https://social.emucafe.org/naferrell/should-switch-2-key-cards-be-preserved-08-26-25/

I wrote a New Leaf Journal Article several years ago praising Nintendo for having a cartridge-first mindset with the Switch. Nintendo’s emphasis on cartridges has waned with the release of the Switch 2, which has introduced game “key-cards,” which are good for nothing more than downloading the game in question. This brought up an interesting issue for a Japanese government initiative to preserve games and game media. Should game key cartridges be preserved? The National Diet Library says no. I had not thought about it before and will not do so here, but I could see arguments in favor of preserving the game-key cards even though they do not contain the game in question (perhaps as a monument to bad trends if nothing else). But the story did remind me of my experience with the installer for the 2006 English language patch Midsummer Haze to a doujin Japanese visual novel called Manatsu no Kagerou. The patch wants to download the Japanese Manatsu no Kagerou. However, Manatsu no Kagerou has not been downloadable from the developer site for many years. Thus, the installer was useless until your favorite (I hope) online writer managed to find the original Manatsu no Kagerou and shared the knowledge with the world. Whether you should play Manatsu no Kagerou or the English localization Midsummer Haze is a more complicated question.

#digitalOwnership #midsummerHaze #nintendo #nintendoSwitch #nintendoSwitch2 #videoGamePreservation #videoGames #visualNovels