Typical Nintendo: there's already a game too big for the Switch hard drive
Admittedly, the game is only available in Japan, but the new console's limited internal memory could prove annoying
It could probably only happen to Nintendo. While other console manufacturers have dutifully stuffed their consoles with ever more expansive hard drives, the Kyoto-based veteran has always been somewhat penurious with storage. Its next release, the delightfully eccentric Switch, contains only 32GB of internal memory, around 4GB of which is reserved for the operating system. Sure, this probably keeps the manufacturing costs down, but it presents a problem. This week, the official Japanese Switch page revealed a host of forthcoming titles, together with their file sizes. One, a double pack featuring Dragon Quest Heroes I and II, comes in at ... 32GB. Which means if you buy the digital version from the Nintendo eShop, it won't fit on your console.
There are some mitigating factors here. Dragon Quest Heroes I & II collects two full-size PlayStation releases into one package, so it's an unnaturally large proposition. The file sizes for other games were mostly around 1GB to 5GB, with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild coming in at 13.4GB. Also, unlike the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the Switch doesn't demand that physical games are installed on to the hard drive before you can play, so if you buy a boxed copy of Dragon Quest Heroes I & II, you won't have any issues. But if you do plan on making a lot of eShop purchases on your new machine, you're going to have to buy a MicroSD card for extra storage space. A 128gb card comes in at around 35.
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