Nintendo’s 30 Best Switch Games, Ranked

Most of us played 1-2 Switch because we needed something to play with friends who didn’t want to sit around watching us play Breath of the Wild. The mini-game collection is pretty much a Switch tech demo that almost feels like a WarioWare game but not as good or memorable. Still, it’s a fun time killer when you don’t have anything else to play on your Switch. Luckily, a lot has happened in the eight years since, like every other game on this list.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is a compilation of bite-sized speedrunning challenges lifted straight from Nintendo’s releases for its very first console. It has selections from the original Super Mario Bros., the first Legend of Zelda, and much more, and packages them in a way that requires you to constantly rethink levels you’ve likely played hundreds of times over the past 40 years. As Carolyn Petit wrote when the collection came out, “Repeatedly, Nintendo World Championships thrilled me by giving me exciting new ways to tackle games that I’ve been intimately familiar with for most of my life, and I suspect that I’ll continue having fun going back to it for some time and trying to improve my rating in some of the game’s many challenges.” Unfortunately, as she also notes, it lacks leaderboards for its individual challenges, eliminating the opportunity for fierce competition with friends that could have made this release an essential throwback instead of merely a novel curiosity.

The Mario Party series is, in a word, divisive. Super Mario Party Jamboree isn’t any different. It’s got some great mini-games mixed in with some bad, some boards are a nightmare to play through while others are a breezy trip around the block, and ultimately how you feel about all of that will be determined by whether you’re playing with people who are good sports or the gamer equivalent of an angry wasp who knows nothing but how to pester you for your coins and stars. After nearly 30 years, Mario Party has iterated on its systems and polished away some of the rough edges that sometimes made these games miserable, but for all that refinement, its core impact remains largely unchanged: getting people to go from agreeable friends to sworn enemies with one roll of a die.

Seeing Princess Peach get to star in her own game for the first time in ages is certainly welcome, but sadly Princess Peach: Showtime ends up feeling secondary to its Super Mario counterparts. It has cool ideas like giving Peach different costumes and personas to don that also grant her new abilities, but it’s hampered by a simple platforming that doesn’t match the thrills of the Mario games. Hopefully next time Peach gets a starring role the game is up to snuff, and importantly, doesn’t take nearly another 20 years to come out.

Nintendo Switch Sports had some massive shoes to fill as a successor to Wii Sports. The motion-controlled sports collection didn’t become the household name that its predecessor did, but that’s a tall ask considering Wii Sports was packaged in with Wii systems. By the time Nintendo Switch Sports launched in 2022, the novelty of the premise was dead and gone, but if you’re open to it again nearly 20 years later, you’ll find Nintendo Switch Sports is a fun party game evocative of a different era in Nintendo’s history. It’s a bit unremarkable, but it gets the nostalgic job done with a bit of modern flair.

ARMS is one of the few new IPs Nintendo invested in for the Switch, and it’s also one of the more underrated games on the system. Its eccentric brand of stretchy, midrange melee combat isn’t quite as deep as the brawling in its fighting game contemporaries, but it is novel and stylish, and could have been a springboard for a better sequel. Though ARMS lives on thanks to fighter Min-Min’s inclusion in the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate roster, it seems the series has largely been forgotten by Nintendo. Hopefully that changes with the Switch 2, because there’s potential here.

Nintendo Labo is one of the more oddball experiments the company tried out with the Switch. The toys-to-life cardboard cut-out kits let users assemble handmade peripherals such as a fishing rod, a piano, and a toy car, each taking advantage of the Joy-Con controllers and the Switch itself to create truly original experiences you wouldn’t find on any other platform. Labo is an interesting use of the Switch’s tech, and it’s a shame we haven’t gotten more “throwing spaghetti at the walls” projects like it. Maybe Nintendo will have more ideas like it with the Switch 2's technical upgrades.

When I was in college, I didn’t have a real exercise routine. I would run laps around the neighborhood, but that wasn’t the launching pad I needed to actually adopt a healthier lifestyle. Ring Fit Adventure launched shortly after I graduated, and while I don’t play the fitness RPG anymore, I don’t think I would have moved onto more impactful exercise routines without it. The first time I played Nintendo’s exercise game, I woke up the next morning sore in a way I’d never been. This game doesn’t put on kid gloves and tell you to just jog-in-place your way to the end of a dungeon, it uses its titular Ring to make you push, pull, twist, and otherwise contort yourself into different poses to take down in-game foes, all with the goal of creating a regular gamified workout routine. Sometimes all you’ve gotta do to get someone to make a lifestyle change is make it a video game first. Now, I’m a self-taught gym rat, and I would probably have never gotten to that point without playing this game.

Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics is a beast of a compilation. As the name implies, the collection includes 51 selections from the realms of board games, card games, and beyond. As Mike Fahey put it when he wrote about the collection, “Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics is no cheap-and-dirty mini-game bundle. It’s a polished collection of beloved multi and single-player card, dice, board, and sports games in a wonderfully presented package. It’s good stuff. Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics doesn’t just collect games, it celebrates them, teaches them, and helps keep their legacies alive.”

We often forget when recalling the Switch’s incredible first year launch lineup that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was part of the party. Monolith Soft’s sequel to the late-era Wii exclusive took the open-world RPG to the skies for a beautiful, sprawling, somewhat uneven adventure. Building on its predecessor, it married more engaging combat with even deeper progression mechanics to yield interesting exploration and fun battles, held back only by the annoying gacha mechanic underlying the game’s blade spirit system. The sky pirate fantasy about an orphaned salvager named Rex who battles an evil empire took narrative swings that didn’t always land and the characters were weak, but the overall package wasn’t without its charms. — Ethan Gach

It was wonderful to see the princess, for the first time, take the starring role in a proper Zelda game instead of just being the series’ namesake (and no, we don’t count the CD-i games in which she was playable). Unfortunately, not unlike the aforementioned Princess Peach: Showtime existing in the shadow of Mario’s exploits, while Echoes of Wisdom has some novel ideas, it also can’t quite hold a candle to the kinds of adventures Link gets to headline. The one-two punch of B-tier, female-focused games in the span of six months had the unfortunate effect of making it seem like Nintendo really doesn’t think its leading ladies are ready for prime time. — Carolyn Petit

It’s sad that it took nearly ten years for us to get another game in this consistently delightful series. Pikmin 4 continues the series’ trend of being an approachable but reasonably challenging spin on the RTS genre, all while letting you watch in horror as the titular little guys drown, get crushed, and fall to their deaths. Try not to let too many of them meet such a fate, though, or you’ll be out of resources as you try to move treasures to your ship, take down giant foes, and engage in the whimsical camaraderie of having dozens of adorable little bug-like creatures to vibe with. Pikmin isn’t the biggest of Nintendo’s franchises, which is probably why we’ve only gotten four of them on consoles in over 20 years. But every time one shows up, it’s wonderful, and Pikmin 4 is no exception.

I always recalled the original Luigi’s Mansion on GameCube as being a bit divisive, but perhaps that perception came from it not quite getting the kind of glowing praise usually reserved for the mainline Mario platformers. As the spooky spin-off series has gone on, it’s only gotten better as Nintendo massaged the original concept and riffed on it in fun, often memeable ways. As Chris Kohler wrote in Kotaku’s original review, “It’s the sheer variety of experiences in Luigi’s Mansion 3 that keeps it entertaining throughout. While you might at first think you’re in for a repetitive time as you go through the first few floors and find nothing but standard hotel rooms, things get quite unexpected as you continue higher and higher. While it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it’s a solid take on a series that hasn’t had many entries over the last nearly 20 years. Mostly, it’s just nice to see that Luigi is indeed alive, and not dead.”

The Splatoon franchise has pretty rapidly gone from being a new, unproven series on the Wii U to giving us one of the most popular multiplayer games on the Switch, which is no small feat. Splatoon 3 offered up a meaningful iteration on the first two games’ Turf War wall-painting mechanics and kept people engaged for months with regular Splatfest competitions that became mini-online wars over the silliest debates, and the appeal is no mystery; effortlessly moving through the ink you leave all over the map is still a delight. As Ari Notis once wrote, “If Splatoon 3 doesn’t win you over to Nintendo’s take on the world of competitive shooters, nothing will. This third game in the ink-splattering sequel has something for everyone, from an endearing single-player campaign, to raucous showdowns against giant enemy salmon. It improves or expands on just about everything from the previous game without getting too overwhelming or losing its soul in the process, still focused on two teams trying to coat a location in their color of ink. The online connectivity can still be a mess, but the amount of character customization and player self-expression takes the social shooter to a whole new level. There’s even an in-universe collectible card game. It’s Splatoon 3’s world, we’re just living in it.”

The Paper Mario series has had a bit of an identity crisis over the years. Where once they were known as turn-based RPGs with a focus on well-timed input commands, we’ve since gotten a platformer and an action-adventure game that bear the Paper Mario moniker and signature visual style. The Origami King tries to find a happy middle ground between everything Paper Mario has ever been, and the result is a delightful sequel, albeit a potentially aggravating one that doesn’t commit to the tried-and-true turn-based formula of the series’ most beloved entries. As Chris Kohler wrote in Kotaku’s review, “I’m not sure why Nintendo feels that Paper Mario can’t be a role-playing game: What exactly was the issue with the original games, which were widely praised and sold very well? But the major issue for me was not that Nintendo removed the series’ RPG mechanics, but that what it replaced them with was not as good. Origami King might not be the successor to Thousand-Year Door for which fans have been clamoring, but this time the formula works, allowing the series’ great writing and worlds to shine through.”

It’s fun to think about how if you’re ever hankering for another one of Mario’s run-and-jump adventures, you could just open up Super Mario Maker 2 and find an endless treasure trove of levels you’ve never experienced before. As a creation tool, Super Mario Maker 2 is full of new options and features to help you create the Mario levels of your dreams. As a nearly limitless archive of fan-created levels and challenges, the average Mario fan who has no interest in making their own stages still has a ton to get out of it.

Kirby spin-offs have been 3D before, but Forgotten Land marks the first time the main platformer series has made the jump. Its open areas and possession mechanics feel inspired by Super Mario Odyssey, and though the pink puffball doesn’t quite reach the same highs, Forgotten Land still has a lot of charm, challenge, and creativity in its DNA. The Mouthful Mode in which Kirby tries to devour things he can’t quite fit in his gaping maw and then uses them for his own goals is still one of the funniest things to be announced during a Nintendo Direct, and it’s a clever feature that riffs on Kirby’s most recognizable trait: eating people and things and using them or their defining characteristics to his own advantage. Forgotten Land is a great spin on old ideas, and I can’t wait to see the series get even more creative as it further explores a 3D design space.

Metroid Dread is at its best when it leans into how dangerous Samus Aran’s intergalactic exploits truly are. The sidescroller’s most memorable encounters are the ones in which the bounty hunter makes it out by the skin of her teeth, having barely scraped by without her fully-equipped combat suit and all her tools at her disposal. As Carolyn Petit wrote in the Kotaku review, “I’m glad that Dread really goes for it, that it wants to make you feel hunted and disadvantaged and that it’s willing to feel hostile in order to accomplish that. The result is a feeling that survival itself is a reward more meaningful than all the upgrades in the world, a feeling I rarely get from games anymore.”

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 felt like a do-over in more ways than one. It took learnings from Monolith’s previous games and used them to turn the blueprint for the original Xenoblade Chronicles into a full-fledged open-world RPG that didn’t just feel like beautiful skyboxes over mostly empty fields. The combat is finely tuned, the characters are great, and the story about child soldiers is the best Monolith has ever produced. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 tells an evocative tale of friendship, betrayal, and existential fear with one of the best party-based real-time hybrid combat systems around, and the studio’s obsession with baroque skill trees and stat augmenting systems is kept mostly in check. — Ethan Gach

When Nintendo said “Everyone is here,” they meant everyone. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s bonkers roster of 89 playable characters is an achievement, albeit a nightmare to balance. A common experience of disappointment among fighting game fans is seeing the next game in a series you love get announced, but your main not make the roster.. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate says “eff that” and brings back every single character from previous entries, creating a remarkable class reunion of the most iconic heroes and villains of Nintendo’s history. The guest characters, like the long-dormant Banjo-Kazooie and the unexpected Sora from Kingdom Hearts, are wild, and damn, that Joker reveal the night before launch got me to leave my house and buy a copy at midnight. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was an ongoing cultural event for so long that, much like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, I can’t quite imagine how Nintendo is going to follow it up on the Switch 2. Maybe after all this expansion, a return to basics is what the series needs.

Before Wonder came along, it had been a while since the 2D Mario games had gotten a real upgrade, and while this one isn’t necessarily a revelation, it is the most interesting 2D platformer the plumber has given us in a hot minute. With new power-ups like the Elephant Fruit and level-altering Wonder Seeds, Super Mario Bros. Wonder knows how to maintain what makes the series so beloved while also keeping long-time fans on their toes.

Once trapped on the Wii U, Super Mario 3D World departed from the likes of Super Mario 64 and Galaxy to give us a game that fused the sensibilities of the series’ early 2D games with 3D gameplay. It deserved to reach a wider audience, and thankfully Nintendo liberated it from the library of that poorly selling console, sweetening the pot in the process by packing in a compact, experimental new adventure (which is why it’s included on this list). Bowser’s Fury adapts 3D World’s new costumes and mechanics for an open-world game starring Mario and Bowser Jr., and right from the get-go it establishes a sense of scale unlike anything in the base game. When you start it up and immediately see a giant, terrifying kaiju version of Bowser unleashing fireballs at you like a final boss, it’s genuinely chilling, and establishes that this isn’t just another run-of-the-mill Mario adventure. Bowser’s Fury is a bite-sized experience, but it gives us a lot to chew on as we consider what the future of 3D Mario might look like.

If you owned a Switch in 2020, chances are you were playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If you didn’t own a Switch before the latest entry in Nintendo’s beloved life sim series launched right at the beginning of the covid-19 lockdowns, you may have bought one so you could maintain some semblance of human interaction. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an often cumbersome game, so much so that there are fake Nintendo Directs made to illustrate all the bare minimum improvements fans hoped for but Nintendo never actually implemented. Even so, Animal Crossing: New Horizons represents one of the quintessential “you had to be there” moments in video game history. Words alone can’t capture how unifying it was to go to your friends’ islands when we couldn’t see each other anywhere else. Animal Crossing: New Horizons may be clunky, but it was also a creative and social outlet for millions of people when we needed it most. It’s easily one of the most important games on the Switch.

It’s a bit maddening that Game Freak put out one of the most significant leaps forward the Pokémon series has ever seen with Legends: Arceus, but hasn’t looked to it as a template for the future. Taking Pokémon to a historical period before Pokémon gyms and criminal organizations existed let Game Freak design an action/turn-based hybrid RPG unlike anything the series had seen before. Its catching mechanics are unmatched, the changes it makes to the turn-based battles add new layers of strategy, and its story is some of the best narrative work Game Freak has ever pulled off. Legends: Arceus marks the first time since I was a kid that the Pokémon world felt big and unknowable. I’m excited for Legends: Z-A, but I don’t know if it’s going to feel the same without all that historical intrigue.

There aren’t many games that have inspired the level of fandom fervor that Fire Emblem: Three Houses has. Six years after its release, the question of whether or not Edelgard is a war criminal is still a touchy subject. Intelligent Systems’ first Switch game, developed in collaboration with Koei Tecmo’s Kou Shibusawa team, redefined what Fire Emblem was for a lot of fans. Though there’s some discussion to be had about whether its tactical combat is up to snuff compared to that of its predecessors, the school life and social sim elements are some of the most entertaining and endearing in the genre. Characters like the suave Claude, the honorable Dimitri (until, y’know, he’s not anymore), and the aforementioned war criminal Edelgard have essentially become the modern faces of the Fire Emblem franchise. There was a whole other Fire Emblem on the Switch in Engage, but we’re still talking about Three Houses.

In many cases, Nintendo porting a game from the Wii U to the Switch felt like the company was putting them on a lifeboat so they could escape a sinking ship. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is one of those rescues, but it’s also so much more (which is why it’s on this list). The kart racer was ported to the Switch just a month after the console launched in 2017; it’s now been nearly eight years since that day and Nintendo is still adding new content to the 11-year-old game. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the best-selling game on the Switch, with a whopping 67.35 million copies sold as of 2020, and when you’ve got that big of a success story, adding a ton of new playable characters, courses, and modes is a no-brainer. Nintendo has announced that a new Mario Kart game is coming to the Switch 2, and considering that it’s following up one of the most feature-complete games in its genre, it’s going to have some huge shoes to fill.

Eight years later, I still get the Super Mario Odyssey bop “Jump Up, Super Star” stuck in my head from time to time. Every Mario game has to find some way to make the series’ winning run-and-jump formula fresh and exciting, and Odyssey’s big mechanical change was pretty transformative. Giving Mario’s hat eyes and letting you throw it on objects to take control of them adds a completely new dimension to a Mario level. There are over 50 different objects Mario can control, and half the fun of Odyssey is testing the limits of what the game will let you do. I was surprised when I was able to possess random objects like cars, as well as enemies I’d only ever fought over years of playing these games. Those magical moments are sprinkled throughout Super Mario Odyssey, reinvigorating a series that you might think would start running out of gas at this point, and it all culminates in an amazing finale that pays off in an incredible way on both Odyssey’s core mechanic and Mario’s long-time rivalry with the Koopa king.

It’s hard to fully get perspective on just how influential Breath of the Wild has been when the ramifications of its arrival are still rippling throughout the realm of game design. With this incredible release Nintendo reinvented its own flagship fantasy series, integrating deep systems into its world in ways that make it feel stunningly alive, a place packed with incredible interactions and discoveries rather than just a map filled with icons to clear. At a point in time when many AAA games are trying to be these massive, life-sucking, open-world time wasters, Breath of the Wild stands as a testament to a concept of open-world design that’s not about simply cramming a map with objectives to complete but making the world so interactive and responsive and surprising that you naturally want to spend time there, just playing and experimenting and discovering.

Following up Breath of the Wild, one of the defining games of the last decade, is no small task, butTears of the Kingdom builds upon Breath of the Wild’s foundations to stunning effect. The first game asks you to explore its open world to your heart’s content. Tears of the Kingdom asks you to build something in all the empty spaces. Nintendo looked at the previous game’s themes and traversal and, instead of making the world bigger for the sake of it, chose to find new ways to extrapolate those ideas into something altogether different.

Tears of the Kingdom is all about experimentation, creative thinking, and problem-solving, and no two people play it the same way. I remember being in Discord calls playing the game alongside friends and it took days or weeks for some of us to come across certain storylines and characters others encountered right away because the paths we took were so vastly different. Then we used the Ultrahand mechanic to build vehicles, platforms, and other tools to solve puzzles with solutions that hadn’t crossed each other’s minds. Sharing a Tears of the Kingdom clip is like presenting an art piece all one’s own, as people’s stunts, creations, and solutions were expressions of their creativity. Breath of the Wild told players to go wherever they wanted, and then Tears of the Kingdom asked them to find a new way to get there. Like its predecessor, it will no doubt be hugely influential to the next generation of open-world games, perhaps in ways that we can’t yet begin to imagine.