Nintendo soft-announced some slightly disappointing news particularly for foreigners living in Japan: they’ll have to fork up an extra 20,000 yen, which is about $133 dollars in American money, if they want a Switch 2 console that communicates in their native tongue.
As spotted by Gabe Perez on Twitter, the official Japanese Nintendo website includes a breakdown of the two different Switch 2 consoles that’ll be available in Japan when the console launches on June 5. One will be the Japanese language-only version with a ¥49,980 price tag, which is loosely equivalent to $337 with the US dollar being especially strong in Japan right now. The other console comes with “multilingual support” for 16 languages including Japanese, and that’ll run you ¥69,980, roughly $473 at the time of writing.
For context, the current Switch is region-free everywhere and the Switch 2 will presumably be region-free everywhere except for Japan with the cheaper version.
While the reason for this discrepancy is unclear, it could be in response to Japan’s relatively weak yen at the moment. This could be an attempt to deflect scalpers who might otherwise buy consoles on the cheap in Japan and then try to sell them at a profit elsewhere.
The good news is that this makes the Switch 2 a more affordable investment for Japanese-speaking buyers in Japan who don’t need the extra language options. That said, it’s hard not to think of the added financial burden for people still learning Japanese while living in Japan.
Here are all of the Switch 2 launch games we get to play in June.