Let me begin by saying: fuck Nintendo. Their insistence on
ruining the lives of people who do anything they disapprove of
with the products they sell, regardless of whether that thing
is illegal let alone harmful to them, is despicable. It
creates a chilling effect on vital efforts towards digital
preservation that extends far beyond their own products, on
top of just being a heinous thing to do to fans of their
games. The regard in which they consistently hold their back
catalog as assets on which they could one day collect rent
speaks to a deep-rooted capitalistic mindset among the
businessmen who run the company that is in no way outweighed
by the positive things written below.
All that said... Welcome Tour evinces an attitude somewhere in the company—somewhere widespread enough to get this game made and translated—that I find deeply admirable. Unlike the obvious touchpoint ASTRO's Playroom, this is a tour of the Switch 2 in the most thorough possible sense. It takes the player not just through the most charismatic features like HD Rumble 2 or the mouse control scheme, it shows off every square centimeter of the system in a very literal sense. Players walk across circuit boards and computer chips and learn about exactly what they do. Every meticulous design decision is laid out for the player to see.
The result is a game that's intimately concerned with the physical and design structure of the device it's describing, and that invites the player to share in that concern. It trusts the player to care about the craftsmanship with which the console was created, and it provides tech demos to guide them towards understanding it by directly demonstrating technical concepts like framerate, HDR, and VRR.
And, yes, this is in service of convincing buyers that the $450 or whatever they laid out for this device was worth it by framing it as a meticulously designed luxury product. But it's also taking a stand and saying that thoughtful, humanistic design is what defines quality. In an era when every corporate product is racing to become the worst version of itself that might still be salable, when overhyped prediction engines that can only produce statistically-average slop are hailed as the future of content, this is a dramatically heterodox position for Nintendo to stake out so stridently. I'm impressed and honestly heartened by it—not enough to look past the company's myriad acts of destruction, but enough to say that I'm very glad that Welcome Tour is the way it is.
All that said... Welcome Tour evinces an attitude somewhere in the company—somewhere widespread enough to get this game made and translated—that I find deeply admirable. Unlike the obvious touchpoint ASTRO's Playroom, this is a tour of the Switch 2 in the most thorough possible sense. It takes the player not just through the most charismatic features like HD Rumble 2 or the mouse control scheme, it shows off every square centimeter of the system in a very literal sense. Players walk across circuit boards and computer chips and learn about exactly what they do. Every meticulous design decision is laid out for the player to see.
The result is a game that's intimately concerned with the physical and design structure of the device it's describing, and that invites the player to share in that concern. It trusts the player to care about the craftsmanship with which the console was created, and it provides tech demos to guide them towards understanding it by directly demonstrating technical concepts like framerate, HDR, and VRR.
And, yes, this is in service of convincing buyers that the $450 or whatever they laid out for this device was worth it by framing it as a meticulously designed luxury product. But it's also taking a stand and saying that thoughtful, humanistic design is what defines quality. In an era when every corporate product is racing to become the worst version of itself that might still be salable, when overhyped prediction engines that can only produce statistically-average slop are hailed as the future of content, this is a dramatically heterodox position for Nintendo to stake out so stridently. I'm impressed and honestly heartened by it—not enough to look past the company's myriad acts of destruction, but enough to say that I'm very glad that Welcome Tour is the way it is.