For decades now, the adage has been to add a little damning-with-faint-praise caveat to a complement about good-looking games, especially third party ones, on Nintendo platforms. It looks great, we might muse… ‘for a Nintendo platform’.
In this context, one can see why Nintendo would want to make Capcom’s upcoming releases of Resident Evil 9 and Pragmata such tentpoles. That backhanded complement still lingers, but when you look at and play these games on Nintendo Switch 2, they no longer feel like heavily compromised versions. Compromises are present, naturally, but in this presentation they feel more reasonable, and ultimately these games feel right at home on Nintendo’s newest platform. I look back to the days of properly hobbled, materially different versions of multiplatform games on Nintendo platforms and think: Those days may finally be over.
I’ve played a fair amount of Resident Evil: Requiem pre-release demos, and so I sit in a pretty good position to compare and contrast. I was one of the first people to play it in June (PS5), and then did so again in August (PS again) and September (Switch 2, handheld), and then last month I played three hours of a near-final version (PS5 again). A little over a week ago, I finally got to play the missing piece – not Xbox Series X, which will surely profile close enough to PS5, but the Switch 2 version docked, on a TV.
This is a crucial step – handheld, many Switch 2 games present better thanks to the relatively modest screen size going a long way to hide away some technical shortcomings. Case in point: I heartily recommend Switch 2’s version of Cyberpunk 2077, but only really if you plan to primarily play handheld. Docked, on a TV, there’s really nowhere to hide.
This is a challenge for a game like Resident Evil in particular. I reckon horror is absolutely best experienced in a darkened room on a decently large display, ideally with a surround sound system so the gleefully cruel sound design can properly turn your stomach. Horror games can work on handheld – RE had a great turn on 3DS, for instance – but I do think it’s an experience most at home in a more cinematic setting.
Which brings us to the upcoming Resident Evil 9 on Switch 2. Point is, I’ve run the gamut. The best thing I can tell you is this: I’d happily play this game entirely on Switch 2, if the circumstances suited. Docked or handheld.
This is a shift for me. I’m a bit of a snob; I’ve got a ludicrously powerful PC, so that’s my primary port of call. A Switch version of any high-fidelity game was always either a novelty or an ‘if I have to’ thing. But as I sat there experiencing a solid-looking version of RE9 at a frame rate that is comfortably shooting for 60, I simply thought: I’d happily play this as my main version of the game.
Crucially, Resident Evil 9 on Switch 2 looks good on the handheld and on a TV (docked mode).
It has of course been nipped and tucked and graphically tweaked to make everything work on this platform. So this doesn’t look as good as the PS5 version that I played by quite some way. But it also speaks to the overall trend of diminishing returns on ever bigger and better game graphics that the difference is now no longer fundamental. If I had to put my finger on it, I’d say that the Switch 2 version of Resident Evil 9 is probably a little stronger than what a PS4 version of the game would look like – and I don’t actually think this franchise (or gaming in general) has visually moved on that far from how the PS4-era Resi games looked. Things look better, but each graphical upgrade is more granular than the last – and it’s clear here that the Switch 2 has more than enough oomph for these new RE Engine games to get by. At a time when huge budgets dictate games can reach the biggest audiences possible, these versions don’t just feel appropriate – they feel a must.
In practice the slight cosmetic pull-backs means that a jump scare from a big nasty monster is perhaps slightly less visceral because the mix of blood and saliva that glistens on its teeth when the game pushes into an extreme close-up after the jump scare isn’t quite so realistic – but the moment still works. Protagonist Grace’s lavishly rendered hair looks a generation older here than it does on PlayStation – but that isn’t really fundamental to the experience. Meanwhile, some new-gen features make it over – so ray tracing is in, even if it perhaps isn’t in its full-blown form on Nintendo’s platform.
Pragmata felt a touch less stable than Resident Evil, but that perhaps makes sense with it having action that can get more frantic with sci-fi particle effects firing off as you battle robots. It still felt fine, though – it felt at home on Switch 2, which just wasn’t the case for older entries in franchises like this.
Pragmata has more effects going off during combat, which can hurt performance, but overall it still looks great on Switch 2.
There’s a lot of work being done here by DLSS, aka Deep Learning Super Sampling – an AI-powered technology that essentially renders games at a lower resolution initially to increase performance and allow for advanced features like ray tracing, but then upscales that initial image to the desired output resolution. There’s trade-offs to this around input lag and visual artifacting, but I think the majority of users will struggle to see the difference.
DLSS is a cheat, but it’s a cheat inherent to all gaming, pretty much. Everybody is at it; PlayStation’s biggest exclusives are now often deploying their equivalent, PSSR, and even my PC’s RTX 5090 is putting in DLSS duty. On the Switch 2 it’s a vital tool to get games like RE9 and Pragmata over the line – but honestly, I’m not all that interested in debates about fake resolution or fake frames or whatever else. I’m interested in the result, not the journey. This result is pretty fantastic, all things considered.
As they have in many matters third party, Capcom does rather appear to be paving the way. Its in-house RE Engine is ready for the Switch 2 big-time. This isn’t Diet RE9 or Pragmata Zero; it’s the full-fat thing. It’s a way of playing these games that I can recommend to anyone; it’s no longer strictly circumstantial. And those trade-offs are now beginning to feel more like footnotes than glaring caveats marked with the boldest asterisks. If other third parties follow suit as strongly as Capcom, the Switch 2 is even more irresistible than I first thought.
