Travel Lite
Smaller, lighter, longer-lasting – can Switch’s new model deliver joy without Joy-Cons?
Can the new Switch model deliver joy without Joy-Cons?
Nintendo has never held much truck with convention, but it’s still surprising to witness a hardware announcement accompanied by a trailer illustrating what it can’t do. So it was with the debut of the Switch Lite, a more compact, lightweight revision dedicated to handheld play – and which, as demonstrated by Yoshiaki Koizumi, fits within the inside pocket of a suit jacket. It will come in at $100 cheaper than its older sibling, thanks to a host of costcutting changes. There’s no dock or HDMI cable, since Switch Lite won’t
connect to your TV. Controls are integrated, so no more Joy-Cons – which in turn means no IR Camera. You can say goodbye to HD Rumble, too, while the absence of a kickstand rules out tabletop mode. Here, in other words, is a Switch that no longer lives up to its name.
Put that way, it sounds like a terrible idea. Yet it’s an acknowledgement of how a large proportion of Switch players actually use it. Until now Nintendo has positioned Switch as a home console you can take on the move rather than a handheld you can connect to your TV. But as anyone who’s filled out a Nintendo survey recently will attest, the company has been keeping track of who plays it docked and undocked. The numbers will have suggested this is the right move, even before you consider the vast audience who might balk at paying £280 for a new console, or those now ready to upgrade: Nintendo might claim that Switch Lite isn’t designed to replace the 3DS line, but it’s not fooling anyone.
A hardware revision removing key features is hardly without precedent. Many people didn’t invest in 3DS until
autostereoscopy was no longer part of the deal, and having a Switch that doesn’t, well, switch is arguably no stranger than a console called 2DS that plays 3DS games. This isn’t quite the same, since 3D slider and hinge aside, the two devices were functionally identical. Here, to play any games that don’t support handheld mode – such as 1-2 Switch and Super Mario Party – you’ll need to buy a pair of Joy-Cons, which brings the price much closer to the original Switch.
Among the console’s rapidly growing library, the list of games that don’t support handheld play is vanishingly small. Even so, it’s hard not to feel that creative experiments – cardboard creativity booster Labo being the obvious example, or even Mario Party’s more unusual asides – are now less likely to be released given the probable success of the cheaper model. The lack of nuanced force feedback will also make certain Moons in Super Mario Odyssey tricky to excavate (a patch for one of Switch’s flagship games is surely incoming) while Seaside Kingdom’s fizzy ocean will be missed on Lite.
Still, for all that Switch Lite is defined more by the features it’s missing, there are benefits beyond the more wallet-friendly price. The addition of a traditional D-pad will be a godsend for Tetris 99 fans and anyone who never quite got used to controlling 2D platformers with an analogue stick. Improved battery life, slight as it may be, is a bonus. Meanwhile, a wave of new players will get to discover the likes of Breath Of The Wild for the first time – and we guarantee none of them will be thinking about downgrades when that happens.