10 Things You Didn't Know About Super Mario Odyssey
6. It Doesn't Really Work On The Switch Lite
It's probably unfair to blame Nintendo for their lack of foresight here. After all, Mario Odyssey entered development when Nintendo's next-gen console was nothing more than a mysterious rumour dubbed "NX", and the failure of the Wii U made Nintendo's future dubious at best. The idea that a handheld-only version of the console would materialise some years in the future would have been a distant dream.
Still, there are few things more disappointing than firing up Super Mario Odyssey on a shiny new Switch Lite only to discover that you're stumped within the first few hours of the game. You head down a warp pipe to a room which some colourful character assures you is hiding a Moon, and you trounce around it for ages finding absolutely nothing.
Dumbfounded, you go to good old YouTube for some help, only to find it's a locked room puzzle centred around the Nintendo Switch's rumble feature. A rumble feature which didn't make it onto the Switch Lite.
Of course, you can get around this problem, by either hooking up your Joy-Cons from your docked Switch to the Lite or buying a third-person controller which features rumble, but it's frustrating that the game can't be played as it is on the handheld system. What's worse, this isn't an isolated incident - there are a few moons which rely on the rumble feature throughout the game which are almost impossible to nab on the Lite without looking to the internet for answers.
Even more frustratingly, some cap-throw combinations can only be done by shaking individual Joy-Cons, and while these are never necessary, they can prove to be a big help in some sections of the game. Plus, circumstances which do need you to utilise the Switch's gyro features are incredibly annoying on the Lite -- shaking an entire handheld for a silly effect is just disorientating. Seriously, couldn't they have mapped some of these combinations to buttons?