Topic: Do you think it's our fault that Nintendo has gone lifeless and bland with the Switch?

Since the eShop is closing tomorrow, I obviously pulled out my 3DS and Wii U to have one last browse before it all shut down, and that led into a rabbit hole of going through all the old music and details of the Wii U (and 3DS).

And then I stumbled upon the main theme song for Wii U Chat, and it made me realise something.
Wii U Chat, despite being such a small application, used for calling your friends and having fun, has such a great production quality on it's music.

The calm background ambience of the Wii U we are all familiar in every Wii U song, paired with fun instruments, what appears to be a sound of a phone ringing in the background at times, and all these other fun details that really tells you that THIS is a Nintendo song.

Nintendo put so much effort into this tiny application because they had high hopes that it and the Wii U would be successful, only for it all to backfire, and all the hard work and effort that everybody went through to make the Wii U and all it's tiny little details that are so unnecessary, but they put them in anyway!

Some people never have and never will get to hear all of the amazing songs from the Wii U, because they refuse to set a foot near it, they act as if it's the devil of gaming systems, the worst 8th gen console of all time.

So, referring to the thread title... do you think, considering the Wii U did so badly and they lost so much money from all the hard effort they put into creating beautiful menu's and songs and everything else, they were scared that the Switch was gonna be the same way? They might've decided to not put as much effort into music or menus or any details, just in case the Switch backfires and they lose more money?

@squisan
NDS menu also have no music.

2015 Wii u Christmas eshop music.
Magical times

@Anti-Matter DSi had music

Switch was both a back to the drawing board and a combination of many older ideas that Nintendo had/implemented (as they explained during the switch reveal). They had been working on a streamlined OS and had been making steps with the nintendo network ID and then the current account setup. I think the lack of music/themes was in part a hope to speed up the OS (wiiu and 3ds OS are slow) and to alter the perception of the system. They wanted a family friendly but still for everyone mulitmedia system ( TV integration) and a way to jump off of the wii success. That failed so they went a different route. I do think the switch was inevitable though. But perhaps they used lower specs to allow them to better absorb losses if the switch was rejected by the market. I think a better question was did Nintendo consider the switch to be their last chance. Of course we will never know.

I think this is close to the mark but the other way around. For UI design you'll put in things like loading bars, background music and even mini-games to try and mask a slow UI and/or re-assure the user that the page is loading. Like how the Wii U had that match-three mini-game when you booted the eShop or how the Wii had that "Mario hitting blocks" download animation. Do these things slow down how fast things run? Well yes. But they'd be pre-built assets that'd be optimised to come up quickly

I mean, the Switch still has some of those kinds of elements. The eShop does still have a loading animation screen for example. But outside of that most of your interactions are fast enough that you're not sitting in the UI for long periods of time like you were with the Wii U, Wii or 3DS

I don't really mind the lack of music and simplistic menus/apps, i'm fond of this minimal design. But some themes would definitely add more personality to the system.

I think that might be the case. Wii had the quirky charm and was a smash hit, the 3DS was a success, and the Wii U failed. Nintendo was probably just trying to go back to the drawing board with the OS and realized extra music and visuals that most won't appreciate aren't worth the effort or processing power.
Hopefully the next system has more life in the OS while maintaining a slick speed.

I want to explain something important, hear me out. In an app or digital space, the general look and colors and whatnot define our experience and memory of it. But the way they make the time we spend on the app memorable is the music. It's how we've always decorated time. Setting aside the strong and painful nostalgia, how fondly do you remember just staring at these menus, their bossa nova-like songs looping in your ear? Now how memorable and unique is the switch eShop? And the settings menu? Or the wifi menu? Nintendo no longer puts the charm on their list of priorities. They are trying their damn hardest to fit in the corporate mold. The issue is both of us. Nintendo knows that they do not need a subversive melody playing in the home menu to have an enticing product, and the people don't care. They will continue buying a switch regardless of the memorabilia it may or may not come stuffed with. I miss the jingles. The wii, wii u, and 3DS menus are almost painful to go back to because of how much I miss them. It's as though you enter the house of a friend who passed away, and a song you two enjoyed still rings out behind the emptiness. If even the sounds of the Wii's disc drive are nostalgic, how much more would the sweet melodies of our pastimes be? We are no longer children, and Nintendo knows. They needn't try to feed off of our want to be young. They just need to push us into being customers and nothing else. I miss the badge arcade bunny. Hearing the gateway galaxy theme makes me want to cry. Nothing will ever be the same as the time we spent in front of those tube TVs. Nothing.

I'm still very young. I'm still growing up. But the years were I was growing before this were filled with all the things we miss about Nintendo. Our Nintendo.

@Squisan Do you also remember what it was like? To browse the Wii U eShop endlessly, listening to the soft synth Instrumentation? I used to record the songs from the Virtual Console game trailers in the 3DS Sound app, and listen to them over and over. We need to continue supporting those Programmers and modders that keep the Wii U alive, even if it just by mentioning their name.

Why did you have to remind me about the music, oh the music, I’m sad now.

@MetaCrystal
Music is definitely important but I think you, and others in this thread, are reading into this WAY too much. As I said above, the reason you do those sorts of things is to mask loading times. With the Wii U at launch it took almost a minute to exit a game and come back to the main menu. And longer than that again to get into things like system settings of the eShop. So there was ambient music to keep you engaged with the console while you waited

Same deal with the Wii back in the day. In some cases it was even worse for the Wii because storage and download management on the Wii was completely non-existent, especially early on. And most people would have been on much slower internet connections. You wanted to download an N64 VC release? You definitely needed that Mario hitting the blocks animation

With the Switch? You press the home button and you're in the home screen, it's basically instant. Turning the console on? If you were in sleep mode, again, basically instant. Going into the eShop? Sub 10s. Loading a game? Usually pretty instant, at least to get into the loading screen of the game itself. Downloading a game? Let it do it in the background

Elevator music is most definitely a thing, I don't think "open door music" is a thing.....

I disagree that the Switch is lifeless tbh. I think the "click" sound alone is more iconic than anything the Wii U did.

Maybe the eShop could do with some music, but I personally love how clean and snappy the Switch UI is.

I think the quirkiness was really associated with the mindset the company had when it was headed by the late Satoru Iwata. For me there are at least three Nintendos:

• The N64/GC era (and before), where the hardware was as good as you could expect and the games were absolutely amazing.
• The Wii/DS era where the hardware was quite poor, but a huge emphasis was put onto quirkiness, character, originality etc. The 3DS and Wii U also had this even though they were better hardware.
• The Switch, which represents a company with a much more modern mindset. Hardware and games are good, but fit much more with modern sensibilities, so you have to pay for online, Zelda is sandbox and there are more games like Splatoon etc. They don't really have the storytelling or quirkiness of past Nintendo.

For my part I prefer the "clean" lool of switch. Even on systems with themes and music I don't use the prior and Turn off the later if available lol

I hate the Switch OS compared to the Wii-U. There's no reason it runs so poorly when scrolling through the store when it's so bare bones.

Slightly off topic but still one of the things that really annoys me with the switch OS is how you can't keep a game suspended when you swap to something like a streaming app. I like to flick between games and YouTube (especially if im chasing collectibles in a game) and having to back out of a game to do so is crazy annoying when you take the painfully slow load times into account.

Again, I think we can be pretty damn confident that the performance of these "apps" would have absolutely nothing to do with music not playing. What you're looking at is basically a web page in a browser. What you're basically doing is opening a fairly media rich web-page on what's essentially a mid-range phone from 2015.... that happens to have a half-decent GPU for its time that doesn't help at all with loading a web-page

The hardware is fairly old, relatively speaking, and isn't really designed for browsing the internet. Playing an mp3 in the background at the same time? I mean that it could do. Easily. What it'll struggle with is loading relatively high resolution images into memory. Making lots of web calls in parallel. Especially when we're comparing it to the basically instant experience we're used to when browsing the web these days on more modern devices

@Buizel you perfectly understand then. The difference is that the iconic snap sound is all we have. Clean OS is nice. One day people will have nostalgia for that.

@skywake Everything you said is also true. Although my rant was not necessarily about the way Nintendo is doing things, more about why we notice what they do and why the lack of music feels odd to us.