掲示板 Forums - Disappointing

After all these years, and it's still like this. Makes me sad. There's missed potential.

It turns out that the Switch natively limits you to typing hiragana and katakana. No kanji. 4 different sets of keyboards and not one has autofill to convert kana into kanji. It doesn't even matter if you changed the system's language, there's just no kanji you can generate. I suspect that has to do with the dependency on using autofill, which I'm certain it has in some form, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't use it. I can only imagine that it would work on some software which supports it, but the odds of what I have and use is certainly slim to the point of it being nonexistent.

it's strange that the Switch isn't capable of converting kana to kanji when the 3DS can perform kana to kanji conversions... Although I believe certain 3DS games did not natively support kana to kanji conversions in their built-in keyboards.

Ohhh, Nintendo Switch. I get it now

I think the Switch eShop has a kanji autofill function for game titles. I was planning on looking up a game anyway, so I'll edit this comment if the autofill does exist.

Edit: The kanji converter does exist, but it's not very good. I tried to type in 真・女神転生 (which should be a popular search query at the moment) and it parsed the wrong kanji. Not sure if they train it on user data or common kana readings... Manually converting しん > 真 and めがみ > 女神 pulled up the correct games, but it was very tedious.

The way you describe typing it is basically how I type on mobile too. That's just how it works AFAIK. I don't have any issue with that.

But the idea that it doesn't work globally on the Switch is my gripe. Is it an imperfect system when it does appear? Yes, I tend to agree. I can just navigate the list end to end with the trigger buttons, as opposed to the shoulder buttons, and it can be tedious just from the quantity it generates the suggested text. On mobile, I just have a single button to jump through the set of characters to select (and sometimes whole words, if it appears), or just use the other button that generates the whole list to scroll through. It's better than nothing at all. I'd just wish it were not as subjective per app.

My main gripe is how terribly slow the applications are. Want to look at a game on the eShop? Get ready to wait 3-5 minutes for everything to load, assuming you have fast internet. Want to open the Nintendo Switch Online application to earn points and make a new profile picture? Get ready to wait 3-5 minutes while it slowly loads all of the pictures in. At least my release day console can play Tears of the Kingdom, albeit very noisily because the fans sound like a little helicopter getting ready for liftoff...

I unironically went back to the Gameboy Advance and 3DS eras for casual gaming because my Switch can barely run new games. Virtually any new game that isn't Switch-exclusive is guaranteed to run 3x better on my budget gaming laptop anyway.

I have the original Switch model, so my console is around 7 years old. It's definitely showing signs of heavy use.

どうも！