You’ll be able to use a USB mouse with the Nintendo Switch 2 in at least one game, as a Koei Tecmo developer commentary video for the upcoming Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening Complete Edition revealed this week. That’s great news if your wrists, like mine, started preemptively cramping the first time you saw video of someone tipping a Joy-Con 2 controller on its edge for mouse mode.
While demonstrating the game’s use of the Joy-Con 2 as a mouse, producer Michi Ryu stops and plugs in a USB mouse. The Switch 2 displays a message that says a mouse has been connected, and he continues to play with both a mouse and his left Joy-Con 2, switching between them seamlessly, the same way you’ll be able to go back and forth between gyro and mouse control in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
As VideoGamesChronicle notes, the original Switch had mouse and keyboard support, though only some games took advantage, like the Nightdive-developed Turok port. (If you own that game and never noticed the “Mouse” option in its input settings, go plug in a USB mouse and keyboard and try it out — you won’t want to go back.)
This time around, Nintendo is embracing mouse support more. For instance, the company published a video to its Nintendo Today app earlier this month, showing that when you put a Joy-Con 2 on its edge for mouse mode, an onscreen pointer appears for navigating the system’s menu.
So does the Nobunaga’s Ambition video, mean a standard mouse works interchangeably with a Joy-Con 2 controller anywhere where mouse control is supported? I sure hope so, but we don’t know that yet. And Nintendo didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s email asking if that was the case.