If the Switch 2 is safe, then I'm Jason Statham and I want to star in it
Bigger, better, more badass.
My first thought on seeing Switch 2 was probably a lot like yours. Mumble mumble, continuity, familiarity mumble mumble. You were probably a lot more coherent than me, and my apologies for that.
Anyway, when proper sentences started to form for me, the first was something like: this is going to be weirdly non-weird to play games on. And that's weird? Then: this doesn't feel like a next generation of hardware so much as it feels like... a sequel.
Has there ever been a genuine hardware sequel before? Not just a follow-up, not just a successor, not just an evolution of the conversation in a new and delightful way: a proper sequel. I think the closest I can recall is probably the movement from NES to SNES. Continuity was important, but this time it was everything you already knew you liked made SUPER. Probably the easiest pitch in all of video games. And what a new machine that was. But it felt bracingly new. Four face buttons, the shouldery bits, Mode 7. Not, in my mind, a sequel.
Switch 2 is a sequel. Yes, the name makes this clear, but just look at the machine. It follows the classic sequel laws, as laid down by Cliff Bleszinski: Bigger, better, more badass. It's the form factor you recognise, most of the elements you recognise, and the tweaks, outside of the size, are subtle. Magnets for the Joy-Cons, a proper stand in place of the little bike kickstand the Switch had.
This has made me think: I'm not against this. Not at all. And I've realised that's because there is a place for sequels, I'd just never really considered it before.
Mostly I tell myself I'm against sequels, but that's because I'm still thinking about the first sequels I came across, which were films. (Back to the Future doesn't count, BTW - all three are perfect.) Sequels in films are often sneered at, and so sequels in games and other things are sneered at too, all struck by the same sneery brush. But there's an important distinction. Films are often largely about story, and stories tend to come to an end in quite a distinctive way. It can be a real pain to think of more story when you finished everything off so carefully. But games are about systems a lot of the time, and systems don't end the same way stories do. You can keep going back, tweaking, subverting, finding things you missed which lead to their own new mechanics and new joys and whatnot.
Then there's something else a designer once told me: by the end of making a game, you're really good at making it. You're really good at making it well.
Back to the Switch. Would a wild new Nintendo machine be good? Yes of course. I can remember sitting up in bed one morning and reading about the Wii after its reveal and trying to make sense of it, and that was brilliant. But it's also quite a classic Nintendo idea to sequelise something like the Switch. And this is for a handful of reasons. As hardware, the Switch is novel in a way that allows designers to keep creating new things from it - I'm thinking here about that late-game idea of linking different screens together with a swipe of the finger - but it's also just really really good as it is. It gets out of the way, in that it allows you to play it where you want to, and it also gives you a clear way to approach it as a player. You don't need the Wii moment, which a former editor once referred to as "learning to eat with a knife and fork again, but different."
What I'm getting at is there's still potential within the Switch, so tweaking bits and improving the hardware in ways that I won't even pretend to understand makes sense. It feels hyper-evolved, in that it gives you games where you want with a minimum of fuss. And it reminds me of the thing about withered technology that always gets talked about with Nintendo. It's not that the tech is old and cheap so much as that the company finds old and cheap tech which has ideas and potential lurking in it that hasn't been tapped yet.
So, Switch 2? Yes please. And while I wait I'm going to rewatch Back to the Future 2 and remember how good a sequel can be.