Nintendo ended Tuesday’s Pokémon Presents with new footage for Pokémon Legends: Z-A on Nintendo Switch 2, showing the player wandering the streets of Lumiose City, enjoying a break in the park with a full team of Pokémon, and having fast-moving, sharply animated battles with several Pokémon on-screen at the same time. There’s a slight problem with all this, though:. The footage was only for Nintendo Switch 2.
I get it. Nintendo naturally wants to show off the best version of a major fall game that’s poised to sell millions of copies. And I don’t think anyone who’s up-to-date with video games thinks Pokémon Legends: Z-A will run as smoothly on the original Switch as it will on the new console. But folks still have the right to know what to expect from their purchase.
At the end of March, Nintendo reported it had sold over 152 million Switch units around the world. Four days after the Switch 2 launched, the company announced it sold more than 3 million units. It’s impossible to know how many Switch owners might upgrade or how many even care about Pokémon, but the point is, that’s a lot of people who don’t have a Switch 2 yet. Which means there are a lot of people likely to pick up A New Pokémon, trust it’ll be fine because Nintendo, and then potentially not have a way to get their money back if they purchased it digitally (to save money via Virtual Game Card sharing, for example).
Legends: Z-A might perform fine on the original Switch, but some of the early footage Nintendo showed raises more than a few questions. The trailer from the March 2025 Nintendo Direct — the last time Nintendo published footage of the game on the original Switch — is mostly a sequence of cinematics showing off Lumiose City. The gameplay segments that are shown are less demanding; you’re never seeing more than a few Pokémon and characters on screen at the same time. It looks fine, sure, but resolution isn’t the important thing here.
During one scene roughly 1:33 minutes into the March trailer, the player encounters a Dedenne and a Spewpa on a rooftop, both of whom are just staring into the distance. Maybe they’re just dissociating a little as a treat, but it’s more likely that the system’s limited processing power is preventing them from behaving in a Pokémon-like way. Given how Pokémon Scarlet and Violet on the original Switch struggled to render enough Pokémon and have them behave appropriately in the open world, it makes me doubt the console’s ability to handle things like multiple Pokémon following you, citizens shopping, walking, and living in a way that makes the should-be-bustling city feel alive, and how smooth battle animations will be.
This lack of transparency is not a new issue. In notes for Switch 2 editions of old games, Nintendo already established a precedent of not being particularly candid about what Switch 2 upgrades actually improve. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s Switch 2 description, for example, only mentions that the games are “optimized for… high-resolution TVs” and have a frame rate “improved for smoother movement.” That translated to support for 4K resolution and 60 fps. Nintendo did the same for the Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom upgrades and refused to outline specifically what changes other free and paid Switch 2 upgrades included.
The practice makes Nintendo an outlier, as greater openness about performance differences between console generations is, perhaps not quite a rule, but certainly not the exception. Sony didn’t show official side-by-side comparisons of Horizon Forbidden West on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, for example, but did at least publish footage of the game running on older hardware. Publishers such as Deep Silver occasionally post detailed spec sheets explaining what you’ll get from the lower- and higher-end consoles, as it did for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and it’s standard procedure with PC games and their minimum and maximum spec. Even if official footage only shows the game running on powerful hardware, you still get an idea of what it’ll look like on your rig.
Maybe Nintendo plans to do something similar before Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s release date, with a detailed version comparison or perhaps some additional footage of the game running on the original Switch. (We’ve reached out to Nintendo asking just that and will update if we hear back.) If it doesn’t, and you don’t own a Switch 2, just bear in mind that what you see from Z-A’s promotional materials might not be what you end up getting.
