On Thursday, Nintendo gave us our first official look at the upcoming Switch 2, and its stealthy all-black redesign is signaling a gamer glow-up into a brooding teenage phase that screams "I'm not a kid anymore, mom."
The new Switch 2 looks like the original Switch just hit puberty and decided it was time to trade action figures for Esports. Perhaps the only thing stopping Nintendo from slapping an unhealthy amount of RGB on this thing was the threat of Razer suing over encroaching on its "try-hard" turf.
This isn't the bright, family-friendly console of your youth. The Switch 2 drinks Monster energy, challenges you to 1v1's on Rust, and probably has some edgy political takes it's dying to inform you of over in-game chat.
Nintendo's new handheld console will still be kid-friendly, set to offer a familiar lineup of Mario, Kirby, and Pokémon first-party titles suitable for all. Though its look is more modern kid-friendly — you know, the kind that wants a Bugatti and isn't afraid of getting their hands dirty by dabbling in a few crypto scams to get it.
The Switch 2's aesthetic matches its ambition
The Switch 2's glow-up isn't only skin deep, with the rumor mill churning over some serious under-the-hood upgrades we can expect to hear more about when Nintendo reveals more hardware details during an April 2, 2025, Nintendo Direct event.
We're talking about the kind of performance that brings native support for grittier, more graphically demanding titles — no longer relying on cloud streaming like it was trying to sneak cable access without parental supervision.
The Switch 2 is even rumored to be outfitted with an Nvidia Tegra SoC, offering ray tracing and DLSS support, letting it ride that AI-generated frame-rate wave of controversy like its RTX 40 and 50-series bad-boy cousins.
Even the Joy-Cons are getting a moodier revamp. They ditch the playful click as they slide into place on carefully crafted rails for a bullwhip-like crack as they magnetically snap into position, like you're celebrating a win in Warzone's Gulag with an overly aggressive magazine reload.
The Switch 2 isn't just a handheld console; it's almost a statement piece—Nintendo's way of saying that it's ready to trade the ball pit for the big kids' table and pull up a chair next to Sony and Microsoft to talk smack about Call of Duty players who use the riot shield and one-shot shotgun combo.
Switching things up
However, for all the dark aesthetics on display, Nintendo is still Nintendo and the familiar red and blue hues of the Switch that came before sneak in as accents to this next-gen offering's Joy-Cons and rumored hall-effect thumb sticks.
It's a sign that the Nintendo we all love is still very much at the soul of this handheld device, reminding us of the Switch's playful past while hinting at a more powerful future.
Nintendo's new console will, of course, be very much kid-friendly once again, but with its souped-up hardware and modern aesthetics, it looks to be equally as friendly to those kids who grew up with the original Switch and are now ready for something bolder.
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