bad part of my life. Honestly, I couldn’t actually play this for very long as it brought a lot of emotions, which turns out: I haven’t fully worked through!

My mental health fared a bit better playing Tears of the Kingdom, which I might finally finish now thanks to its 4K and 60fps update. I will say though, it is weird to go back to these games. Playing them at 60fps feels kinda wrong. It feels like seeing something I am not meant to, like accessing forbidden knowledge. I am so used to them running a certain way and using my mind to fill in the gaps, and now suddenly I don’t have to; I am dedicating all my brainpower to enjoying. It’s really wild and kind of has to be seen to be believed.

Mario Kart World is a delightful, chaotic, messy and I kind of love it. The shift from 12 to 24 (all of whom can have two items at once) basically means that you are constantly getting blue-shelled if you are in first or bumping into the riffraff with countless mushrooms lower down the field.

The much flaunted open world is pretty barren, and I’m still not one hundred percent sure how I feel about the new looser handling model. Yet despite all this, I love this game already. The chaos on screen is frequently just a cacophony of nonsense, it's often times bullshit where you will lose or gain 20 places within a couple of seconds, it's Mario Kart.

Third up is more of a warning than anything else. Arcade Archives 2 Ridge Racer is a terrible version of a great game. The Arcade Archives series has always been a nice thing to have from a preservationist point of view, but nobody has ever accused Hamster of lavishing new content or quality of life features on its ports - and that has never been more evident than in the first game in the Arcade Archives 2 collection.

Basically, this is the first new game in a new second tier of the Arcade Archives collection. This new collection will focus on slightly more modern and graphically demanding arcade games, many of which will be 3D, and to go with these newer games will be a higher price. AA1 games were usually $7/€7, sometimes more, and AA2 games are going to run you $17/€17 on PlayStation and Xbox and $20/€20 on Switch 2. And while that price might be high, it would be fine if Hamster gave these games the love and attention they deserve.

Well… it hasn't started that way, as this port of the arcade version of Ridge Racer has not been brought to consoles in good condition. The big problem is that Hamster has not adapted the game’s analogue acceleration for the Switch's digital triggers that would let you feather the gas as you drift around corners. On top of this, very little work has been done on making the steering (which was done with a racing wheel in arcades) feel good on an analogue stick.

TLDR; this is a pretty low-effort emulation of the least feature-rich version of the game. You’d be better off buying the cheaper version on another console with analogue triggers, or better yet, buy the $10/€10 port of Ridge Racer Type-4 on PlayStation.

I’ve always loved the look of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, though I struggled to finish it because the stuttering performance often gave me a headache. Thankfully, it now looks and runs better than ever, which is what this weird little thing deserves. It runs so well in fact, that I am getting really tempted to finally pick up Echoes of Wisdom.

Bravely Default is a fan favourite RPG, but totally passed me by as someone who never owned a 3DS. It’s been really nice toying around with the game’s unique combat mechanics and neat job system; however, the port itself is a bit of a letdown.

The work done to get everything onto on screen is great, but the visuals seem pretty rough. I can’t confirm it, but the background art looks like it has been up-rezzed to HD using AI with telltale inaccuracies and smudges smearing the hand-drawn art style. This feels pretty egregious considering that Square has shown off the original versions of the background art in art books in the past, so why not just use them? I’ll keep playing, but I’m not sure that I would have bought this game with my own money.

Fast Fusion is rad. It looks great. It runs great. It's fast!

Seriously, if you haven’t checked out any of these games on the Wii U or first Switch and are looking for something you can chip away at between long Mario Kart World marathons, this game is excellent.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is awesome. It was awesome last year, and barely anyone played it. It is still awesome now, and I am begging you to play it. My biggest problem with the game last year, after beating the secret new game plus boss, was that I still wanted to play more, and now Capcom has now added an endless horde mode. Delightful!

OK, please don’t be mad. I already owned Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 on the first Switch and played a bunch of it. I got sent a code for Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S. I have no idea what is new here. It already ran at 60fps, it's Tetris and Puyo Puyo. Both Puyo Puyo Tetris games are great, but if you own either already, from when they released on the first Switch, I truly do not know how you could justify paying 40 bucks for this version.

I love Yakuza 0. I truly believe this is one of the best games ever made. Despite being designed for the PS3, this game still looks incredible and it finally running at 60fps justifies a full replay for me. That said… This port isn’t perfect, but it's not because anything has been made worse. In fact, the handful of new cutscenes add a nice new dimension to several characters. The new content that really doesn’t work is the multiplayer Red Light Raids and the English language option.

The Red Light Raid is simply incredibly thin. In theory, beat-em-up brawls with multiple players sound fun, but even on launch day, I was struggling to find a match. What’s more, while the mode touts over 100 playable characters, most of them are standard enemies or bosses with massively reduced movesets.

The English VO is another weak point. While I have no moral objection to the idea of English VO in RGG games - in fact, I think the English VO is the best way to play Judgement and Lost Judgement - the fact remains, YongYea is simply not a strong enough voice actor to embody a character like Kiryu. He constantly sounds like the straining to sound tough, and it really takes away from the effortless-coolness the character is so famous for.

Ultimately, though, these two things are additions; you don’t have to touch them. This is still the best way to play one of the best games of all time.

Being lazy works! That is my big lesson from never playing Super Mario 3D World - Bowser’s Fury when it came out, because now I have been rewarded with basically a brand new 4K, 60fps 3D Mario game, and that is so great for me. You really shouldn’t have played this at the time. Try being lazy next time.

Turns out, even on a Switch 2, I do not like Sonic. Sonic X Shadow: Generations is still bad. Why do people like these?

UNOFFICIAL UPDATES!

Let’s start running through these because there is a lot. A bunch of original Switch games have seen upgrades even without patches as they were running at uncapped framerates or with dynamic resolution, so let’s run through some notable winners and a few that might need more direct updates.

Batman: Arkham City is still a game that absolutely rules AND seems to run at a pretty consistent 60fps in both handheld and docked mode. It looks like cutscenes are capped at 30fps, but combat feels great now. The dynamic resolution and texture quality also seem pretty good now. While I couldn’t test it myself, early word is that Arkham Knight does in fact run much better, staying at a mostly consistent 30fps. However, the extremely low texture quality that had to be used to even get that game running on base Switch in the first place means that even with a more consistent framerate and resolution, that is still not a good way to play that game.

The weird, and often forgotten, crossover between SMT and Fire Emblem that nobody ever talks about, Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore, has seen almost no benefit from the jump in hardware. This game is still locked at 30fps and seems to be outputting a 720p image (even docked), resulting in a very muddy image. It would be lovely if this got a patch, but I can't imagine it is high on Altus or Intelligent Systems' priority list.

Tetris Effect: Connected is already one of the best games ever, and it now runs at a locked 60, and outputs at a locked 1080p thanks to its dynamic resolution. Honestly, this game is magical, and having a high-quality version you can take on the go feels like you're getting one over on somebody. If you don’t own it already, you really should just grab it now.

Listen, Astral Chain might be copaganda, but darn it, the gameplay is fun and it's got styyyyyyle. There haven't been any major improvements since that game was capped at 30fps, and it now hits that target constantly.

Cruis’n Blast is a massively underrated arcade racer, and if you haven’t got your fill with that genre from Mario and Fast, it's never been a better time to check it out. It now runs at a locked 60fps, and while the game has never exactly been a looker, it's easy to ignore when you’re having fun and listening to the killer soundtrack.

Bayonetta 3 felt like it was mired in controversy at launch. Between the weirdness with the voice actors pre-release and its unbearably long development cycle, it felt like the game needed to be perfect if people were to fall back in love with the franchise. It wasn’t.

The big bet Platinum put on focusing the combat on new kaiju battles felt like it took away from what made Bayonetta Bayonetta, and that view was only reinforced by how poorly the game ran. Thankfully, the game now runs at a locked 60fps, and that makes it much easier to enjoy the parts of the game that do work.

Have you ever played Deadly Premonition? You really should. It's a totally singular experience full of brilliant and terrible design decisions, and there is still kind of nothing like it, including Deadly Premonition 2. This game usually ran about 15fps on a normal Switch, and now that it runs at 60fps, it almost looks kind of modern… for 2008. Oh, and since car speed was tied to framerate in that game, you can now drive everywhere way faster. I love weird, kind of broken video games.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was the impossible port of the Switch generation. It really is pretty nuts that a game that big even boots on hardware that was ripped out of a mobile phone from 2015. That said, it was a pretty terrible way to experience and a time classic. I would know, because I played 80 hours of that (all in handheld mode) on the Switch.

The game hasn’t received an official patch, but with Cyberpunk burning up the Switch 2 best sellers chart, it has to be something CDPR is considering. As it stands now, it does seem to run at a more consistent 30fps, and the resolution seems locked at its 720p target. The only problem is that, if we are honest, it's still not a great way to play this game. Textures are ugly, and there is basically no anti-aliasing, so the game still looks as jaggy as a cave full of stalactites.

And that’s it, that is mostly everything I’ve played on Switch in the first five days. I will say, I didn't buy Switch 2 Welcome Tour because I genuinely do not think I could look myself in the mirror if I paid for that thing. I also toyed around with the GameCube emulator, which seems totally solid. However, in a world where Dolphin is by far the most fully featured emulator around, it feels a little pointless.

My biggest takeaway from the experience was that I actually feel way more positive about the potential future of the Switch 2 than I was before. With how little Nintendo promoted backwards compatibility improvements, I’m shocked how much better unpatched games like Bayonetta and Tetris Effect play, and it has left me optimistic about what can be done with this chipset over the next few years. 

Even if that means we’ll continue to see a lot of PS4/Xbox One-era ports, I’m excited about that. There are so many games of that generation I never played, and so many original Switch games held back by their performance, If even a handful of them see improvements, I’ll consider this console a success. That, or I just really need to lie to myself to justify all the money I just spent. Who knows.