Hogwarts Legacy – Nintendo Switch 2 Impressions

A few months ago a friend asked me the following, “Would you play Hogwarts Legacy on Nintendo Switch?” I think I gave him the frankest of answers: “If Hogwarts Legacy on the Nintendo Switch is the ONLY way you can enjoy the game, then yes. But if you can play it on anything else, I’d do that instead.” The response, I think, was fair – while Hogwarts Legacy on the Nintendo Switch wasn’t unplayable by any means, it also wasn’t a great experience either. That’s all changed with the launch of Hogwarts Legacy: Nintendo Switch 2 edition!

If you played Hogwarts Legacy on the Nintendo Switch, you probably remember the load times upon load times, upon load times. Moved to a different part of the castle? Load. Moved into Hogsmeade? Load. Sometimes into specific buildings? Load. The game was littered with load sequences, and they were not short either. Having played on the PlayStation 5 originally, I could only manage a few hours on Nintendo Switch before I threw in the towel and stopped playing completely.

I’m now over a dozen hours into Hogwarts Legacy on Nintendo Switch 2 and I’m so impressed. You can play an up-scaled version of the Nintendo Switch edition of the game, but if you want Hogwarts Legacy in all it’s (well almost) glory, you’ll want to either purchase the Nintendo Switch 2 version or the upgrade pack. It makes a huge difference.

And that difference is evident in every single way. Graphically it looks better. Frame rate is definitely better. Overall performance? You got it…better.

Besides making the game more playable on a Nintendo console, the development team is also leveraging the mouse controls of the Joy-Con 2 controller. I love that Hogwarts Legacy is one of hte first third party games to leverage this feature, and while I’ve talked at length about how I enjoy the Nintendo Switch 2 mouse controls it is probably not something I’ll use often in Hogwarts Legacy. The game was built for a gamepad, and in the dozens upon dozens of hours that I played it on PlayStation 5 I never once said, “Man, I wish I had a mouse.”

Still, the willingness to work in these controls by a Third Party bodes well for the Nintendo Switch 2. I’m not sure the level of work required to make this happen, but it performs almost as good as using a real mouse. Hogwarts Legacy, and the fantastic mouse support, is just the beginning of what companies will be doing with this feature.

If you’ve never played Hogwarts Legacy before and are thinking of jumping in, this is not a bad place to start if you want the flexibility of playing on your couch or while commuting to school or work. While the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game are better when it comes to consoles, this is still a very serviceable release more akin to the Xbox Series Version of the game. If I was spending my dollars on this for the first time, it would be on the Nintendo Switch 2.