It’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary the Nintendo Switch was. It was obvious when it launched in 2017, and it’s only become more obvious as the entire handheld market has been pulled into its orbit. As the longest survivor of any Nintendo console generation, it’s easy to see the Switch as an ou🍎tdated and underperforming system now, but its legacy isꦺ cemented. The Switch made full-sized, triple-A console games portable, in a way they had never been before.
All progress𒅌 leaves behind casualties, unfortunately, and I often find myself pining for the handheld days of yesteryear. The Switch broke down the barrier between handheld games and console games, and as much as I love playing The Witcher 3 and Doom Eternal on the go, I miss when handheld games were handheld games. Call me old-fashioned, but I liked it when big companies made small games that looked bad. It forced them to design within the limitations of the hardware to find creative solutions and create compelling gameplay, and I don’t think that kind of thing exists in triple-A today.
This is something I think about a lot as a Kingdom Hearts fan. The three mainline Kingdom Hearts games were all big budget console exclusives, but in between them we had smaller entries on Game Boy Advance, PSP, NDS, 3DS, and mobile. And while spreading your series over seven different consoles is a terrible way to tell a story, it created so many opportunities for unique gameplay experiences. The only Kingdom Hearts games we’re likely getting between 3 and 4 is a multi-platform rhythm game and a couple of money-grubbing gach𝕴apons.
I miss the handheld spin-offs, especi♒ally the ones created to sell the PSP and PSVita. Games like God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Jak and Daxter, Lost Legacy, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and Ratchet & Clank: Size Matter🃏s gave us prequels and side stories that expanded the worlds of our favorite games, helped fill the gap between mainline entries, and gave small development teams a giant IP to cut their teeth on. Ready at Dawn’s first game was Daxter on the PSP, and now it makes the hugely successful VR series Lone Echo. The studio that led development on Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories, now known as Rockstar Leeds, was approached by Take-Two because it had built an engine for the PSP. Outside of Riot Forge, those kinds of opportunities for small studies to work on big franchises don’t exist anymore.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that we’re getting flooded with ports of handheld games now that the Switch is at the end of its life. Not only is there a lot of nostalgia for the Game Boy era, but as the Switch has started to show its age, it seems like there’s a newfound appreciation for the kind of modest-looking, well-designed ꧒games we u💛sed to get on handheld. Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection, Crisis Core - Final Fantasy 7 Reunion, and Advance Wars 1 and 2 Re-Boot Camp are the most recent examples, but we also saw a big collection of Game Boy and GBA games added to Nintendo Switch online earlier this year.
Many of the most popular handheld games were designed around the idea that players would be engaging with them in short bursts on the go. Some of the PSP’s earliest hits, like Patapon and EchoShift, would not have been nearly as popular on a home console. Those games had the feel of handheld games in a way that games made today, even mobile games, never do. We often say that games feel like the perfect Switch game or the perfect Steam Deck game in order to describe the intimate, casual, or passive way we enjoy them, but games just aren’t intentionally designed to be playe🐭d handheld the way they used to be. As one example, just think about how often people complain about the text being too small when they play Switch games. That never happened when handheld games were their own type of game.
There’s a much wider variety of gaming experiences than there’s ever been before, but that specific category of handheld games still feels lost to time. We’re never going to get a ten-hour mobileಞ game that takes place in between God of War 2018 and God of War Ragnarok. Big franchises aren’t going to come out with experimental gems like Mega Man Battle Network and Metal Gear Acid. Any future 2D Zelda, Mario, and Sonic games will only be considered novelties and throwbacks. We’re never going to get six Powerpuff Girls games in the span of two years ever again. Some say maybe we never should have, but that will always be my favorite era of video games.