Over the last two episodes of the Nintendo Entertainment Podcast, we’ve talked about how certain groups of people have gone out of their way to bash Nintendo for the “extreme price of the new console,” or the “terrible game key card system,” or, in the case of a former head of PlayStation Studios, accusing Nintendo of “losing its way” because the Nintendo Switch 2 “isn’t innovative. Many, including myself, disagree with that assessment, but Nintendo doesn’t need me to defend it. It has its President to do such things.
In a Q&A after the financial briefing for the fiscal year, Shuntaro Furukawa was asked about those who felt the new console wasn’t as “innovative” as Nintendo’s past systems. Furukawa pushed back, noting that because they put so much more power into the Switch 2, developers are able to do more than ever:
“Over the past eight years, software developers have come to need higher hardware processing power in order to realize one of Nintendo’s most important values, ‘proposing new ways to play.’ Therefore, this time we aimed to design hardware with a large capacity in terms of processing power. We believe that Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza have proposed new ways of playing that could not be realized on the Nintendo Switch.”
He’s not wrong. Mario Kart World is going big on the open-world racing aesthetic, including doing a “free roam” mode for fans to go nuts in. As for Donkey Kong Bananza, that game will have a vastly destructible environment for fans to revel in and trash as DK. Furukawa continued on by noting that the future of 1st and 3rd party titles will use the Nintendo Switch 2’s incredible power to push things further:
“Regarding your question about the innovation of the hardware, the Nintendo Switch 2 may not look like it has changed much. However, in reality, both the hardware and peripherals have been redesigned from scratch, and we feel that it is a very Nintendo-like product, filled with various ingenuity and the attention to detail of Nintendo’s development team, who develop hardware and software together. Going forward, we will develop various titles centered around the Nintendo Switch 2 and provide new play experiences.”
In other words, just be patient, you’ll like where things go.
