If you had asked me whether or not I was ready for an upgraded Nintendo Switch two months ago, my answer would have been an emphatic yes. I had just played Pokémon Scarlet and, like many people, was baffled by its poor technical performance. I began to wonder if Nintendo’s aging hardware had finally hit its limits, unable to meet developers’ growing ambitions. Perhaps it wasn’t just time for a Switch Pro, but a new console altogether.
Doing it right If you look at Fire Emblem Engage and Three Houses side by side, the jump in quality is immediately apparent. The former has much cleaner visuals overall, as images have smoother edges. Load times are quicker, its frame rate is more consistent, and animated cutscenes look spectacular. There’s a sense that developer Intelligent Systems identified all of the technical shortcomings in Three Houses and, for the most part, resolved them sufficiently.
Recent Pokémon games are something of an outlier among Switch’s first-party exclusives, which often excel given the hardware’s aging tech. Xenoblade Chronicles 3, for instance, has an even larger open-world scope than Pokémon Scarlet, and it’s able to deliver on those ambitions with little in the way of issues. Some of its textures may look muddy close-up, but they don’t take away from its awe-inspiring landscapes.