What part of the Nintendo Switch do you find to be the most disappointing?

[Halloqueen]

Probably not the most disappointing, but it's still weird and nobody else seems to mention it.

This power button on the home menu doesn't actually turn the console off. It just puts it into sleep mode. If you want to actually turn the console off you have to get up, walk over to the Switch, hold down the power button for 5 seconds, go to the power options menu, and then select turn off in there. This is the most inconvenient console to turn off that I'd ever have to deal with ;_;

I didn't mention it since the other stuff in my post bothered me more, but yeah, it's definitely ridiculous. Pretty sure I didn't actually turn off my Switch for like the first year until I found out about this, mistaking the Sleep mode for the console being off.

Glad I eventually found out.

 

[Alolan_Apples]

It’s not exactly a Nintendo Switch only problem I’m sure but I pretty much exclusively play on Nintendo consoles and I didn’t feel this way about 3DS games or anything prior.

Games today in general just don’t seem as good anymore. There’s a few exceptions but in general games feel rushed, unpolished, riddled with glitches and poor performance, and lacking the charm they used to have. For example a few of my favourite series are Animal Crossing, Pokemon, Harvest Moon (now Story of Seasons), and Fire Emblem. While I’ve played and still like the new games in those series they all feel lacklustre compared to those older in the series. My favourites list of each series would 100% put their most recent games at the bottom or near the very bottom of the list.

Heck I’ve even found myself pulling out my 3DS recently with new sparked interest in it cause the games on it just feel better to me. Yes I still play Switch fairly often but it’s mostly to jump on for some Salmon Run or events in Splatoon 3 (which is one of the few games that does feel good to me on Switch, at least compared to those older in the series. Disconnections in certain modes are still common though sadly). Anything else I play on Switch is very sporadic cause I’m just not as into it.

I’m glad that I’m not the only one who’s more concerned about software issues than hardware issues when it comes to the Nintendo Switch. I felt that the removal or nerfing of popular features from older games was more disappointing than the Joycon Drift.

 

[TheThomas5252]

The fact the joycons drifting is a common occurrence is also one of the most disappointing things about the Switch for me

 

[-Blue-]

I liked how the Wii U felt more personal with the user interface. And the little jangles it would play when booting up the system. And all of the different things had its own little song. I never used it much, but they had their own music for the weather and news app? or whatever it would be called on the Wii U.

The Switch was just so modern it was tasteless and soulless. Maybe some like that, but I loved the charm that Wii U brought.


Also online. No dedicated servers and they're still using the ones that were outdated for NewLeaf when it was introduced in 2012. No one should have to disconnect every time someone has a bad connection. Nintendo has the money. They need to stop being cheap. The whole cherry-picking of virtual games was crap to. It took way too long for them to release some of them. Golden Sun finally got dropped on the gba virtual console for NSO+ (won't pay for it) but NSO+ has been out for 2+years? Nintendo you got to get with the times man. Stop dragging feet.

 

[VanitasFan26]

The Switch doesn't have much of personality. Eversince the death of Miiverse its just been very lifeless. Also the servers to play online are so bad. Contsant lagging, lantecy issues, and of course taking forever to find matchups in certain games. Not to mention some games haven't aged well with Performance and it sometimes becomes laggy to even play them again. I really hope the next system tries to at least improve on this.

 

[Seastar]

I'm not sure what to go with so I'll just list everything.

-The lack of themes like the ones on the 3DS
-Joycon drift existing when the controllers themselves are expensive (I think the newer ones have improved this but I haven't gotten them)
-Nintendo Switch Online in general. We have to pay for this and the connection isn't even that good in some games.
As for the older games you can play, I highly dislike that we're just renting them which means they won't always be available. Unless they plan to keep them available somehow when they eventually discontinue the service, this really just doesn't seem that great in the long run. I like owning games and not feeling pressured to play everything before it's gone.
Of course my next complaint is the expansion... The only purpose of it is to rent even more games and some DLC. I'm not really into renting and I'm especially not interested in renting DLC that I already know I want. I want to actually own it and not have it tied to the subscription.
Lastly, the family plan existing to make everything more expensive. Why are we paying more for accounts that are on the exact same system? This is also another reason I'm never getting the expansion. I have to get the family plan.
-I've heard things get really complicated if you put the same account on more than one Switch. Apparently it starts requiring an internet connection to make sure you're not playing the same digital content on both systems at the same time. This seems like too much of a pain to deal with.
-The Switch's eShop not having any music

 

[BetsySundrop]

I have to add one more thing. When we got acnh, we had multiple players/profiles on our switch. I was thinking we would each be able to make our own island. Under our own profile.

Nope! And now for years I've suffered an awkwardly placed resident services.... and can't restart and wipe out the other players, who don't really play anymore...

And it doesn't make sense! With smash bros, you have to unlock everything on each profile. So each profile has separate save files, different friend codes, has to unlock everything separately, etc... but with acnh, it's all shared. Pfft.

 

[Sheando]

I think the Switch suffers a little from trying to be both a docked and handheld console. As others have mentioned, the Joy-Cons aren't the world's most ergonomic controllers. (Oh GameCube controller, you will never be improved upon.) I think the 3DS felt more natural to hold despite being much older, and the flat control stick was a GREAT design.

I also think that with a few notable exceptions, major franchise installments haven't been the best in the series. I'm a big fan of Breath of the Wild, I just finished Mario Wonder and found it one of my favorite Mario games ever, and I think MarioKart is a strong installment in the series. But Animal Crossing, Story of Seasons, Mario Party, and Pokemon have all been less compelling to me on the Switch than they were on other consoles. That doesn't mean I dislike the games--I actually have really fond memories of Pokemon Sword and I think ACNH was a ton of fun for the community. But many Switch games just don't feel like enough of a step up given how different the console is from its predecessors. Some of the games feel like prettier 3DS games that somehow run worse and have fewer features. The Pokemon remakes are really lackluster and we're seeing a rise in open-world games that, unlike BOTW, can't actually sustain the concept due to lack of differentiation between regions and lack of things to do that would make exploration feel worth it. I'm not sure what to hope for with the next Switch.

Don't get me wrong, I like the Switch and I'm overall satisfied with the experience. I've had a lot of fun with it. Just hoping we see the major franchises step up their game soon!

 

[Alolan_Apples]

In regards to the Pokémon games, all five main series games on the Switch are not just disappointments to a multi-billion franchise. They’re also another reason why the Switch is disappointing compared to the predecessors. The best of these games is Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and that isn’t even a traditional Pokémon game. Which tells you that there’s something wrong with the “traditional Pokémon games” on the Switch:

• One thing all five games have in common is that not all Pokémon species up to date are supported. In fact, there are still some species that aren’t even supported on any Switch game, with the majority of the remaining species not having any Pokédex entries since Gen 6. It made sense that Pokémon Let’s Go and Pokémon Legends didn’t include them all, but for the others, it didn’t make sense for the Pokémon games going forward.
• Pokémon Let’s Go replaced random encounters with GO mechanics and excluded mainstay features like Pokémon breeding. It’s also worth mentioning that back then, people were getting tired of the Gen 1 pandering, and this game was part of the problem since it was another Gen 1 remake.
• Pokémon Sword/Shield had a short and lackluster story and has very little postgame.
• Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl focused on being too faithful to the original games rather than following along the modern Pokémon standards.
• Pokémon Scarlet/Violet is plagued by performance issues and removed or limited popular features like the Battle Tower.

While this is more of a franchise issue than a console issue, the fact it had a disappointing journey on the Nintendo Switch is another example on why the Switch was a disappointment. From just the first two years, we thought the future for the console was bright. Come 2024, and we noticed that the Switch wasn’t everything we hoped for back in 2016. Even if they finally have stuff like menu themes and a more improved NSO, it’s already too late.

 

[Lancelot]

I will die with the opinion that ACNH wouldn’t have been that successful at all and would’ve been the least popular AC game if it hadn’t of happened to release during a pandemic.

I’m getting really sick of Nintendo releasing games and acting like they’re going to add so much content, only to be lazy with the aspects that made the games good in the first place. Like why was diving added as DLC.

I also hate that there’s no music in the EShop. The switch has 0 personality

 

[-Blue-]

I will die with the opinion that ACNH wouldn’t have been that successful at all and would’ve been the least popular AC game if it hadn’t of happened to release during a pandemic.

I’m getting really sick of Nintendo releasing games and acting like they’re going to add so much content, only to be lazy with the aspects that made the games good in the first place. Like why was diving added as DLC.

I also hate that there’s no music in the EShop. The switch has 0 personality

I said the same thing about the music and jingles. I miss that from the Wii U. Hearing all the different apps jingle or music on the Wii U and Wii was something else. They went all out on the news and weather music. And no one really used those apps lol. The only thing I can hear of the Switch is the snapping sound when it's booted up or whatever. It feels like they tried too hard to be modern and it just became soulless as a result.


And ditto on NH. They banked on the pandemic. More people would've called the game out for how barebone it was during launch and how underhanded the whole dripfeed content was if not for that and less people would've been ok with it. 2020 was something else with the divide between those disappointed with the release and aggressively defending the game.

It took a year and a half for base game content (sure there was a few extra things, but most was locked behind real time) It should never take almost two years for a game to release base game content. We pretty much paid for beta access. The whole fix it later or release it in parts is here to stay and it sucks how so many games have suffered from this. It's going to get to a point where future gamers won't remember when games were released complete. I've already came across comments that indicate as such.

 

[Lancelot]

I said the same thing about the music and jingles. I miss that from the Wii U. Hearing all the different apps jingle or music on the Wii U and Wii was something else. They went all out on the news and weather music. And no one really used those apps lol. The only thing I can hear of the Switch is the snapping sound when it's booted up or whatever. It feels like they tried too hard to be modern and it just became soulless as a result.


And ditto on NH. They banked on the pandemic. More people would've called the game out for how barebone it was during launch and how underhanded the whole dripfeed content was if not for that and less people would've been ok with it. 2020 was something else with the divide between those disappointed with the release and aggressively defending the game.

It took a year and a half for base game content (sure there was a few extra things, but most was locked behind real time) It should never take almost two years for a game to release base game content. We pretty much paid for beta access. The whole fix it later or release it in parts is here to stay and it sucks how so many games have suffered from this. It's going to get to a point where future gamers won't remember when games were released complete. I've already came across comments that indicate as such.

I’m really hoping they sort of used it as a stepping stone for having the system or whatever, and asset creation tools for the next game. But I highly doubt it

 

[McRibbie]

And ditto on NH. They banked on the pandemic. More people would've called the game out for how barebone it was during launch and how underhanded the whole dripfeed content was if not for that and less people would've been ok with it. 2020 was something else with the divide between those disappointed with the release and aggressively defending the game.

It took a year and a half for base game content (sure there was a few extra things, but most was locked behind real time) It should never take almost two years for a game to release base game content. We pretty much paid for beta access. The whole fix it later or release it in parts is here to stay and it sucks how so many games have suffered from this. It's going to get to a point where future gamers won't remember when games were released complete. I've already came across comments that indicate as such.

I mean, the pandemic and NH's release basically happened at the same time coincidentally, it's not as if Nintendo went "looks like a viral pandemic's happening soon, lads... quick! Release Animal Crossing now instead of at the end of next year with free updates, that'll sell gangbusters!" It's more "they were going to release NH in March 2020 since at least sometime between September 2018 and June 2019 anyway, and sometime around November someone caught the first recognised case of COVID and things steadily snowballed from there"

There's ultimately a good load of other reasons why NH elected for free updates. Some of them clearly come from the devs, some of them come from higher-ups:

• for a start you've got the entire "the Wii U failed in part due to the lack of regular releases due to HD game development being much more time consuming, and doing games with free updates is one of the ways you can ensure that" thing. To be fair, I don't think Nintendo would do it for literally everything (they're not Square Enix, who are Incredibly Guilty Of This), and they generally only do it for stuff that you're going to potentially be playing for a long time on and off (ie. sports games, Super Mario Mario Maker and Animal Crossing).
• Animal Crossing is fundamentally a game designed around interpersonal communication and the shared experience of playing together doing similar, yet different things. It is also a game that as a result can be localisation-intense compared to other games. This... is not remotely ideal. The GameCube game didn't have online, released during a time when Nintendo's localisation could often take much longer, and didn't yet have the expectation of being a series that drives console sales, and so it took about 3 years to release it in Europe. Wild World and LGTTC ended up being much smaller experiences than the GC game in part to make that localisation process a lot easier, and as a result those games ended up releasing at similar times worldwide (and even then, the European release of WW came out a few months later, and the Korean releases of both WW and LGTTC came out a couple of years afterwards). But ultimately, I think at least part of this decision comes down to how they handled the release of NL. There's 7 months in between the release of it in Japan and the release of it in the USA and Europe. That's an incredibly long time in AC terms. Japanese players have already seen a good portion of what's available in the game if they got it Day 1. They've already pretty much fully upgraded Main Street, they've gotten the Roost and a lot of the PWPs, and they've seen Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Festivale, Easter and April Fool's Day already... and this has been documented in excruciating detail online for even Western players to find, and they can't even experience it firsthand. By the time it's come out in other countries, people have probably already gotten bored with it and moved onto something else
• On top of that you've got people who clearly haven't gotten the entire "play in real time" memo jumping ahead to stuff like Halloween and Christmas also spoiling that stuff ahead of time, which also derails the shared experience factor of Animal Crossing
• On top of that, in between the release of NL and NH two games have released: Splatoon (which was the first free update game Nintendo released, and shares the same producer as AC), and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (which was developed around the same time as both the Welcome amiibo update and NH), and I generally think that NH uses updates for similar reasons as both. Splatoon's updates were generally designed for people to get to grips with how the game operates and have new things come out over time (and in general there's some trace of this approach throughout NH's updates, from bushes coming out in the spring, swimming in the summer, and pumpkins in the autumn; as well as a decent chunk of 2.0's features largely boiling down to "this is the grand finale of the game, here's a coffee shop where you can see all the other NPCs and here's some things so you can now do stuff faster!"), whereas Pocket Camp's are designed to be eye-catching and make you go "whoah, new thing, better play the game!"
• Finally, you've also got the fact that Animal Crossing's both a proven system seller and an evergreen seller. It's something up there with the big boys of Mario and Pokémon. If NH had released in late 2021 (when it was finished), that's pushing it in terms of release timing. If it had been released in 2022 or 2023 (if they were aiming for Even More Content), that's way, way too late. Look at what was being released in those two years, it's predominately second entries for series that already have a presence on the Switch (Kirby, Splatoon, Bayonetta, Zelda, Pikmin, 2D Mario, Warioware). It needs to be out sooner, not later!

 

[Alolan_Apples]

It took a year and a half for base game content (sure there was a few extra things, but most was locked behind real time) It should never take almost two years for a game to release base game content. We pretty much paid for beta access. The whole fix it later or release it in parts is here to stay and it sucks how so many games have suffered from this. It's going to get to a point where future gamers won't remember when games were released complete. I've already came across comments that indicate as such.

This is pretty much why the TBT community shrank faster during the New Horizons era than it did during the New Leaf era (while also effectively hurting the TBT Marketplace). This site is dominated by Animal Crossing veterans, people who have been playing for years. The fact that the game was half-baked for 20 months, only for the fact that some features and items from previous games (chiefly New Leaf and Happy Home Designer) are still missing, was what turned many players off. But that’s not the only problem. They nerfed money-making past the point of reason (like making regular beetles spawn on palm trees), they made backwards steps on where New Leaf went forwards, the early progression when playing the game is much slower than past games, and they added the feature where all tools break. I already mentioned that the ordinances are complete jokes rather than something actually beneficial in ACNL. Of course, stuff like the joy-con drift and online features locked behind the paywall made the game even more unplayable.

Nintendo tried their best on making the Switch their best console, but some of the decisions made it a disappointment despite raging successes.

 

[LuchaSloth]

Lack of customization for the home menu has ALWAYS been incredibly irksome to me. Like...how hard is it? A monotone background for the entire lifespan of the system? No custom folders or anything? It goes beyond disappointing. It's actually really bad. - Aside from that, just the way that backward content is used (or not used).

Switch Online is a pretty lame service. Buying specific games that you owned was a better way. Wii, DS, 3DS, and Wii U did a million times better with classic games. We still don't have access to any classic Pokemon games. How many people have expressed wanting them? How many people would be glad to pay for them? Nothing.

 

[McRibbie]

aite, now I've done my "here's all the reasons NH used updates" list I've been meaning to do for a while, here's my list of Actual Switch Disappointments:

• in general I started falling out of love with Pokémon as soon as they stopped basing the regions around different regions of Japan, then slowly but surely over the course of the 3DS era fell further out of love with it (ORAS didn't quite capture the same atmosphere as the original RSE even if it is a good game, and I've still yet to complete Moon the best part of a decade later) but with the Switch era? Yup, I can comfortably move on from this now. (Willing to defend BDSP more than most because I actually kinda liked it despite the lack of stuff from Platinum and some of the weirder changes, tho). Game Freak just about managed to put out games as regularly as they did before the 3DS because they were sprite-based, but once they moved into 3D properly the limitations of both their engine and their devs became painfully clear, it got worse once they transitioned to HD, and it's only taken until now for them to go "actually, we need to sort something out" because if they stopped for too long their Vast Multimedia Empire would collapse through lack of new games to feed it.
• Mario sports games have always seemed pretty unnecessary to me, but the Switch entries in particular seem to make me go "I vastly prefer my Nintendo sports games without Mario. On top of that, you already clearly make too many Mario games, do not make these!". Their use of updates makes NH at launch seem full-featured. They're (Mario Strikers aside) developed by Camelot, a company consisting of 35 people, which is way too small for HD development. They're just kinda "eh" in a generation that's generally been a vast improvement for Mario games, because they no longer feel as bland as they did in the 3DS/Wii U era!
• The Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Booster Course pack was largely done as a way to preserve Mario Kart Tour tracks, because the quality of the tracks looks much cheaper and the tracks just feel like they did in older games, instead of the radical reimaginings they felt like in base Mario Kart 8. It did get slightly better as time went on (most of the stuff they added last year didn't feel as rubbish, and the new characters were very welcome) but it just feels a bit underwhelming compared to Mario Kart 8 itself. The biggest argument against doing something similar with NH and Pocket Camp, tbh.
• I'll defend NSO on the fact that even its most expensive tier is cheaper than the base tier of PSN, and that it costs a similar amount per year to what those money sharks at Adobe charge per month. I'll defend the retro game apps on the grounds that while the drip-feed is agonising, the way it's set up means I'm checking out new games and not just going "let's buy the same games I usually buy and literally nothing else", ignoring vast swathes of stuff that's been licensed and put up there that should be checked out. But the N64 emulator still needs work! It's not the vast pile of smouldering garbage it was in late 2021, and it's now got easily the best emulated N64 library Nintendo's put out.. but it could still be much better!
• the GB/GBC library is also seemingly only getting updated whenever base-tier NSO gets updated at best (nothing last time around, though we did get Mysterious Murusame Castle and, for the first time outside of Japan, Devil World!), when it should at least have gotten a steady stream of titles throughout its first year at the very least
• it has gotten much better in the past year or so, what with Metroid Prime Remastered, Pikmin 1+2 and the announcement of the TTYD remake... but come on, lads. Put some more GC games out, you've got that emulator you made for Super Mario 3D All-Stars (something that gives me ultimately conflicting feelings, because they did arguably worse with the Wii port of Super Mario All-Stars back in 2010... but at the same time, damn, they mishandled that in so many ways) or you can get... idk, Grezzo, Eighting or NdCube to do a proper remake of the original Animal Crossing (at the same time, the next game's probably only a year away, perhaps not)
• look, I'm not one of those people who acts like the Wii U was Good, Actually. I think it failed for good reasons, its menus were full of music and very late-period Frutiger Aero skeuomorphism but also painfully slow (and a very good reason why the Switch's menus are as minimalist as they are aside from "vector minimalism was popular in 2017" and "the Switch is trying to be a tablet, not The Sky Box Of Gaming like the Wii was"), and its game library consists of about 8 very good titles and the most mid, Generic Nintendo stuff imaginable. However. I think Super Mario Maker 2 and the Switch port of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker feel like somewhat of a downgrade controls-wise in docked mode because they're probably the two titles that justify the Wii U's controls the most. Perfect handheld mode games, tho.
• on a related note: still no Yoshi's Wooly World port

 

[DarthGohan1]

The only complaint is the joycon issues.

Besides that, Switch is a fantastic console imo. If you bought it expecting PS5 graphics.... probably should have done a little more research beforehand

 

[CylieDanny]

I like to personalize, and the lack of screen customization gets to me. I mean the Ps4 has a big verity, so why skimp on the switch?

 

[g u a v a]

I second most of what's been said already but my biggest gripe is the joycon drift. It's unreal that $70 controllers only last on average ~1 year?? before needing to be fixed/replaced?

I hadn't thought about the lack of themes but it is something I wish nintendo had done. i wasn't able to enjoy 3ds themes because my console always had issues connecting to the internet, which was a bummer.

also... the lack of folders on the home screen!!! it's so dumb how nested folders are, like i wish i could have a super clean home screen with 3-4 folders with all my games easily accessible. i don't understand these choices from nintendo but then again, they're always doing stuff that us fans just do not ~get~.

 

[Lancelot]

I mean, the pandemic and NH's release basically happened at the same time coincidentally, it's not as if Nintendo went "looks like a viral pandemic's happening soon, lads... quick! Release Animal Crossing now instead of at the end of next year with free updates, that'll sell gangbusters!" It's more "they were going to release NH in March 2020 since at least sometime between September 2018 and June 2019 anyway, and sometime around November someone caught the first recognised case of COVID and things steadily snowballed from there"

There's ultimately a good load of other reasons why NH elected for free updates. Some of them clearly come from the devs, some of them come from higher-ups:

• for a start you've got the entire "the Wii U failed in part due to the lack of regular releases due to HD game development being much more time consuming, and doing games with free updates is one of the ways you can ensure that" thing. To be fair, I don't think Nintendo would do it for literally everything (they're not Square Enix, who are Incredibly Guilty Of This), and they generally only do it for stuff that you're going to potentially be playing for a long time on and off (ie. sports games, Super Mario Mario Maker and Animal Crossing).
• Animal Crossing is fundamentally a game designed around interpersonal communication and the shared experience of playing together doing similar, yet different things. It is also a game that as a result can be localisation-intense compared to other games. This... is not remotely ideal. The GameCube game didn't have online, released during a time when Nintendo's localisation could often take much longer, and didn't yet have the expectation of being a series that drives console sales, and so it took about 3 years to release it in Europe. Wild World and LGTTC ended up being much smaller experiences than the GC game in part to make that localisation process a lot easier, and as a result those games ended up releasing at similar times worldwide (and even then, the European release of WW came out a few months later, and the Korean releases of both WW and LGTTC came out a couple of years afterwards). But ultimately, I think at least part of this decision comes down to how they handled the release of NL. There's 7 months in between the release of it in Japan and the release of it in the USA and Europe. That's an incredibly long time in AC terms. Japanese players have already seen a good portion of what's available in the game if they got it Day 1. They've already pretty much fully upgraded Main Street, they've gotten the Roost and a lot of the PWPs, and they've seen Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Festivale, Easter and April Fool's Day already... and this has been documented in excruciating detail online for even Western players to find, and they can't even experience it firsthand. By the time it's come out in other countries, people have probably already gotten bored with it and moved onto something else
• On top of that you've got people who clearly haven't gotten the entire "play in real time" memo jumping ahead to stuff like Halloween and Christmas also spoiling that stuff ahead of time, which also derails the shared experience factor of Animal Crossing
• On top of that, in between the release of NL and NH two games have released: Splatoon (which was the first free update game Nintendo released, and shares the same producer as AC), and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (which was developed around the same time as both the Welcome amiibo update and NH), and I generally think that NH uses updates for similar reasons as both. Splatoon's updates were generally designed for people to get to grips with how the game operates and have new things come out over time (and in general there's some trace of this approach throughout NH's updates, from bushes coming out in the spring, swimming in the summer, and pumpkins in the autumn; as well as a decent chunk of 2.0's features largely boiling down to "this is the grand finale of the game, here's a coffee shop where you can see all the other NPCs and here's some things so you can now do stuff faster!"), whereas Pocket Camp's are designed to be eye-catching and make you go "whoah, new thing, better play the game!"
• Finally, you've also got the fact that Animal Crossing's both a proven system seller and an evergreen seller. It's something up there with the big boys of Mario and Pokémon. If NH had released in late 2021 (when it was finished), that's pushing it in terms of release timing. If it had been released in 2022 or 2023 (if they were aiming for Even More Content), that's way, way too late. Look at what was being released in those two years, it's predominately second entries for series that already have a presence on the Switch (Kirby, Splatoon, Bayonetta, Zelda, Pikmin, 2D Mario, Warioware). It needs to be out sooner, not later!

I think they meant “banked” in the sense that Nintendo definitely profited off releasing it during a pandemic. Not necessarily that they did it on purpose.

I think I’d agree with a lot of your points if Nintendo hadn’t had 7/8 years to make the game. I understand the DLC aspect for holidays and adding them as appropriate so people don’t time travel, but Nintendo is getting a bad habit of trying to force people to play a certain way rather than letting a person play the game they paid $60+ the way they want to. If they want to time travel to Christmas etc, let them.

It’s very much like in Pokémon where they keep removing options like turning off the EXP share. Giving a player LESS options on how they play their own game is never a good thing imo.

They removed so many options on how people can play to prevent time travellers spoiling stuff, which is fair I suppose. But they removed so many other things like shop upgrades that the game just felt slow imo. The stuff they added to fill the time like NMT islands and farming materials gets boring very fast