This year, while visiting my parents over fall reading week, a chance root through my childhood bedroom produced a fondly-reminisced-upon object from my not-too-distant past—my once-beloved Nintendo 3DS XL. I was, for years, a Nintendo kid at heart. Throughout my childhood I wanted bodily to play a Pokémon game. The franchises’ myriad insipid television advertisements are, if anything, largely responsible for having gotten me into video games in the first place.

My first handheld was a Nintendo DSi I got for my eighth birthday. The console was bundled with Pokémon: White Version; it’s got the box legendaries Reshiram and Zekrom embossed on the console in silver. That console is smaller than my current smartphone. Three or some years later I graduated to the 3DS when it came out. I started getting into Zelda. I’d played Four Swords Anniversary Edition on the DSi, but the remakes of the N64 titles cemented my love of the franchise. I’ve so many memories of taking my handheld consoles everywhere—to my friends’ house, to my grandparents’ house, to the United Kingdom (and back). I beat the Unova Pokemon League in the basement of my grandparents’ cottage while my brother watched over my shoulder. I remember the exact feeling of slack-jawed awe when I saw N’s Castle rise from the rubble—the first time a game left me well and truly speechless.

Thirteen-odd years later, and I’ve dug my 3DS out again. A couple years prior my now-ex-girlfriend had psy-opped me into Fire Emblem fandom. After thoroughly playing through Fire Emblem: Three Houses (twice! Fuck the Blue Lions!) I became obsessed enough to want to seek out more, and rather than emulate prior games in the franchise—which are readily available through any number of ROM sites—I decided to bite the proverbial bullet and become the kind of girl who buys physical copies of games for a discontinued console. I am thus the proud owner of Fire Emblems Awakening, Fates (Birthright AND Conquest, though no word on how I’m going to play Revelation with the Nintendo eShop discontinued), and Fire Emblem II remake Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. I’ve clocked more than thirty hours in Awakening. It’s become a nice little ritual—beating a chapter with my coffee before work, playing a paralogue while I make dinner. I check my barracks almost every morning, a routine which is far better for my mental health than any sort of habitual social media use. 

However, most people’s relationship with handheld gaming since the start of the pandemic has likely been of a wholly different kind. The Nintendo Switch seems, at this point, pretty culturally ubiquitous. It’s a console that’s sold 125.6 million units—spurred on by its accessibility and relatively cheap price point—and which boasts a glut of games both critically and commercially successful. The Switch, despite being nominally a home console, does boast the feature unique among its peers of being able to take it pretty well anywhere. Certainly, if one can tolerate graphics that struggle to meet computer benchmarks of the late 2000s, a tiny screen which is impossible to see in any decently-lit room, and more frame drops than I have articles in my backlog, there’s a certain novelty to my co-worker and I playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate while we wait on our sandwiches at the bar.

I’ve played a hell of a lot of Switch games (and even like a couple of ‘em!), though I confess, I’ve never really bought into the novelty of it being an “everywhere console.” The Switch is ungainly on many levels. Besides it being considerably larger than even Sony’s PlayStations Portable and Vita—consoles I’d argue to which it bears a far greater resemblance than the 3DS—playing a full-HD 16:9 video game on a 7-inch screen with controls sized for infantile hands is simply in no way as satisfying as it is to say, enjoy a cinematic PlayStation 5 title in luxurious quality with opulent sound in the civilized comfort of your own home. Both the Nintendo DS and its GameBoy predecessor are shaped intuitively with 4:3 picture ratios to maximally exploit their minuscule screen space and—being generally taller than they are long (though all DS models save the original 2DS can fold in half when not in use)—are designed to be held in the quotidian “portrait” mode of smartphones and letter paper.

Pokémon on the DS artistically employed every pixel whilst deliberately making economical use of both screens. Contemporary entries like Scarlet and Violet meanwhile, are saddled with a staggering field of view with which they find themselves at a loss to fill. While Fire Emblem Awakening’s lavish pre-rendered cutscenes are gorgeous even by the standards of today—never mind its 2011 release date—eight years and a full console generation later those of the series’ sixteenth entry look like they were rendered on a PlayStation 2. I’m not saying they don’t make them like they used to. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that the stringent technical and stylistic demands of Nintendo’s previous handheld platforms forced developers to become more inventive, challenging them in a way the Switch simply does not. 

Perhaps the worst example of this is the least-fulfilled false promise of the Switch era, namely, handheld ports and remakes of existing popular third-party releases. I mean hell, the Switch has got Bioshock, it’s got The Witcher 3, and it’s got DOOM (2016). You can even play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Game of the Year Anniversary Definitive Special Edition (or whichever iteration of that game we’re on at this point) in your intro to psychology lecture if your heart desires. Playing DOOM at 30 frames per second, 720 dots per inch, and a draw distance three inches from the front of your nose is not, however, the “authentic” home console experience on the go. It’s quite the opposite, if anything—I’ve no love of needlessly dying because the enemy who shot me point blank in the face had not rendered on my screen yet. 

The Nintendo Switch is a console I’ve loved for indie games like Hades and Disco Elysium, where art direction takes precedence over raw graphical fidelity. It’s one I’ve equally loved for replaying older games with less strenuous technical demands—games like the original 1993 Doom, and old collections of Castlevania and classic Street Fighter. With the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom imminent, however, and early reviews already citing performance issues on the now six-year-old system (despite TotK’s predecessor Breath of the Wild equally having notable performance issues at launch), I think it’s high time we asked whether this is actually a step forward.

Despite the very first home consoled I ever owned being the PlayStation 3, and its successor being the console whose games to which I attribute my continued love of the medium, the Nintendo handhelds are consoles for which I reserve an unconditional sort of love (as much as one can love a commodified lump of plastic). The Nintendo DS still boasts my favourite Pokémon generation bar none, and what to me is the definitive Mario Kart. The 3DS remaster of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’ s Mask is one of my favourite video games ever—full stop—and the console’s Super Smash Bros. 4 port was my first introduction to a franchise I’m obsessive about to this day. Both consoles are far from perfect in many, many ways, though their idiosyncrasies lend them a certain charm. Did you know that there is a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for the Nintendo 3DS of all things‽ It’s called Snake Eater 3D, because of course it is, and terrible as it is, I love that it exists.

You might be surprised then, to hear that I don’t think we should go back. If you’ve got a 3DS lying around somewhere, absolutely boot up that old copy of Ocarina of Time 3D you never finished. By all accounts, replay the Ace Attorney trilogy, or play that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game you really wish you’d started. However, by no means should you go out and buy a 3DS second hand for a steep markup on eBay, or go to any lengths to obtain one at all, for that matter. Unlike the third-party titles I discussed earlier, any first-party Nintendo game worth playing has likely not only been rereleased on the Switch, but is probably far better to enjoy on Nintendo’s current console generation. Both Hyrule Warriors and Xenoblade Chronicles received respective “Definitive Edition” remasters for the Switch shortly after its release. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age was ported to PC and PS4 in 2018 and Nintendo Switch in 2019, and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword received a high-definition remake which smoothed over the worst of its motion-control borne rough edges. Ace Attorney found remasters in the form of the Turnabout Collection and Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, and both Super Smash Bros. and Fire Emblem received new entries on the Switch with Ultimate and Three Houses respectively, with Fire Emblem also receiving the Koei Tecmo-produced hack-n’-slash Three Houses spin-off Three Hopes and the 17^th mainline entry Engage.

Moreover, online piracy remains abundantly accessible. People have been emulating discontinued games for years, and comprehensive ROM libraries exist practically anywhere, should you look for them. Most DS games are so small and well-optimized that you can run them on your phone without it breaking a sweat. Mobile phones and tablets today run the likes of Genshin Impact and Octopath Traveller, fully-realized console releases with lavish graphics and considerable technical demands. Compared to their likes, Professor Layton is going to be a cakewalk, trust me. 

Sure, there’s nostalgia tied up in everything these days, and I can’t deny it makes me just a little bit giddy whenever I feel the click of my 3DS’ hinges as I open it with my morning cup of coffee, but at the end of the day I can live without analog sticks and LCD screens if it means playing games which look better more in a more accessible format. The modern ubiquity of quality-of-life considerations such as “save states:” may have removed a longstanding element of “difficulty,” from games, but that in itself needn’t take away from one’s enjoyment of the experience. If anything, when I have to restart a map on Awakening’s hardest difficulty after a misinput on turn two, it sure makes me miss the later games’ excellent rewind mechanic. Sure, they don’t make ‘em like they used to, but after being forced to reboot your 3DS about five times, you’ll start to remember why it is they don’t.

Still, I can’t promise you’ll catch me singing the praises of just any new game which comes out. I’ve made no secret my disdain for the current state of the games industry, and as both the biggest Zelda fan at Arthur and Breath of the Wild’s second-most outspoken detractor, you won’t catch me playing Nintendo’s newest cash cow any time soon. I’ve been playing a lot of Castlevania for my upcoming Honours Thesis, which I am currently in the process of writing, as well as a lot of an indie game which I really enjoy and hope to publish a piece I’m particularly proud of about soon (nightmares of the copy editing process permitting). In the interim, I’m busy marrying off my Awakening units like a dad in a Jane Austen novel, and I’ve yet to fully rid myself of that nasty Cyberpunk habit. Life in the meltdown ain’t all bad, but I’m as wary of the technocapital singularity as ever. Assuming monetarizing power doesn’t tend towards effacement of specific territorial features in the meantime, I’ll see you all for the great migration into cyberspace. Until then, rest easy readers, and don’t forget to back up those save files.