The 20 Best Nintendo Switch Games of All Time

Unlike its competitors, Nintendo isn’t well known for buying up third-party studios to make its games. With such meticulous commitment to detail and oversight, the few times they have acquired developers have usually led to spectacular results, as is the case with their 2007 purchase of Monolith Soft, creators of the Xenoblade Chronicles series.Over the course of four games, Xenoblade Chronicles has become one of the best action role-playing franchises in gaming, famous for crafting gargantuan open worlds that rival pop culture favorites like Skyrim while delivering emotionally gripping stories in a sci-fi fantasy setting evocative of the greatest Japanese RPGs of the Nineties.The latest entry, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, is widely considered the best of the already acclaimed franchise, with streamlined controls that allow players to control one of six characters in real-time during combat, swapping between avatars on a whim while the others remain active as NPCs. Making an action-RPG exhilarating is key when the campaign itself can stretch up to 150 hours; it’s a game that’s consistently doling out new locations to explore, abilities to master, and twists in ever-unfurling narrative.While the game’s technical ambitions might’ve been too much for the Switch, with the game suffering visually at times, it remains an artfully designed epic that’s helped redefine Nintendo as a brand to follow for RPG fans who may have otherwise turned away from the company’s platforms after losing most of its big roleplaying game franchises to PlayStation in the early 2000s.

In the never-ending sea of live-service and competitive online games, Nintendo has historically kept its distance from the trend. Even though the Switch is home to games like Fortnite and Rocket League, the company itself has always shied away from online shooters — partially because of its lack of reliable online services — but most likely because the vibe just doesn’t gel with their more tactile approach to local multiplayer gaming.But then came Splatoon. A third-person shooter originally released for the Wii U, Splatoon takes all the various philosophies of a Nintendo game — bizarre character inspirations, a family-friendly tone, and a singular gimmick — and turns it into a shockingly engaging competitive online experience. 2022’s Splatoon 3 utilizes the power of the Switch to make both its physics-based gameplay and online connectivity better than ever before.The premise is simple (sort of): players take on the role of Inklings, little pointy-eared squid children who can use paint guns to cover the surfaces of the arena map. The primary goal is for two teams of 4v4 to cover up the bulk of the play arena with their ink, blasting each other (non-violently!) along the way. The hitch, of course, is that Inklings can “swim” in their own paint-like splatters, meaning that the more of the map is covered by one team, the faster that team can traverse and control the area. The team that covers the most surface area wins.There are other modes too, like cooperative boss battle runs and card games, but the true appeal of Splatoon is its innovative take on the multiplayer shooter that’s accessible and relatively stress-free for everyone, even as kids learn to melt into goop and surprise appear behind their enemies like the T-1000.

While it might be a stretch to call Mario Kart 8 Deluxe a new game (it’s technically a re-release of a 2014 entry), it’s safe to say that Nintendo wasn’t joking when the called the title “deluxe.” Strategically planned as one of the key launch titles for the Nintendo Switch, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe arrived with all of the content the original had, as well as waves of updates in the years that followed that added 48 new courses to the base game — enough to justify a brand-new installment altogether.But at its core, it’s just Mario Kart. One of the most beloved franchises in gaming, its ease of play and competitive nature makes the series one a favorite among gamers across generations. It’s a game that kids can play with their friends or parents, and parents can pick up to pair with a couple drinks to relive their dorm days.Mario Kart 8 Deluxe isn’t even one of the versions that has a big gimmick, like 2003’s Double Dash which forced players to use two different drivers or the Wii edition, which prided itself on motion-controlled steering. Instead, Mario Kart 8 just sticks to the core elements of what makes the series work. It’s simple to understand, tough to master, and is pretty much always fun (unless you’re hit with a blue shell. Fuck those things).

When it arrived at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Animal Crossing: New Horizons felt like the distraction that everyone in the world needed. At a time when everyone was trapped in their homes and mind palaces, the ability to usher off to a beachy island resort with anthropomorphic tanuki and bird friends was a much more desirable alternative to the depressing state of the real world.But to say that New Horizons’ only good attributes are tied to the collective Stockholm Syndrome of 2020 undercuts the many beautiful qualities of the game. As a social simulator, it’s a little bit simple compared to games like The Sims, only requiring simple interactions in between farming for resources and house building, but for what it lacks in the ability to play god, it makes up for extensively with charm.New Horizons lets players build their own island getaway (or compound, depending on your predilections), but there’s a natural flow to it and the way customization options and abilities are doled out while teaching users how best to utilize the resources at hand. It’s the kind of game where busywork is the goal; chopping down trees and chasing down bugs with a net is mindless fun, but locking into the monotony bears its own rewards as creative expression comes to the forefront in how islands are constructed. By the time you’re doing straight up contracting work to install a new reflecting pool in the town square, you’ll realize that actions that began months ago are finally bearing fruit. But where did the time even go?Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn’t the most tasking game, but it is one where every task feels somewhat therapeutic. While some may prefer to sink their time in stat-crunching dungeon crawls or the endless loop of competitive battle royales, it offers a more relaxing way to put a mind at ease.

When given the Herculean feat of following up The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, many doubted Nintendo’s ability to find a meaningful way to advance the series. After perfecting the concept of an open world, would the answer be reverting to something smaller? What would a new Zelda game even look like in the wake of the entry that felt pretty much definitive.The solution was a lot of things at all once. But really, it was just about more. Everything players liked about 2017’s Breath of the Wild — its environment, tone, and exploration — is present and them some. The already massive world that seemed almost too big for the Switch was doubled in size. The more gripping stories from Zelda games past were woven into the more subdued melancholic tone of the modern era. Enjoy building things in Minecraft? Hell, throw that in too.On the surface, Tears of the Kingdom shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s Breath of the Wild 2.0 (some would argue 1.5), but to chalk it up to a rehash is to miss everything special about the game. Yes, it builds on the existing world many explored ad nauseum before, but it reframes everything we know through conflict. What happens when you save the day, and everything goes to shit anyway? By ruining the hard work from the past, every existing location in Tears of the Kingdom is one players don’t want to see, they need to. What happened to that little farm tucked away in the woods? Where are all our friends? Did they even survive?By placing players in the shoes of a world-weary Link who’s already lost, yet again, it takes the framework of the original game — which dropped players in a time when the characters had emotional memory of their situations — and grants the same to us. After playing through Breath of the Wild and now having to pick up the pieces in its aftermath, players are able to feel the despair that Link felt previously as he regained his memories and came to the realization that he failed.For every intricate system to puzzle box to break open, Tears of the Kingdom is really more of an emotional experience. It still does everything right, even when the consequences go wrong.Also, you can build giant mechs to rain fire on goblins and cyclops. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Super Smash Bros., as a concept, is a blast. Predating the IP mash-up trend that’s wrapped his hands around pop culture’s throat over the last ten years, it began as a simple idea. What if Mario fought Pikachu? Who would win?That simplicity makes Smash Bros. not just a perpetually novel idea, but one that’s endlessly fun. Like most Nintendo games, it’s easy enough to pick up, but its fighting systems house a wellspring of complexity to the point where it became a fixture of the fighting game and esports communities, going toe-to-toe in global popularity alongside heavy hitters like Street Fighter and Tekken.Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the pinnacle of that concept, to the point that there may never even need to be another installment. With 89 playable characters ripped from all corners of gaming, it’s both a nostalgia bomb and constantly surprising experience to play. How does anyone know the inner workings or best strategies to combat that many fighters? It doesn’t really matter, because chaos is part of the appeal.Crossovers may be all the rage these days, but there’s no content farm on the planet that has nailed the ability to bring together characters and world that have no right to fit together as well as Nintendo did with Smash. The fact that the novelty never really wears off, and that there’s a highly complex competitive fighting game beneath it, makes Super Smash Bros. Ultimate a one of a kind experience.

Everyone loves Tetris. It’s just a fact. Since helping launch the Game Boy in 1989, Alexey Pajitnov’s addictive puzzler has become more than just iconic, it’s a deep-seated part of the world’s cultural psyche.But how does one make a perfect game even better? Many have tried, with hundreds of iterations of Tetris popping up throughout the years. But what if the right recipe for the ultimate Tetris experience has been right of us all along. Cribbing the battle royale framework from games like Fortnite and PUBG, Tetris 99 takes the thing people love most about the game — meditative self-competition — and blows it up. Rather than competing to topple your own or someone else’s high score, it’s now about taking other people down directly.Tetris 99 has players (99 of them, obviously) all engaging at the same time to clear row after row of Tetrimino blocks. Clearing rows and stacking combos dumps trash onto other opponents, making it more difficult to press on as each is knocked out one-by-one. It’s a simple conceit, but like Tetris itself, the genius is how straightforward it is.While the original game is an evergreen staple, one that can be played anywhere, anytime, and remains pleasurable, Tetris 99 ups the ante by instilling in fans a different kind of obsession. Getting totally crushed by a faceless foe online is an unbeatable motivator to dive by in for another go of the game that practically coined the phrase, “One more round.”

For all the great 2D Mario games, there’s now multiple generations of players who mostly know the mustachioed plumber by his work in 3D. Entries like Super Mario 64 (1996) and Super Mario Galaxy (2007) didn’t just help reinvent the series on its own terms, but innovated the ways in which movement and action in three-dimensional space could work for the industry at large.With such a pedigree, 3D Mario games tend to be an event. Nintendo generally spends years brewing the right concept and direction, to the extent that there may only ever be a single one produced for each of their devices (the Wii U didn’t have one at all). Suffice to say, there was a lot of pressure placed on Super Mario Odyssey as the first big 3D Mario game of the high-definition era. At a time when most other companies had eschewed their cutesy mascots and 3D platformers without intense action had mostly gone the way of the dodo, what could Mario bring to the table that hadn’t been before?True to its name, Odyssey feels like a long road through all the franchise’s history, and a celebration of everything fans worldwide love about the character. Like Super Mario 64, Odyssey lets players control Mario through a series of levels that serve as small sandboxes rife for exploration. The goal is to chase down every secret, collect every moon, and fell every oddball baddie utilizing Cappy (a sentient hat) that let’s Mario possess the bodies of foes and items. Slapping a goomba with the cap turns Mario into a pint-sized menace nipping at the heels of bigger enemies.It’s a goofy conceit, one befitting the playful nature of all things Mario. But with reliably inventive level design, some pretty serious challenges, and big moments that serve as nostalgic callbacks to the history of the franchise, Super Mario Odyssey manages to feel like the Platonic ideal of what a 3D Mario game should be.

Although the term “Metroidvania” wouldn’t be coined until the 2000s, anyone who’s played a Metroid game would have already known what it meant. The series, which dates back to 1987 on the NES, was one of the first big 2D open-world games, allowing players to explore in dense verticality the subterranean depths of its map, progressively getting stronger and backtracking to previous gated areas. Since then, practically every company has taken a stab at their own version of the subgenre and incorporated many of its key designs into larger action games as a whole.And while Nintendo themselves refashioned the Metroid franchise into its own take on the first-person shooter with 2002’s Metroid Prime, leaving the 2D premise to become fodder for indie creators to iterate on, fans have long waited for a return to the roots of the series — something that seemed like a pipe dream right until it wasn’t.2021’s Metroid Dread wasn’t just a return to form for the franchise that had been mostly left to the dustbin since the colossal failure of the abysmally received Other M (2010), it was also a return to a very specific old-school mentality for Nintendo. While most of its modern games have a little bit of their edge shaved off to be accessible, Dread leans full-tilt into a retro level of difficulty and an eerie, mature tone that’s almost non-existent in the company’s more recent portfolio.Unlike the Prime trilogy that serves as prequels within the canon, Dread is a full-on sequel to the Game Boy Advance game Fusion (2002), and centers on bounty hunter Samus Aran (at the time more famous for Smash Bros. games than her own), who is once again left destitute on an alien planet and forced to survive in the darkness. Players must find their way through the labyrinthine hollow of the planet, perpetually hunted by a psychotically stone-cold killer robot named EMMI. With a tone reminiscent of the original games (who themselves were inspired by the film Alien), the sequences featuring EMMI are the closest thing to jump-scared horror than Nintendo’s ever done.Compared to games like Super Mario Odyssey or Tears of the Kingdom, Metroid Dread might seem small — and that’s partly true. But smaller doesn’t always mean lesser, and while Nintendo has done wonders to innovate and reinvent itself, it’s also left behind a lot of its more hardcore audience that was weaned on their games in the Nineties. Metroid Dread feels like a return to Nintendo’s scrappier roots; it’s a thrill ride that requires careful thought and tight reactions all the same. It might be a one-off, but Dread showed a side of Nintendo many assumed we’d never seen again.

Nintendo accomplished a lot with the Switch, from hybridizing home and handheld gaming to reinventing many of its classic franchises as modern blockbusters that can compete with its more hardcore-tailored competition. But maybe its greatest feat was showing that, no matter how often they fall, there’s always a way to pick themselves up.That’s the main theme of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one that’s etched into both its admittedly bare-bones narrative and the gameplay itself. It tells the story of a version of Link who’s already lost the battle, waking up a century after his defeat to Ganon to a world he doesn’t recognize. True to the premise of the very first game in the series, it’s a story about possibility, where anything you want to do can be done with the right train of thought.Unlike older entries in the series that were mostly linear, tasking players with gaining new items that are tailored to the next big dungeon or battle, Breath of the Wild is a totally open world. Players get a glider, and later a horse, but where to go is entirely up to them. There’s a few big regions to tackle that will help aid in taking back Hyrule by creating alliances and amassing ancient weapons, but truthfully, you can just pick up the controller and beeline toward the final boss. It’ll likely end in failure, but then, that’s the point.While many games claim to be about player choice, the reality is they’re limited to a narrow set of systems that create the illusion of choice. In Breath of the Wild, a smokestack on a mountaintop might pique an interest, but there’s no waypoints or breadcrumbs indicating how to get there. Maybe you’ll try to tough it out, hoarding stamina fruit to physically scale the mountainside like Cliffhanger, or more ingeniously start a brush fire that will allow Link to catch an air pocket with the glider all the way up to the sky.The successes of Breath of the Wild aren’t steeped in complex lore or epic battles; it’s more about the little things. Each query is a personal puzzle to solve — how to survive a frigid snow cap or chase down a sky bound dragon from the ground — on top of many literal puzzles. But its greatest strength isn’t in telling a cinematic narrative or adhering to people’s preconceptions of how a fantasy game should be, it’s firmly being firmly what it should be: a video game.It just so happens that this particular video game isn’t just the best on the Nintendo Switch, but arguably, the greatest ever made.