There’s a significant flaw in the Nintendo Switch 2! Foreign media say Nintendo may never fix it.

Four months after the Switch 2’s release, one of its most prominent defects has emerged: many previous-generation games perform worse in handheld mode than on the original Switch. While the docked mode retains the original image quality, for a system whose key selling point is handheld play, this issue hits users who primarily play in portable mode especially hard.

The root of the problem lies in the screen resolution upgrade and its compatibility challenge. The original Switch had a 720p handheld display, but the Switch 2 upgrades to 1080p. That means all older games that weren’t specifically optimised must be up-scaled or stretched, causing varying degrees of blurriness. For games whose native resolution was already below 720p (for example, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Persona 5 Royal at about 540p), the effect of blurriness on a 1080p screen becomes even more pronounced.

At present, Nintendo’s solutions fall into two categories: providing free performance-optimisation patches for some games (such as Pokémon Scarlet & Violet or The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening), or releasing a “Switch 2 version” of games (for example, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or Metroid Prime 4). But these cover only a tiny portion of the game library, and comprehensive optimisation across the extensive catalogue is obviously impractical.

Some players have proposed adding a “dock-mode rendering option” for handheld use, but considering that Nintendo would need to re-test and re-validate each game, the implementation cost is very high. This means a large number of older games are likely to remain in the awkward state of “running on the new console but looking worse than on the old one.”

The above content is compiled by ModeZone, a fashion and entertainment magazine.