Nintendo Is Quietly Putting Together a Killer 2027

Who needs a 3D Mario game?

After a week of juicy speculation, Nintendo’s September Direct didn’t exactly deliver on fans’ loftiest expectations. That’s kind of par for the course at this point, but the 45-minute showcase was especially underwhelming. Rather than seeing Super Smash Bros. or a new 3D Mario game, fans were mostly treated to ports of third-party games that will land on Switch 2 this fall. It wasn’t exactly Nintendo’s most thrilling show, to say the least.

But buried in that sea of third-party news and DLC announcements, Nintendo finally gave us a fuller idea of what its 2027 will look like. Based on the games we know about so far, next year is already looking stacked for Switch 2 owners.

So far, we know about four games scheduled to land on Switch 2 in 2027 — well, five technically. We already knew about Xenoblade Genesis and Pokémon Winds and Waves, but the Direct also revealed Metroid Ravenous and Kirby and the World Beyond. On their own, those games serve as sturdy pillars that could very handily make 2027 the Switch 2’s best year yet.

The year will kick off with Metroid Ravenous on Jan. 28. Though Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was met with a very mixed reception in 2025, there’s good reason to believe that Ravenous could be in the running for the Switch 2’s best exclusive out the gate. The 2D game is a follow-up to Metroid Dread, a game that earned Nintendo Game of the Year nominations in 2021. It's also the third 2D Metroid game for developer MercurySteam, which also handled 2017’s Metroid: Samus Returns. The studio got better between its first two stabs at Metroid, so if that keeps up, Ravenous could wind up being one of the series’ finest games.

After that, Kirby and the World Beyond is set to launch sometime next spring. It's a sequel to 2022’s excellent Kirby and the Forgotten Land. That game revitalized the Kirby series after a few so-so outings (including 2018’s forgettable Kirby Star Allies), and Kirby and the World Beyond is only pushing its ideas further. If developer HAL Laboratory can take everything it nailed in Forgotten Land and apply it to an open-world game, we could be looking at a second major hit.

Then there’s Xenoblade Genesis, which doesn’t have a firm release date quite yet, though it's slated for 2027. The Xenoblade series has grown from a niche RPG to a heavy hitter for Nintendo over its lifetime. That culminated in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 landing a Game of the Year nomination in 2022 right alongside Elden Ring. Momentum is very much in developer MonolithSoft’s favor right now, which sets Xenoblade Genesis as another breakout moment for a series that just keeps getting bigger.

The main event, though, is Pokémon Winds and Waves. Some major stakes are riding on the first mainline Pokémon games of the Switch 2 era. Game Freak has a chance to reset the series’ reputation after a string of technical disasters, and deliver a buttoned-up pair of RPGs that pay off the open-world promise of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. No matter how the games are, they’re bound to be culturally dominant system sellers come the holiday season.

And that’s just what we know about so far. Nintendo still has plenty of wildcards left to play in the Switch 2’s early years. We haven’t heard anything about a new Mario game, Super Smash Bros., Animal Crossing, or other critical darling franchises that tend to land Nintendo in Game of the Year conversations. There’s a fair argument to be made that it doesn’t need any of those juggernauts next year. That speaks to how successful Nintendo has been at evolving its franchises throughout the Switch era. Mario and Zelda aren’t the only reason to buy a Nintendo console anymore, and we may see that proven in 2027.