(cheerful electronic music) - [Announcer] When you attach the left and right Joy-Con controllers, you can continue playing anywhere. - [Translator] These are the Joy-Cons, set in the Joy-Con grip. This is the basic style
when playing on the TV. You can even tell. One, two, three. The number of ice cubes in the glass. And you can feel water filling the glass. - [Translator] "Splatoon 2" is planned for launch this summer. (upbeat music) - This is my impression of you just now. "Four years? Nah, it couldn't have been! Oh wow, no, you're right!" It also doesn't help that the last year has just been deleted from existence. But it's been four years since Nintendo's first portable hybrid
has been in existence and it's been a wild ride since then. I don't know if you
remember those early days as much as I do, but there
were a lot of naysayers and only about six physical launch titles and six that were digital-only. The current count on the eShop right now at the time of writing is 5,411. And it's changing daily. That is a significant improvement. The Switch itself has also
gone through a lot of changes, all different versions, different colors, tons of accessories. And there's a lot of hope for future iterations soon to come. (cheerful electronic music) This video is was sponsored by me! Stop asking me if the podcast is back! - Yeah, we're on episode 20 right now! - We stream it over on twitch.tv/WulffDen, where I also play games and stuff. The podcast goes to
youtube.com/WulffDenPodcast and every podcast service imaginable and the gameplay streams get clipped over at youtube.com/WulffDenClips if you're too lazy to watch a live stream. The Nintendo Switch was, and still is a revolutionary device because of the power that it holds in such a small form factor and the convenience of
being able to play games however you want. It's not the most powerful console, and its graphics seem
to be losing its luster by the minute as other consoles come out and flex their muscles. But what it can do is impressive given the nature of the device and its price point. Sure, there are other
gaming tablets on the market but, like, come on. The biggest critiques
of the Nintendo Switch when it first came out were its incredibly small games library and its reportedly short battery life. Three hours is not long at all, but that was only when playing
graphically demanding games like "Breath of the Wild". Games like "Shovel Knight" would grant you closer to five or six
hours of battery life. In the summer of 2019, Nintendo
released a stealth update to the Switch, adding a more
energy efficient processor that granted you 4.5 to 9
hours, depending on the game. Personally, I only ever
really play my Switch in docked mode, so battery life isn't really a concern to me. Plus I have a bunch of these portable battery power
banks laying around, so if I ever did run out of battery, let's say I was on a flight or something, I can just use one of these. I can only remember ever
doing that one time. So I didn't really get one
of these revised consoles until way later on. The library was admittedly small and it took publishers a really long time to start to get on board. Hell, EA still doesn't really have that many titles on the Switch, and the ones that they do have, they treat like absolute (click). But the Switch did have
"Breath of the Wild", which is still one of
the console's best games. It's perpetually been in one
of the top two spots for me. If "Breath of the Wild" didn't exist, I don't think the Switch would've done as well as it did in that first year, or at all, to be honest. That momentum really helped Switch sales skyrocket that year. And that momentum only picked up with the release of "Super Mario Odyssey", my other top two Switch
game still to this day. I'm still recommending both of these games to people who are brand new
to the Switch now in 2021. That says a lot about Nintendo's first party quality and longevity. Another problem that year
was the Switch's scarcity. It was really hard to
find any on store shelves. Many people attribute this to Nintendo's manufactured scarcity. People think that Nintendo intentionally limited the amount of
hardware that they made in order to drive up demand. Maybe they did do this,
if they hate money. Really, Nintendo took a
huge risk on the Switch. The GameCube was a failure,
the Wii was a success, the Wii U was a failure, they had a lot to lose with the Switch. So it's more realistic to assume that maybe Nintendo just
wanted to test the waters before producing a butt-ton of units. In a recent then Nintendo
of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said,
"The Switch really was a make or break product for the company and luckily it was a hit." If the Switch ended up failing
as bad as the Wii U did, you might've very quickly
seen "Mario All-Stars" end up on the X-Box. It was a big shock to everybody when Bethesda announced "Doom"
for the Nintendo Switch. That was the first big power-hungry game that was fully ported to
run natively on the Switch. It was revolutionary and left no excuse for other publishers not to follow suit. Since then, developer Panic Button has been hard at work
porting games like "Doom", "Wolfenstein", "Warframe", "Subnautica", the new "Doom Eternal", and
most recently "Apex Legends" which we finally got a look at during the last Nintendo Direct. And, admittedly, it doesn't look too hot. But at least it's coming, and I'm sure it'll run well. The Nintendo Switch
Pro Controller came out at the same time as the console and was just as hard
to find as the console. But I consider it a necessary accessory because the Joy-Con
aren't very comfortable. The Pro Controller caught a lot of flack for being expensive at $70, which is expensive for a
first party controller. But that is also the price of the current PlayStation 5 controller. It took almost a year for great third party options to start to pop up for the Switch. Maybe third party hardware manufacturers didn't believe in the console, or maybe Nintendo was just
that secretive with specs, they do like to play their
cards close to their chest. The second year of the Nintendo Switch eventually brought with it
"Let's Go Pikachu" and "Eevee". The first Pokemon remake to be brought to a home console. This was a fantastic
addition to the library, depending on who you ask. Many Pokemon fans were mad about the "Go"-style capturing system. They wanted a new
generation for the Switch. But I actually liked this more than "Pokemon Sword" and "Shield". You can probably chalk
that up to nostalgia. Regardless, it was a big deal to play a full Pokemon game on my TV. The tail end of 2018 also brought "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate",
which almost instantly became the best selling
fighting game of all time. "Smash Bros. Ultimate" is
still a worldwide phenomenon and a great e-sports game to watch, despite how terribly Nintendo
treats that community, and how bad the community
is sometimes to itself. 2018 had a big focus on filling
out the Switch's library, adding ports from all different consoles and making some new games too. And also filling out some
features on the Switch that it didn't already have. For example, in September of that year they launched Nintendo Switch Online, which was reviled by fans because it meant that the
Switch's once-free multiplayer would now cost people $20 a year. And it also cemented the death of the long awaited virtual console. 20 NES games being added to the service was a welcome addition, but Switch users were really looking forward to buying retro games individually. Nintendo fans dislike-bombed pretty much any video mentioning
Nintendo Switch Online in any capacity. Even the subsequent drops of new games being added to the service. SNES games came to Switch
Online the following year with another drop of fantastic games. But lately it seems like they've been running out of games to drop. I hope we get at the very
least Game Boy games soon. N64 games would be amazing, and the "Mario 3D All-Stars" emulation could pave the way for other N64 games. But I have little faith. Game Boy seems way easier for Nintendo. It was business as usual for Nintendo all the way through 2019
until about the summer when they announced the sequel to the beloved Zelda launch title. And we haven't heard
anything about that game since then, not even a little peep. It was also around this time that "Super Mario Maker 2" came out, which made a huge impact on my little Nintendo Switch world, but had very little
impact on anyone else's. I love this game. I love 2D Mario and it's great to have endless 2D Mario
levels on my Switch. It's also put the final
nail in my Wii U's coffin. The original "Mario
Maker" was the only reason I held onto that thing for so long. 2019 also brought the stealth release of the new version Nintendo Switch that we talked about earlier, the red box model. The model number HAC 001 (-01). The parentheses really
is what makes it new. Very soon after came the
long-rumored Switch Lite, the portable-only Nintendo Switch. Sporting a much more
convenient form factor, an actual D-pad, and a better price point. Shaving a hundred dollars off
the original Switch's MSRP. It's an awesome console. Perfect for people who
don't see themselves playing in docked mode. However Nintendo's terrible
cloud save and account systems make it very difficult to
use as a secondary Switch. Leading me and many others to basically never use their Switch Lites. Nintendo's account services
have gotten a lot better, and their cloud save service does support automatic downloads now, but I hold my save data
at too high of a value to be (click)ing around
with all of this stuff. Plus, where am I gonna go where I need something that portable? I haven't left the house
since I saw the Sonic movie. Speaking of, 2020 was
looking really hopeful for the Nintendo Switch. In terms of sales, Nintendo
knocked it out of the park. But as a fan, it was
looking a little barren. "Animal Crossing" dropped right
when the (click) hit the fan and became the game of the pandemic. It was sold out everywhere. Switch consoles became hard to find as everyone stayed home
and used Nook's Island as an escape from reality. "Animal Crossing" also brought with it a special edition Switch console. It wasn't the first
special edition Switch, but it was the first to have a different colored back on the Joy-Con and an entirely different colored dock. It was definitely the most beautiful special edition Switch to date. And I had to have it. I'm sure that Nintendo had a lot of things on the docket for the rest of the year, but nothing really happened. No Nintendo Directs, almost no new game announcements besides "Paper Mario". Again, this didn't stop sales at all. New users were still coming
in hot for the old stuff. "Super Mario 3D All-Stars"
was also a massive success and gives some hope for
not only more N64 games, but also more GameCube games to eventually make their way over using the same sort of emulation that the "All-Stars" collection does. This year Nintendo
started off with a bang. "Super Mario 3D World Plus Bowser's Fury" adds a lot to the Wii U port. "Bowser's Fury" is almost worth the whole $60 price tag in itself, if you're going for all of the Shines. And the Mario red and blue edition Switch, which is really just red, is the best looking Switch console to date in my opinion. And apparently I'm alone in that opinion, because everyone else thinks it's too red. Regardless of what you think
of this particular console, it gives us a lot of hope that Nintendo might finally release different colored Switch consoles, or at least get a lot more creative with future special editions. That seems to be the theme here, hope. I've been saying hope a lot, like this is "Star Wars" or something. The future seems pretty
bright for Nintendo. Nintendo had their first
Nintendo Direct in 18 months. If you were a J-RPG fan, you
thought that Direct was great. If you're me, you thought it was alright. There's still a lot of question
marks in Nintendo's future. More and more evidence is popping up of a future Nintendo Switch revision, or a new console entirely. It should be no surprise that Nintendo is working on whatever
their next console might be. I'd imagine that whatever they had planned has been delayed due to the coronavirus. The latest rumors say that the next Switch will support 4K via
Nvidia's DLSS technology. So, basically upscaling. Basically every analyst
has been predicting that we're going to get at the very least a new Nintendo Switch iteration this year, and at most a brand
new console generation. I personally have been
preaching for a long time now about the inevitable new Nintendo Switch, a mid-lifecycle iteration
of the current Switch. The Switch still has a lot to offer and sales haven't been slowing down. So I don't see the need
for an all-new generation. However, the Switch is
technically a last-gen console, which is a very dumb mis-categorization. I also don't think that Nintendo cares about being in this category at all. They haven't cared about
the graphical power of their consoles since the GameCube. But it is a little curious that their big budget titles have been left in a sort of limbo. Regardless, this new console probably won't be happening for a little while now. So if you've been holding
off on getting a Switch, for whatever reason, you don't have to. You've just been missing out on all these great games. So if you get one now, there's plenty of time
to play this massive, great games library until
the new one comes out. And who even says that you need to get that new one on day one? You've already been pretty patient on getting the current Switch anyway. So what don't you guys think about four years with
your Nintendo Switch? How has it been? When did you get yours? Are you still holding off
for some weird reason? And what do you think
the future of the Switch is going to look like? Leave it in the comments below, at me on Twitter, and any and all of this other social media garbage. It feels like tradition
to do a video like this every year, kind of like a recap or a wrap up of my previous videos. But don't worry, we
got a lot of new things to be talking about, very
soon, there are a lot of wacky and cool little ideas that
I got floating around, they're gonna take a long time, I've been working on it for a while. We've got new videos here all the time at least once a week
and like I said before, we got Twitch, we got the podcast channel, we got the clips channel. There's plenty of ways to help support us without even giving us your money. One of the best ways to help support us is watch the last video that I posted, it was a sponsored video. Your view will just help support us 'cause that video is sponsored. And as always, the most important thing that you can do is just subscribe and have those notifications on if you wanna be notified
when new videos come out. Because YouTube isn't gonna
tell you every single time unless you have that bell turned on, and share this video with a friend, a friend who has maybe been holding off on getting a Switch and
has a lot of FOMO about it. Thank you guys very much. You have yourself a good week. Give your papa a hug. Give your papa a hug!
