[saturdaysaint]

What unique Switch features need to be exploited, exactly? In a sense, the Switch really is a portable Wii U. The most amazing feature, IMO, is how they've managed to make a portable system with local multiplayer (without requiring multiple systems), which plenty of games support.

[nsaslideface]

I've played four or five different multiplayer games on it and it's indeed great. But they're leaving a lot of potential innovation on the backburner:

The touch screen and the the Joycon accelorometers/advanced rumble aren't used at all in many games, or if they are, it isn't anything innovative. ARMS is an exception, though, but I really don't think many people bought the game.

The Mii avatar you create can't do much of anything. On the Wii U, Wii and DS there was a bit more you could do with those.

Amiibo aren't really useful except for small in-game bonuses

The companion app is currently lackluster. They could have made a Mario Kart 8 section where you compare your scores to your friends, a BotW section that would interface with your game... for now it's just a Splatoon app with a few nice features, with only one main feature actually communicating back to the game.

I guess those middle two aren't Switch-specific, but there are a lot of Nintendo-specific things that they should really considers spending time cultivating.

[saturdaysaint]

These are essentially all legacy features. I see the Switch as something of a retreat from the highly proprietary hardware features that attracted spotty-at-best 3rd party support and even Nintendo sometimes struggled to shoehorn in (see the gimmicky motion controls in Zelda/Metroid games on Wii). It's simply a great classic console experience you can play anywhere.

[Fej]

The "advanced rumble" is hardly so. It's a gimmick. The accelerometer/gyroscope was present on the Wii and Wii U. What the Switch has going for it is its portability, not any particular feature (although the touch screen is good for a few games).

[jamesgeck0]

I think that HD rumble is actually pretty great. It's not essential, but games are better for having it. In Mario Kart 8, it conveys the "texture" of the road. TumbleSeed does a fantastic job mimicking the feel of something rolling across a board between your hands.

It's especially nice in handheld mode, where the user doesn't have a decent speaker system to emphasize things (and may not even have the sound turned on at all). In those situations, the user may not be able to hear the sound effect when they get hit by a shell or drive off the road. But with the rumble, the punch of it is still there.