You Had To be There
The announcement of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour at the April 2nd Nintendo Direct was one of those weird ones. Ninety-five percent nice vibes – not hype, exactly, but a “oh, that looks cute and informative” kind of positivity-followed by a brutal thud right at the end as they announced the price. Not the specific number of dollars, of course – we didn’t even get that until later – but the fact that there was any price in the first place. A game that boiled down to showing off the features of Nintendo’s own hardware in the vein of a fancy manual costing actual money was not what I or anyone else expected. Why? Well, to dig into that, we really need to talk about another game.
Astro’s Tour
Astro Bot isn’t as bluntly educational as Welcome Tour, but it pulls a lot of joy and fun out of the concept of a company showing off their new console. It takes an approach to the PS5 similar to what Pixar’s Inside Out took to our minds.
Look, I’m hardly the only person who reacted to the start of that little Welcome Tour trailer with a “Hey, Nintendo’s pulling an Astro!” Astro’s Playroom, the predecessor to last year’s beloved PS5-exclusive platformer Astro Bot, was and is one of the greatest pack-in games ever made. Every PS5 and PS5 Pro includes it pre-installed to the SSD, and it’s a wonderful 5-hour experience that sees you jumping, bouncing, flying and fighting your way through a whimsical and cartoonish platformer-friendly take on the PS5 itself, with levels themed around the PS5’s various important parts – CPU, GPU, etc. It was regarded as a really well-designed and enjoyable platformer that went past just being a playable PS5 console showcase, and it serving as a free pack-in was hugely appreciated and considered pretty generous. So when Welcome Tour was first shown, it seemed obvious that Nintendo was taking a leaf out of not only Sony’s book, but also its own – as I said, Astro Bot is only one of the greatest pack-in games ever. Wii Sports is almost certainly the king, it being so significantly responsible for the immense initial success the Wii saw back in the latter half of the 2000s. Surely Nintendo was going with what had worked before, right? Wrong. While Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is not disgustingly expensive at AU$15, and obviously required development effort to create, it’s difficult to defend the price regardless – but I’ll try.
Narrative in Welcome Tour
Narrative, really? In a game console explainer? Well, yes, sort of. While it’s not as fun and goofy as Astro’s Playroom’s approach, Welcome Tour has you playing as a visitor to a Nintendo Switch 2 exhibition, where you traverse the outside and inside of a gigantic Switch 2, its dock, its accessories, etc. It’s like a wildly more extravagant take on Nintendo’s real-life hands-on exhibitions, the sort of thing they might do if they had the resources to make something on the level of Disneyland while making a fraction of the profit from it. There are plenty of basic human employees around (calling them “characters” would be a stretch) who have text-based dialogue that adds a touch of personality to them, though this is undercut by the total lack of voice acting. They serve to explain the Switch 2’s hardware and development process along with all the other information you can access, and to introduce the wide variety of little minigames you get to play throughout the complex.
Welcome Tour as Technical Education
As I noted before, Welcome Tour is in a lot of ways like an extended, playable manual. Through both the scaled-up Switch 2 hardware that serves as the setting and the many Insights and Quizzes dotted around the game, it goes into extensive, yet digestible, detail on the Switch 2 and its development. You’ll learn about magnetic connections, 4K pixel resolution, variable refresh rate screens, machine-learning-based Super Resolution (Nvidia’s DLSS nomenclature goes unused here), how to get 3D audio out of tablet speakers, and a whole lot more. The whole thing is quite educational, but never really reaches the point where you don’t think that all this could have been on a free website. Hell, a lot of it already is. It’s a fun way to present it, but it is on the most basic level still marketing for Nintendo’s own product. But what about the gameplay?
Welcome Tour’s Minigames and Tech Demos
This is it – the real, best argument for why Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour costing money might be halfway justifiable. The giant Switch 2 and accessories are filled with a variety of minigames and tech demos designed to show off the console’s features. There’s a version of the classic World 1-1 from Super Mario Bros that demonstrates 4K resolution, a demo that shows Super Resolution via machine learning in action (including what I believe is the first case of DLSS being applied to only part of an image in real-time), and even a cute minigame using the stand where you attempt to match a given angle by sight. The Joy-Con 2 mouse controls especially, are given a major workout in multiple minigames, with you being asked to dodge spiked balls or defeat basic first-person shooter demos with different control setups. You’ll also need to get used to switching modes – docked, handheld and tabletop modes are all required at different points here.
There’s quite a lot of gameplay here, enough to, I imagine, lead certain people to defending Welcome Tour’s status as a paid title. But for me? Merely “having gameplay” is not a positive bullet point. It’s just the bare expected minimum for any game (except for something like a walking simulator or narrative experience, and they’re expected to make up for a lack of “gameplay” by drastically excelling in their chosen niche). Astro’s Playroom mixes its console-advertisement nature with far more in the way of gameplay that builds over the course of hours in a way that feels satisfying. Welcome Tour’s minigames are certainly fun and educational, but they’re educational only about Nintendo’s own system that they want to sell. Even I, someone who followed rumours and technical details about the Switch 2 for years before its announcement and who honestly finds Welcome Tour a goldmine of information, recognise that’s really not something that should be charged for. I think you’ll enjoy the minigames if you buy Welcome Tour, but they’re just bite-sized pieces of gameplay that don’t build to anything in the way you’d expect a “proper” video game to offer.
Nintendo’s Broader Approach
As impressive and successful as Mario Kart World has been, it’s hard to argue against the complaints of a very steep price.
There’s a temptation to link Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour’s pricing situation with a wider discussion that’s been happening since April 2nd – basically, a lot of people think the company has gone full “arrogant Nintendo” and decided to charge whatever they like for whatever they choose regardless of a perceived “unfairness” or “anti-consumer approach”. Points of evidence for this include things like the system price itself (the Switch 2 costs close to what a PS5 does despite being much less powerful, with even its system-on-chip process node being cheaper and weaker than what the consoles launched with back in 2020), the largely unprecedented US$80 price tag stuck on Mario Kart World (though the limited-time bundle does at least offer a chance to get the game for a solid discount), and to a lesser degree, the removal of eShop Gold Points and charging for game upgrades in the case of certain titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Kirby and the Forgotten Land.
I can understand this, though I don’t think the argument is particularly strong. The complaint I agree with the most is certainly Mario Kart World’s price – people can talk about inflation or the rising cost of game development all they like, but the reality is that companies like Nintendo are making record profits as a result of other factors, like drastically increased sales of games (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe having sold close to 70 million copies even if you don’t count sales of the original Wii U version), or the constant, reliable influx of cash from subscription fees. But the console price isn’t so bad, especially not when you consider the amount of tech the Joy-Con 2 controllers cram into such a tiny space, and the paid Switch 2 Editions of games do at least offer upgrades beyond visuals (whether that’s minor stuff like the Zelda Notes phone app compatibility or things like Kirby’s Star-Crossed World gameplay additions that come across much more like what you’d expect from a paid DLC. And there’s counter evidence as well, with multiple games getting free upgrades that enhance their performance on Switch 2 for no extra cost (Pokemon Scarlet and Violet come out especially well here, with Digital Foundry even declaring the improvement not unlike what you’d expect from a paid remaster), or GameCube NSO not requiring any extra charge beyond needing a Switch 2. So while I’m not on board with the pricing of certain games like Mario Kart World or Welcome Tour, I think the idea that Nintendo has gone full steam ahead on fleecing its fans is premature at best. I’d put a pin in this discussion for at least a year to see what they offer up, whether that’s a variety of new and free features and widespread sales, or just more US$80 games and a Switch 2 price increase.
Conclusion
Overall, I wouldn’t exactly recommend Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, certainly not to everyone. It has its pluses – it’s probably the best way to quickly demonstrate the Joy-Con 2 mouse controls to someone, and the information in it can be very interesting if you’re a chronically-online tech nerd like me, but otherwise it seems less likely that you’d be interested in it. Beyond that, it feels like paying for this might be something you’ll disagree with on a philosophical level – paying money to a company to access what is essentially marketing material for one of their own products that you already paid for. Everything about Welcome Tour – not just the minigames and information, but its slick and happy approach that surrounds you with avatars extolling the virtues of Nintendo and their products – is built around making you like and appreciate the Nintendo Switch 2, and while it can be useful in learning about your console and using it to its fullest, that’s still something Nintendo should be offering pre-installed. I bought it to do this review, but otherwise I would’ve left it alone. It’s your choice, and there’s absolutely enjoyment to be had here, but you may want to think about the message you want to send to Nintendo.
