Best First-Party Nintendo Switch Games

Nintendo has built up a cast of beloved supporting characters, so expand upon them and make them matter. Age of Calamity did a solid job of this, although I wasn’t a fan of its more eccentric approach to storytelling - still, it’s a good blueprint to follow if the overall tone is given a few much-needed adjustments. Breath of the Wild was so compelling because of the mystery that defined it, each hesitant step into its sprawling world rewarding us with riches and a freeform experimentation in gameplay that nothing in the open world genre has been able to match since. It’s a marvel, and something the sequel should build upon as opposed to replicating with only a few key changes.

Princess Zelda’s new look could be little more than an aesthetic makeover, but that would cheapen what her character is capable of, especially given how much room she’s given to shine in Breath of the Wild. While she’s seldom seen outside of flashbacks and cutscenes, watching her initial reticence to Link ’s presence and how it evolves into a willingness to confide in the Hero of Time as a lasting companion is emotional to watch, especially once we become aware of everything Zelda has lost and seeks to regain while keeping Calamity Ganon at bay. She’s the integral fabric of this narrative, while Link is the weaver who joins all of these incoherent threads together.


The classic approaches weren’t bad or archaic. It’s a common misconception. They often had janky controls, poor accessibility, or even overly difficult game design - but the aesthetic was never to blame. The industry has ironed out a lot of these creases over the years to create much smoother experiences, adventuregameland.com and the indie space is proof enough that 2D doesn’t mean old and obtuse. The Binding of Isaac takes the original Zelda and makes it a roguelike, even sharing its UI, dungeon format, and item pickup animation - the inspirations ooze. Undertale is a 2D RPG that has combat expressed through a small box that has you avoiding the bullet-hell barrage - it doesn’t rely on fancy graphics. Little Dew is a more comedic Zelda that feels like an HD rendition of the classics with a quaint, cartoony art style. These are all iconic titles, despite not being 3D triple-A blockbusters. Meanwhile, when Nintendo wants to revive its classic library, it does so by modifying its 2D approach, 3Dizing them instead. Look no further than the upcoming Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl Pokemon gam

You also can’t climb in the rain, with Link being encouraged to find another route up a mountain the moment a drop of water falls from the sky. These are all polarising mechanics, and for good reason, but they also help define Breath of the Wild as a special experience that always changes things up, seldom having you repeat the same tasks in order to complete your objective. If it wasn’t different, it wouldn’t be Zelda.


The remake of Resident Evil 3 reportedly shipped two million units in five days. There is an obvious hunger from consumers to relive games of the past rebuilt for modern consoles. The remake of Resident Evil 2 is currently Capcom's sixth best-selling game of all time, with roughly 5.8 million units sold. Similarly, the original 1998 release of Resident Evil 2 for PS1 is Capcom's seventh best-selling game of all time. That game sold 4.96 million units worldwide, not counting the various ports and updated re-relea


It’s not unlike animation’s seemingly unanimous move toward CGI, leaving 2D behind as a relic of the medium. Disney likely won’t ever make something in the style of The Jungle Book or The Lion King again when Tangled, Moana, and Frozen have such a wide appeal. Anime is huge in its own right but it doesn’t have the same pull in the West as Pixar, Disney, or DreamWorks - all of which have moved toward CGI animation. Indies in gaming hanging onto the old approach is like anime retaining its 2D style. Nintendo taking Zelda back in time would be akin to Disney releasing a new animated film in 2D. It would show that the approach still has a place and it would pave the way for others to do the same in whatever shape or form that might take. I wasn’t particularly optimistic about this ever being a possibility but now, with Metroid Dread , there’s a glimmer of hope on the hori

Breath of the Wild tells an achingly human tale, but to uncover it you’ll need to invest dozens of hours into scouring Hyrule in search of brief cutscenes that chronicle Link and Zelda’s doomed pilgrimage in search of allies. None of the flashbacks are told with any sense of chronology, so you’ll stumble across them randomly and be forced to work out exactly what is going on and how it factors into the overall adventure. This mirrors Link’s own amnesia, so it feels like we’ve truly been placed in his shoes, trying to work out how our friends were lost and what we can do to save whatever it is they left behind.

However, neither of these games encourage experimentation like Breath of the Wild does, so it’s much easier to provide us with an easier mode of traversal instead of artificially increasing the time required to reach our destination. However you slice it, these games viewed climbing in the rain and weapon degradation as negatives, choosing to build upon Nintendo’s vision by removing them entirely. I understand why games that adopt so many of the ideas pioneered by Breath of the Wild opt to change them, because every game is different and it’s unfair to tar them all with the same brush. That being said, I don’t want the upcoming sequel to follow in their footsteps. Nintendo needs to stick to its guns, favouring clumsy wet traversal and obscenely delicate weapons over an adventure that simplifies things to the point of triviality.