The Grim Barbarity of Optics and Design

This is another Switch 2 Blog Post.

Matt · Apr 29, 2025 · 5 min read · 6 views

A screenshot of the new Nintendo Switch 2's home menu. A blank gray background with rounded square tiles in the center to show games, one has Mario Kart World. The bottom menu buttons are rounded circles containing an icon pertaining to what the button does.

This is what the Nintendo Switch 2's Home Menu UI looks like. It's lame as hell. Blank grey background with rounded tiles in the middle for game icons and a plethora of circular menu buttons on a bar below the tiles. It's all in this boring, monotonous, and assumingly silent menu.

To those new here, this is almost identical to how the Switch 1's UI looked. To those who had a Switch 1, welcome back! This is all too familiarly disappointing, isn't it?

A screenshot of the old Nintendo Switch 1 home menu. It's the same, without the rounded corners on the icons.

It's all so bare and boring. The "Themes" menu in the System Settings just has "Basic Light" and "Basic Dark". After 8 YEARS of speculation, more themes were never available for purchase, like how the 3DS had.

After 8 years of this system theme, hopes were really high for the next system in Nintendo's lineup to go back to the old infinitely replayable menu music of the Wii era, or the lively social landscape of Wara Wara Plaza from the Wii U (that even had its own jingle for when it was your birthday!), or the ever infectious startup sounds for the GameCube, or the iconic jingles and tunes in the Wii's Mii Channel. All of these made opening the console on Day 1 so exciting and fun. I remember opening the Wii U on my birthday, booting it up, setting it up, and then getting into Wara Wara Plaza with that birthday jingle mentioned before, it was so magical and it's something I still think about to this day.

All of this was thrown away in the Switch's UI design! There's no music! There isn't any music when you open the main menu, unlike the amazing ambient soundtracks of the Wii or Wii U era. The ever-evolving eShop themes from the 3DS and Wii U, nor anything like the iconic Wii Shop Channel are present in the Switch's eShop app. Instead, you are met with a (very slow on the Switch 1) baren webapp. Giant sidebar, slowly transitioning into your main content view. Just an unpleasant experience, especially compared to Nintendo's previous home consoles.

A screenshot of the Wii's system menu. Shows all the default channels in a 4x3 grid layout akin to TV channels. There is a blue Player 1 cursor shown on screen from the Wii Remote. Below the channels has the system date and time, with a settings button, SD card menu, and the Wii Message Board.

Part of the Wii's charm was its system UI. The iconic TV channel layout was easy to understand to ANYONE, gamer or not. The included channels (Mii Channel, Photo Channel, Wii Shop Channel, Weather Channel, and News Channel) were all fun to use! The Mii Channel was infectiously fun and filled with creativity, you can make yourself, your family, celebrities, anybody!! It's always a fun time gathering around the TV and creating a new Mii. You could manipulate and draw on images from your SD card in the Photo Channel, look at your local weather forecast in the Weather Channel, look at local and worldwide news in the News Channel, and shop WiiWare and the Virtual Console in the Wii Shop Channel. All of these channels had incredible soundtracks, and were fun to play around with! These were included with the console, just on the system UI. The Wii's system software is notable enough to even have its own Wikipedia Article.

All of this has ultimately gone to dust in the Nintendo Switch era. You make Mii's in the System Settings. YOU MAKE MII'S IN THE SYSTEM SETTINGS... The system is practically on mute until you start up a game. It's so sad! I really thought that with the Switch 2 Nintendo was gonna do something more. I think all the UI concepts I kept seeing on Reddit and places alike had me too hopeful. It's sooo boring and sad! The death of the Mii's as branding is just sad to see, like we've seen some glimpses of them using Mii's again (Virtual Game Cards promo video and Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream) but not the abundance of Mii's found in the Wii and Nintendo DS era. Which, okay, makes sense, and yes, I'm incredibly blinded by nostalgia here, but still, I think that use of branding was so fun and flavorful.

All this to say, I really miss how creative Nintendo was with their UI design. These flat muted colors with nothing to have fun with out of the box is so soul-sucking. "So excited to open my new console! What's there to do? Okay... system settings... eShop......... aaand playing the 1 game I could afford. This is kinda sad." I fear this is how I'm gonna think when opening my new $450 console. Oh well, at least Mario Kart will be fun.