You lift the Switch out of its dock, the game keeps running on the screen in your hands, and you walk away from the television without missing a frame. That is the entire pitch. Unlike the Wii U, I understood it in about four seconds, and that is the single most important sentence I am going to write about this console.

The Switch is a tablet with detachable controllers, the Joy-Con, that slides into a dock to play on the TV and pops back out to play in your hands. It runs an Nvidia Tegra X1. The genius is that it finally answers the question the Wii U never could: why is there a screen in my hand? Because the screen is the console. The Wii U awkwardly split your attention between a pad and a TV and asked you to care about both. The Switch just lets the whole machine leave the house with you, and the difference between those two ideas is the difference between a flop and this.

This launch carries more weight than a normal one because the Wii U nearly broke Nintendo, around 13 million sold across its entire life, the worst home console the company has ever made. After that humiliation, and after sitting out the PS4 and Xbox One fight entirely, Nintendo needed this to land. So it went back to the drawing board and merged its console and handheld businesses into a single device, which is either the smartest thing it has done in a decade or a bet-the-company gamble. I think it is quietly both.

And then there is the launch game, which is doing a frankly unfair amount of the heavy lifting. Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the rare system-seller that also happens to be a genuine generational game, and it is the best argument the Switch has by a wide margin. Launch lineups are almost always thin and this one is no exception, but when the single headline game is this good, it drags the hardware along behind it. I have put more hours into it this week than I would comfortably admit in print.

I am not going to pretend the Switch trades blows with a PS4 Pro on raw power, because it does not, and it is not trying to. The Tegra chip is mobile silicon, and docked it lands somewhere around a lighter take on the current generation. But Nintendo walked away from the teraflops war years ago, and the lesson of the Wii was always that the spec sheet was never the point. The point is whether the thing is fun and whether a stranger can understand it, and the Switch clears both bars in one motion.

The Wii U was the right idea executed so badly that nobody could see the idea at all. The Switch is the same core concept, a console you can take with you, executed so cleanly that a four-year-old gets it instantly. Nintendo spent one miserable generation learning that being clever is worthless if you cannot explain it. This time the explanation is a single gesture: dock it to the TV, lift it out, keep playing. If this one does not work, I genuinely do not know what Nintendo does next. But I think it works.

The Console War, in Order