So, Nintendo fans, how are we doing? Enjoying the Nintendo music subscription that comes with an online service that never works?

Well, even if you aren’t, I bet you are (or in my case were) excited for the Switch 2. 

But like most things Nintendo, the Switch 2 has a few catches that are draining my excitement.

First things first, the $450 is a little much for a sequel console where the biggest new addition is that a Joy-Con can be a mouse, and a button that says C and makes a cool noise. 

The PlayStation 5 Pro Digital edition bundled with Astro Bot, a Game of the Year winner, is $400. But honestly, this isn’t the price that I am most worried about; I’m more worried about the price of the games themselves. 

Video games have increased in price recently; some still go for $60, which is what used to be the norm. But now, most Triple-A developers release for $70. 

Nintendo went the extra mile when they announced a new dynamic pricing system. The new Donkey Kong game is $70 for digital, and the new Mario Kart is $80 for digital.

If you want physical, you will have to pay an extra $10. So now Donkey Kong is $80 and Mario Kart is $90. 

With the announcement by Nintendo recently of digital game share, I fear that Nintendo’s play for the Switch 2 is to kill physical games. 

The death of physical games is something that, if you have played games in recent years, you should know about. PlayStation and Xbox have released digital-only edition versions of their consoles for cheaper than the ones that can do both digital and physical. 

Game companies want to do this because if they cut out the cost of manufacturing a game, they get to save a lot of money. 

As gamers we should make sure that physical games are something that are here to stay in the long run. It’s not a preference; these physical versions are important. In recent years have seen the dark side of digital games rear its head. 

You don’t own your digital games, you have a license. Which means the company can take digital games away whenever they want. This is currently happening with other major consoles at the time. 

Nintendo is a company that is known for there strictness when it comes to their product. You can’t legally jailbreak the consoles, meaning fan content for these games usually ends with a Nintendo cease and desist at your door. If you try to emulate games that are near inaccessible, Nintendo will take kindly. 

So with Nintendo starting to push the digital alternative, It makes me worry that Nintendo will start to tighten their grip and make life for the consumer even worse. 

Physical games offer the consumer some freedoms I worry will be taken away from us if we switch to digital. 

This sadly isn’t my only problem with the Switch 2. 

If you have ever played a Switch for a long stretch of time, you will know that Joy-Cons are infamous. 

Stick drift, something that is happening in controllers around the gaming space, is when controllers move on their own– pulling one way while the player tries to go another. While I wish I could tell you that there is just a ghost haunting the controller, it sadly isn’t. There is dust in the controller that screws up the input or wear on the joint itself. 

Switch Joy-Cons are riddled with this problem. The Switch has been around for eight years, and Nintendo hasn’t even tried to fix it. They acknowledged the problem and offered free repairs, but it took them multiple years to do so. 

The Joy-Cons on the Switch 2 have been a big selling point to a lot of people. They have a more comfortable design and they seem like it will actually be usable for people with bigger hands, which– as someone who is 6 foot, 4 inches– made me super excited for the Switch 2.  

But we have heard nothing if there has been any efforts to fix these issues with the Joy-Con for the Switch 2 and with these new controllers being priced at $80 a pair, I hope that they address it to some extent. 

The usual replacement for a Joy-Con is a Pro Controller. This is the main way to play any competitive games on the Switch since it’s more like a regular controller. But like its Joy-Con brothers, it also develops stick drift very fast. These are also priced at $80. 

The big new piece of hardware that was announced was the Nintendo Switch 2 camera, which is the big new thing with the new chat feature. It is $50, and the camera quality shown in the trailer does not look very good at all.

Nintendo is known for their accessories that don’t do much, but this feels a bit too much for Nintendo. This thing isn’t even usable for non Nintendo Online users. 

Now for my opinions that I think will get people the most mad: the new Switch 2 video games. 

Let me start with some ground rules; I will mainly be talking about exclusives, and please remember that these games have had little information outside of trailers and small snippets of gameplay released so I’m going off of the things I’ve picked up from those. 

The first game I wanna talk about is the new Donkey Kong game, Donkey Kong Bananza.

This is the game that easily makes me the most excited. It looks like some fun gameplay, and destructible environments are a great way to show the console’s capabilities. I’ve also seen on gaming news sites that this may be a spiritual successor to Mario Odyssey, so I’m liking what I’m hearing. My only negative is the design of Donkey Kong himself, but it’s not that big of a gripe. 

Next on the list is Kirby Air Riders. Honestly this is my biggest surprise of the show. We didn’t see much, just a teaser, but I’m excited. I have no idea why they announced this racing game when the biggest announcement of the night was a racing game. 

Metroid Prime 4 looks really cool; I would hope so since its first ever announcement was in 2017. I am not the biggest Metroid fan so I don’t have a lot of cool analysis to give, but I’m just happy Metroid fans have got a new game. 

The DuskBloods look cool. A seamless multiplayer Soulsborne is something that seems like it should have happened a long time ago. Soulsborne really isn’t my specialty, I played Elden Ring and enjoyed it, but I probably won’t be playing this cause I can’t do another game with a Soulsborn camera.  

Pokémon Legends Z-A is something that I have been waiting on for a while. Pokémon X and Y are my favorite set of games, and I can’t wait to see how they use the setting of Lumiose City. I haven’t recently been following Pokémon as much as I used to but if this one is good I will definitely give it another shot. 

Now the big game of the direct: Mario Kart World. It seems Nintendo console is defined by its Mario Kart nowadays, and sadly I’m not interested at all. Don’t take this as I would never play this; I have a feeling if you sat me down with this game, I would play for quite a while but compared to the hours I would put in to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, it would be nothing.

The open world seems really cool, but it doesn’t compare to seeing the zero gravity of 8 for the first time. Plus I am very afraid that they are going to heavily market this open world and then there just be nothing in it outside of the roads going from place to place. 

It feels like they saw the success of Forza Horizon and thought that open world racing games are an easy win. But what makes the Horizon games work is that the world feels lived in, and there is stuff to interact with at every corner. An open world with nothing in it is more of a detriment to a game than anything positive. 

There were other Nintendo exclusive games announced but rather they are a tech demo or something that I did not find notable. 

I am still a little excited for the Switch 2, but the price and hardware scare me the most. There isn’t a game that really entices me yet.

I fear this will be the PlayStation 3 of the new generation: too expensive and not enough substance to pull people in, so it flops but then after some changes it comes back near the end of its life cycle, makes some much needed changes and wins everyone back. 

But personally, I will be waiting for the Wii U 2.