Player 2’s 11 Quintessential Original Switch Games
Can you smell that in the air? No? Yeah, the hype/vibes of the impending Switch 2 launch (literally days away, possibly in the distant past when you’re reading this) are kind of weird and different from that of other full, generation-shifting consoles. There are several potential reasons for this, but that’s not the focus of what we’re doing here.
Rather, this piece is a celebration of what we feel to be the most quintessential of games for the Nintendo Switch 1.0. Note that we’re running with ‘quintessential’ quite intentionally here; these may not be the absolute best 11 games on the system, nor are all of them exclusives. They’re just the ones we think really feel at home on Nintendo’s soon-to-be-last-gen hardware. Of course, they’re also all very good and worthy of being played, either on your original Switch or using backward-compatibility mode on your shiny new Switch 2 while waiting for its catalogue to become more fully fleshed out.
Curious as to how we got here? Well, we recorded a podcast covering it not all that long ago, which you’re free to give a listen. As for why 11 games and not 10? It’s possible that we maaaaaay have forgotten one during the recording of said podcast.
Anyway, that’s enough preamble! Here, in totally alphabetical order, are the 11 games that we feel to be the most quintessential to the Switch’s library!
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
The Animal Crossing games aren’t especially new at this point. The first one came out at the end of the N64’s life, and we’re guessing none of you played it because it was both a long time ago, and also only in Japan. Franchise releases came and went, but it’s fair to say that the series hit its stride on the Switch and then some.
Annoyingly, it’s hard to separate this particular game from circumstance. Landing at the tip of a pandemic practically launched Animal Crossing into space. For the year 2020, this game was the main event of more people’s lives than is probably healthy.
Dead Cells
Dead Cells is really good, no matter where you play it. Sure, you would occasionally hit that annoying stage where the lights keep on going out, but we can look past that because Dead Cells is really, really good. Smashing a Metroidvania into a Roguelike shouldn’t work this well.
It helps that Dead Cells has style and super crisp controls. Also, it’s just a perfect early example of an excellent indie game that everyone said would be fantastic on Switch… that totally proved to be fantastic on Switch. It still is. Buy it if you’re yet to.
Golf Story
There may be a bit of personal bias here, in part because this is indeed an Aussie-developed game, but also because it was the first Switch game that I personally purchased. Of course, it went on sale the very next day after I bought it, so I have good reason to be bitter, too.
The above isn’t the only reason Golf Story is making the list, it is exceptional. I have a personal hatred of what I describe as sports where ‘nothing much happens, until occasionally a person hits a ball with a stick’. Golf, baseball, cricket. They can all burn in a furnace as far as I’m concerned. Despite this, though, golf has the exclusive honour of occasionally being good in videogame form, double so, it turns out, when it’s incorporated into a cute, pixel-art RPG.
Hollow Knight
For anyone curious, but also not bothered to download and listen to the podcast (boo!): this is the game that we completely forgot about. How did we forget it? Not sure… this is probably the most quintessential Switch game that isn’t exclusive to the console. To this day, tears are shed whenever Nintendo posts a Direct and doesn’t mention the forever-in-development DLC-turned-full release, Silksong.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
More than any other game on this list, this one caused some problems. For one, titles beginning with ‘the’ create a categorisation nightmare when working alphabetically (we clearly decided to go with ‘legend’ for our sequencing), but more notably, should we include this or Breath of the Wild? Should we just include both? We settled on including only one, although it wasn’t an easy choice. As a day one release, Breath of the Wild is frankly, legendary, but we ultimately decided that Tears is the more refined game overall, and decided that this would become more apparent with time. Will our decision hold up? Come back when the Switch 2 is at the end of its life, I guess.
Monster Hunter Rise
This one gets included pretty much at the behest of Hewso, but it’s difficult to argue with its inclusion if you take a moment to mull it over. With the current PS5 / XBox Series / PC game currently occupying people’s free time, it can sometimes slip the mind that this game owes everything to Sony’s PSP. And vice-versa, for that matter. For a few years there, Monster Hunter was basically synonymous with handheld gaming in Japan, and Rise is frankly a member of an exclusive club of higher end 3D games not made by Nintendo that really pushed what the Switch was capable of
Pikmin 4
There are few things that will give away that I had a stubborn vote in how things played out than the resilience that Pikmin 4 showed in remaining on this list. But, seriously, Pikmin 4 is excellent. The changes it introduces to the quasi-strategy game formula are all for the better, it is oozing charm, and is loaded with content. Good content, too. And you’re not forced into it all, either. There may be no Nintendo property that has benefited more from at home / portable hybrid functionality.
Pokémon Arceus
Fuuuuuuuucccccck. If Zelda proved a headache with the whole ‘should we just choose one from a core franchise?’ dilemma, the Pokémon was the migraine. Honestly, if you’ve played them all and have a favourite, then just go with that. We’ve gone with Arceus, though, because it turns out that there hasn’t been a notably more technically sound Pokémon game on Switch since, and we find the premise of checking in on the origins of all this madness more interesting than what the other games promise.
Super Mario Odyssey
My word, what a strange, wonderful game that had to do battle with another strange, wonderful game in the form of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Odyssey won out, perhaps because it was an early landmark for the machine, possibly because you can stomp around as a weirdly realistic T-Rex causing absolute mayhem mere moments into the game starting proper.
This really is a strange one, with occasional off-mark art direction and slightly inconsistent design, but also some absolutely wild highs such as a unique take on Bowser’s castle, to say nothing of what happens in New Donk City.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
I cannot stress enough how traumatised I was by the ‘everyone is here’ E3 Smash Bros. trailer that turned out to be 95% of Nintendo’s entire E3 showing that year! I don’t care about Smash! I wish I did, but I don’t! Clearly, a lot of people do, though. So, here. It made the list. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.
Tetris 99
This one almost failed to make the cut, but the more we thought about it, the sillier not including it seemed. Not only is Tetris 99 a standout for Nintendo’s online service, but it’s a wildly fun spin on the formula of an absolute classic of a game. And, oh yeah, that classic game happens to be motherflapping Tetris!
So there you have it, Player 2’s 11 quintessential Switch games. How does your list shape up? Let us know over at Blusky.
