With Capcom’s upcoming Switch 2 games looking great, the future of current-gen ports to Switch 2 is very promising.
For decades now, the adage has been to add a little damning-with-faint-praise caveat to a complement about good-looking games, especially third party ones, on Nintendo platforms. It looks great, we might muse… ‘for a Nintendo platform’.
In this context, one can see why Nintendo would want to make Capcom’s upcoming releases of Resident Evil 9 and Pragmata such tentpoles. That backhanded complement still lingers, but when you look at and play these games on Nintendo Switch 2, they no longer feel like heavily compromised versions. Compromises are present, naturally, but in this presentation they feel more reasonable, and ultimately these games feel right at home on Nintendo’s newest platform. I look back to the days of properly hobbled, materially different versions of multiplatform games on Nintendo platforms and think: Those days may finally be over.
I’ve played a fair amount of Resident Evil: Requiem pre-release demos, and so I sit in a pretty good position to compare and contrast. I was one of the first people to play it in June (PS5), and then did so again in August (PS again) and September (Switch 2, handheld), and then last month I played three hours of a near-final version (PS5 again). A little over a week ago, I finally got to play the missing piece – not Xbox Series X, which will surely profile close enough to PS5, but the Switch 2 version docked, on a TV.
This is a crucial step – handheld, many Switch 2 games present better thanks to the relatively modest screen size going a long way to hide away some technical shortcomings. Case in point: I heartily recommend Switch 2’s version of Cyberpunk 2077, but only really if you plan to primarily play handheld. Docked, on a TV, there’s really nowhere to hide.
This is a challenge for a game like Resident Evil in particular. I reckon horror is absolutely best experienced in a darkened room on a decently large display, ideally with a surround sound system so the gleefully cruel sound design can properly turn your stomach. Horror games can work on handheld – RE had a great turn on 3DS, for instance – but I do think it’s an experience most at home in a more cinematic setting.
