Two, six, and ten. Those are the numbers of mainline Pokemon, Zelda, and Mario games that are currently available to download on Switch, respectively.
Obviously this doesn’t include Super Mario 64, Sunshine, or Galaxy, all of which were temporarily playable on Switch prior to the removal of Super Mario 3D All-Stars a few months ago. All in all, it’s a fairly poor selection of iconic entries from three of Nintendo’s most illustrious flagship series – at least we’ve always been able to play the rest on older machines.
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What’s that? Not anymore, you say? Do explain.
Nintendo has announced that as of January 2022, credit card support for the 3DS and Wii U eShops will be shut down. Essentially, if you want to be able to play Wii U or 3DS games after that date, you’ll need to either a) buy them digitally beforehand and have the memory necessary for storing them, b) purchase pricey physical copies of the games, c) circumvent the lack of credit cart support using bureaucratic money circulation techniques, or d) emulate them, which is illegal. That last point makes the closure of the 3DS and Wii U eShops particularly ironic.
If you’ve got Nintendo Switch Online, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with the NES and SNES libraries available to subscribers. In order for these games to run on Switch, they must be emulated – while emulation via third parties is illegal, Nintendo is obviously allowed to run its own games based on software designed to replicate its proprietary hardware. The DS was capable of playing GBA games, but that was facilitated by hardware as opposed to emulation tools. Nintendo’s emulation efforts only truly began in earnest with the Wii, which went on to influence the software we see being used by the 3DS and Wii U. As evidenced by previous transferability across generations, this should technically be readily adaptable for the newer, fancier, and more powerful Switch, although we’ve yet to see it adopt anything beyond a machine that was discontinued 18 years ago.
Put it this way: you can’t play Ocarina of Time on Switch. You can’t play Pokemon Red & Blue, nor can you boot up the much newer Ultra Sun & Ultra Moon. As I mentioned earlier, Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and Galaxy were there for a while, but they’re gone. Mario has admittedly enjoyed relative comfort on the Switch compared to Pokemon and Zelda, but there are still quite a few games missing – games that could be played on one of the consoles Nintendo is ditching support for. I mean, the Wii U is a bona fide Zelda machine. The Switch has Breath of the Wild, Link’s Awakening, the recently released Skyward Sword HD, and three NES Zeldas, one of which is the highly contested Zelda 2.
In isolation, all of these things seem like minor grievances, but if you combine each issue and examine the collective whole in context, it quickly becomes ridiculous. Also, this is before we even talk about other Nintendo series like Metroid, F-Zero, Super Smash Bros., Kirby, Earthbound, and so on. Nintendo has, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most impressive oeuvres in gaming history – so why does it seem as if it doesn’t care?
I’m not an expert. The people making these decisions are much smarter than I am and obviously have a more nuanced understanding of what works both commercially and in terms of maintaining what is probably the single most ubiquitous brand in video games. But to me, it just seems as if it’s all in service of yet another anti-consumer gimmick. The limited availability window for Super Mario 3D: All-Stars was an anti-consumer gimmick. Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light was an anti-consumer gimmick. Hell, even the Switch OLED, which retails for an extra $40 despite minimal improvements, is, ultimately, an anti-consumer gimmick.
When we see Nintendo culling support for its second and third-most recent platforms, both of which are the immediate predecessors of each of the Switch’s hybrid forms – home console and handheld – it’s like Sony saying, “Sorry buds, you can’t buy PS4 games anymore.” If you think I’m exaggerating, the PS4 came out in 2013, one year after the Wii U. It genuinely is like consciously choosing to ditch a platform that was current-gen until very recently.
The sourest part about all of this is that Nintendo actively denounces emulation, which, sure, it’s not legal. If you own the copyright to games and you want them to be purchased via the correct channels, you have every right to enforce that – but they’re not even purchasable, for the most part. Once credit card support goes for Wii U and 3DS, your only option will be to hunt down extremely expensive physical copies of games. You can’t get them digitally and they’re not on Switch – not yet, at least.
The only partially refreshing thought I’ve had about this entire fiasco was, “Maybe Nintendo is going to finally get that N64 classics library,” or, as I’d personally prefer, a whole host of Game Boy games. I mean, the Wii U virtual console supports games right up to and through the DS era – given the fact both the NES and SNES emulators exist on Switch, hoping for N64, GBA, and DS doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.
Or does it? It’s all so unpredictable right now. Zelda got nothing for its 35th anniversary. Donkey Kong’s 40th was basically ignored. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond & Pearl were announced alongside Legends: Arceus for the series’ 25th birthday, but aside from that there was radio silence in terms of preservation efforts for the series’ existing games. The technology is there for these titles to come to Switch, and I know for a fact people would pay close to full price for a relatively untouched Emerald, or Crystal, or Black. But no – the only way to play these games for the foreseeable future is to drop top dollar on elusive, archaic, unsupported machines before forking over extortionate amounts of cash for secondhand games that are probably devastated by dust.
Nintendo is probably my favourite video game company of all time, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to go to bat for an organisation that is so insistent on burying its own legacy. The Wii U and 3DS being left behind with no tangible way for the games locked to those consoles to persevere through to newer hardware is shocking. For a studio with so many beloved games, it’s weird to see how hellbent it is on making sure nobody ever gets to play them.