It’s because it was the gold one.

– Joe, who is fiscally irresponsible

Just when we thought Nintendo was going to take the aged, nearly decade old, Switch to the vet to be dropped off at the farm on the countryside, it surprised us with another 2 years of problematic banger after problematic banger. With the beginning of the end on full display with 2023’s beautifully stutter-filled Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to 2025’s Metroid Prime 4: Beyond which will leave your 2017 launch model console begging for mercy.

We are finally liberated from guessing Nintendo’s next move with an unsolicited tweet from the company itself saying we will get news on its next hardware…soon. So now we wait.

In the meantime, I’m still playing on the Switch. Why? WHY?! In the advent of “better” consoles like the Odin 2 and the Steam Deck, What place does the Switch hardware have in the hands of any sane being in the year of our lord 2024? How about the Switch Lite?

Is the Switch Lite Actually Better Than the Switch?

I’m not joking. 2019’s budget-priced, handheld-only, wittle-bittle Pokemon machine is arguably the truest and most valid version of this hardware in 2024. The Switch’s hardware is beyond senile at this point, touting the Nvidia Tegra X1 chip (as seen in the Nvidia Shield) and a whopping 4GB of RAM across all consoles with a handful of refreshes: The Switch Lite, the V2 Switch with better battery life, and the SWOLED.

For those not up to speed, the Switch Lite, in particular, has a 5.5” LCD screen at 720p, a singular rounded plastic body, 32GB of onboard memory, and a similar variety of buttons to its Joy-Con’d bigger brother, analog stick drift and all. The D-pad is actually very similar in size and feel to the Game Boy Advance’s and GameCube’s, being small and firm.

Given the device’s single-player nature, this makes sense. And by extension, less sense is made with the design of the Joy-Con and its buttons. The D-pad is responsive enough without fatigue but is weak in terms of catching diagonals. However, I had no trouble blasting through Kirby Superstar using JUST the D-pad.

The buttons, however, are confusing and leave me outraged at the lack of care that was taken in designing the Joy-Con. These buttons on the Lite are SIGNIFICANTLY better than any of Nintendo’s previous handheld offerings, let alone the shallow dome and clicky buttons on the Joy-Con.

Here we see slightly wider face button⁹s with rubber membrane actuation and totally redesigned trigger button assemblies, giving them a soft click over a *CLACK* on the Joy-Con. These differences are big enough to recontextualize the feel of playing Switch games on a Switch. But what about the size?

Smaller is… Better?

Still not joking. Remember the simple days of Nintendo Handhelds, where you could simply grab them from your favorite shelf, put them in your favorite pocket, and take them with you? The Switch Lite embodies that feeling without compromising the bare-bones utility of the Switch (7.4” screen on the OLED). You can’t really just grab a large Switch and stealthily whip it out like the Lite.

Even amongst similar Retro Handhelds like the Odin 2 (6” Screen) or a pocketable device like the newly released RP Mini (3.7” screen), there’s a certain charm to carrying around something with a no-nonsense, turn-on, and play quality to it.

So It’s a Retro Handheld Now?

No. But also yes. Something we take for granted these days, amongst a pile of devices that need to be configured, is the software experience of the Switch. Don’t get me wrong; it’s bare bones and BARELY configurable, and it’s not exactly the ROM collection that everyone is looking for. But for the retro games it DOES have and the 1,000,000 plus re-releases on the damn thing, you’ll be plenty busy. Have you played the Ori games yet? Also, NSO exists. Yeah, that service.

I’d even make the argument that new titles post Tears of the Kingdom are best experienced on the Lite in general. Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door, Mario and Luigi, Mario Wonder (noticing a pattern here?), and Echoes of Wisdom all carry very simple, non-AAA 2.5D experiences that can be eaten in bite-sized chunks for 30 minutes at a time without the allure of a large scale 70 hour story. Can your Steam Deck (8” Screen on the OLED) do this too? Sure. But this device only weighs 250 grams and is $200 new.

Or I can get an RP5 for $220

Sure, but the Lite generally goes for as low as around $80 used in the US, which is nuts considering this is still considered a “Modern console”. Maybe it’s me coping, but that’s a pretty good deal for the Switch ecosystem, “Nintendo bad” or not. Either way, I still paid $220 for the Zelda Switch Lite, so maybe I’m just trying to rationalize my poor purchase decisions. I also bought the RP5. Help.

Welp

I’m having a good time with my Switch Lite, playing Echoes of Wisdom on a smaller device when rocking my son to sleep is a blessing I didn’t know I needed and I’m further perplexed by the seamlessness of cross-saving with my main Switch through the cloud. It’s standard tech, but the convenience factor is there and I appreciate that.

The screen isn’t great in comparison with the SWOLED, but Taki’s Super5 OLED mod aims to change that with an easy-to-install screen mod. The future is looking bright for the Switch Lite, as the Switch 2 plans on overtaking the old model, I can see more longevity in the Lite heading into Nintendo’s newer offering.

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