This morning, Nintendo finally announced the Switch 2, or at least showed a console that looks a lot like everyone thought it would and set a Direct with more details for April. The hardware-minded among us are certainly rushing to analyze every frame of the trailer, but I am a simple man with a simple complaint: I still want to slide in the Joy-Con.
In the trailer above, you can see that instead of sliding the Joy-Con into place from the top of the console like the current Switch, they click in from the sides. IGN wrote of an alleged leak of the controllers back in January that “[the] new Joy-Con allegedly ditch the railed lock method used by the current Switch in favor of electromagnetic suction controllers,” though in the trailer there appears to be a connector.
We’ll know more about how and why this all works in April, but if you’ll allow me to engage in the internet-old tradition of complaining about things I don’t know much about, I don’t like it! I want to slide the Joy-Con. Is it the best connection system in the world? No. Some players have found that the rail bends or wiggles, and it’s certainly not a seamless glide.
But still, sliding the Joy-Con in feels like the aesthetic heart of my experience of the Switch, a stance that’s backed up by the animation that opens every Switch game trailer of a Joy-Con sliding into place vertically. In those trailers, this is accompanied by the sharp “click” that’s triggered a Pavlovian response in me ever since the initial Switch reveal. In today’s trailer, that “click” is replaced by a rounder, somewhat echoey sound. Of course, neither of these are what the actual Joy-Con sound like, and the latter might just be an aesthetic choice for the trailer rather than a new “official” Switch sound.
This raises some obvious questions: Is Nintendo going to make a new animation? Are we going to get a new Switch sound? I will grudgingly say that change is good because that’s how therapists advise me to think about life, but aren’t we facing enough change these days? I like the little animation. I like the little click. I like to slide my Joy-Con into place like I’m dropping into a world-defining battle in the Power Rangers mech before I spend a whole evening giving people gifts in Stardew Valley when I should be doing something else.
Fine, fine–change is good, and hopefully the Switch 2 makes many much-needed improvements. While I like to slide the Joy-Con in to connect it, it can be a little annoying to detach; The Verge writes that it’s possible the new design will allow a button press to push the Joy-Con away from the console instead of clumsily sliding it back out, which sounds much nicer. There’s no mention in the trailer of fixes for Joy-Con drift, but I suppose I’m willing to sacrifice my beloved slide in exchange for a controller that reliably does what I want it to. There’s speculation that the Joy-Con can be used like a computer mouse, which is… I don’t know, cool I guess? Time marches forward, and things change, and perhaps a new generation will look at old Switch trailers with their slide animation with the same bafflement of my little nieces and nephews when I make a “hanging up the phone” gesture in front of them.
RIP, Joy-Con slide. I’ll miss you.
