@NintonicGamer : One of the key reasons for that is because Nintendo skimped on the audio quality. Now, I'm no audiophile, but the music is sorely lacking in depth/range. Nintendo squeezed 30 hours of audio to just 1.4GB. Likewise, Smash Ultimate has only very, very few pre-rendered cutscenes, while the Wii U was a tad more generous owing to the 25GB capacity of Wii U discs.

I had a suspicion that this would have happened as even Nintendo themselves evidently prefer to use the smallest cartridges possible. Being an "evergreen" title, I was hoping that Nintendo would lead the charge by making Smash their first 32GB cartridge game and not compromise on any aspect of the game, particularly as any increase in cost would be offset by aftersales such as amiibo, DLC etc.

Audio and texture quality, as well as compression of pre-rendered cutscenes are among the easiest ways to bring file sizes down. I suspect that many Switch games look and sound worse than their contemporaries due to publishers wanting to cut costs on cartridges, as opposed to being attributable to any technical limitation of the Switch itself.

For digital releases, absolutely, Nintendo ought to keep file sizes down as users should not have to accommodate extraneous data due to developers being lazy in cleaning up unused data from their games, but in this particular instance, I don't think that Nintendo deserve to be showered with praise when they have cut corners to the detriment of the overall quality of the package.

It just annoys me that the Switch is capable of so more than what we are given, and there were no excuses for such heavy compression for a mega seller like Smash of all games. Similarly, Just Dance 2017 shipped on a 16GB cartridge and looked great. Ubisoft cheaped out by shipping subsequent instalments on 8GB cartridges and the compression in the videos are immediately apparent. The irony is that the Wii U versions are likely to look and better than the "next gen" version.