Admit it – Nintendo's new Joy-Cons show one huge problem with the Switch 2

When the Switch 2 was first unveiled, it was pretty clear that Nintendo viewed it as a continuity of the first Switch, from every angle. The name made that obvious, but the design was also very familiar, albeit with a new, darker and arguably more mature colour scheme.

It's that colour scheme that has come into focus in the last week, because while I was away in the maelstrom of hands-on time and showcases that was CES 2026, Nintendo announced its first new Joy-Cons for the Switch 2, and they're basically a huge disappointment.

The default Joy-Cons you get with the Switch 2 are not very colourful, with just a coloured ring around each analogue stick to differentiate them, calling back to the original Switch with red and blue choices. The new ones Nintendo has released are jazzier, in purple and green, but still only in the same limited ways.

Whereas the original Switch came to have a huge range of Joy-Cons available, the Switch 2 is in its very earliest days, but the direction so far is still uninspiring. The Switch had Joy-Con versions that were colourful all over the controller, instead of just in splashes that you can barely even see from some angles with the controllers attached.

That meant you could get limited-edition Joy-Cons in a wide array of colours and designs, making for a genuinely meaningful change to how your console looked to other people. That's cool in a very obvious way, and there's no official way to do the same with the Switch 2.

Maybe it'll come eventually, but the fact that Nintendo has declined the first opportunity doesn't bode all that well. It's telling that this was brought to my attention while I was out in Vegas by dbrand. It makes skins that can jazz your console up in a big way, and I've already used some on one of my Switch 2 consoles, as you can see below.

I think it makes a huge difference, and dbrand has already released new versions that match the new purple and green colours exactly, if you want to make your console jazzier. Between those skins and the new controllers, though, you'll be looking at a big chunk of money, which is a real shame when Nintendo could just fix this itself.

I'm pretty confident that we will get louder and more interesting controllers from Nintendo eventually, but it's being slow about it, which is a shame. For now, I can recommend dbrand's products heartily, although it's easier if you're in the US, thanks to some decent shipping costs for the rest of the world.