Switch 2 at Summer Game Fest got AAA games, all the ports, and Ocarina of Time

Polygon RSS Feed✍ Oli Welsh📅 June 13, 2026⏱ 5 min read(2 months ago)

Overview & Key Takeaways

Nintendo's new console is picking up speed and has a lot of upcoming games and third-party support

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The Switch 2 celebrated its first anniversary during Summer Game Fest week, which made the annual showcase fiesta a natural referendum on how it's going for Nintendo's newest console. In summary: It's going pretty well. Everybody seems into it. Here are some data points from the week of reveals:

The marquee bookends for the Summer Game Fest stream (and two of 2027's biggest games), Resident Evil Veronica and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, will both launch on the Switch 2 on day one alongside other platforms. Now, Capcom and Square Enix are both staunch supporters of Nintendo, but this still represents a major marker of the platform's relevance and developers' confidence in its ability to keep up — something the original Switch never quite managed.
Square Enix chose the Nintendo Direct to show Kingdom Hearts 4, another day-one Switch 2 title — and one in a series historically associated with PlayStation. Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Lords of the Fallen 2 are day-one Switch 2 games, too.Parity with Xbox and PlayStation on AAA releases is creeping closer.
Now we have a complete picture of Nintendo's own lineup for the Switch 2 in 2026, and it's pretty impressive. By the end of the year, Nintendo will have released eight Switch 2 originals: Mario Tennis Fever, Pokémon Pokopia, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Star Fox, Slaptoon Raiders, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, and the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. Add six Switch 2 Editions, and Nintendo has kept up a more-than-monthly publishing cadence on the new console.

A Mii flies a prop plane over a blue sea Image: Nintendo

Nintendo is also not hedging its bets. After the dual swansong of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Rhythm Heaven Groove, Nintendo seems done with the Switch, and is focused on pushing its fans to upgrade. The clear sign of this is Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, a mass-market casual game which could easily have been made for the Switch's gigantic install base, but instead is a Switch 2 exclusive.
By my reckoning, 70 Switch 2 games were shown across all the major showcases, versus 88 for PS5 and 80 for Xbox Series X. (I'm not counting all the PC games, I'll be here all day.)
The stream of ports is turning into a flood. This happened with Switch, too, but not so quickly and not on this scale. The Nintendo Direct featured 10 major Switch 2 ports, including Dragon's Dogma 2, Lies of P, Stellar Blade, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and, for some bizarre reason, DayZ.

So: After Rhythm Heaven next month, Nintendo is all in. Capcom and Square Enix are all in. Others are catching on fast, particularly big independent studios like CI Games, Jagex, and Shift Up. For the rest of this year and into 2027, the Switch 2 is getting a lot of Nintendo games, and a lot of games period.

It all looks pretty healthy, and there's reason to believe it will get better yet. The RAM crisis is bad news all round, but for Nintendo, it's less bad. It will delay the next-generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles that would widen the performance gap to Switch 2. It will hurt Nintendo less: the Switch 2 has less RAM and onboard storage than its competitors, and Nintendo is years away from needing to think about a replacement for it. And the Switch 2 — a cheaper, leaner console that runs lighter games — will increasingly look like a safe port of call in the midst of an affordability crisis for gaming tech.

One year in, the Switch 2 train is picking up speed. All aboard.

eShop game of the week: Schrödinger's Call

A girl in pigtails approaches an old telephone in a moonlit room Image: Acrobatic Chirimenjako/Shueisha Games

This visual novel has a heady concept — fielding phone calls from dying souls at the end of the world — and it has reviewed sensationally well since its launch a couple weeks ago. It's currently in the top 3 games of 2026 on both Metacritic and OpenCritic. DualShockers called it an "indie masterpiece" and "an emotional and devastating narrative."

Nintendo Classics game of the week: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

In a Zelda mood after the Ocarina 2026 reveal, but don't want to spoil the remake for yourself by playing the original now? Then try this excellent GBA adventure, part of Capcom's brief but creditable run as the series' handheld steward, in which Link gets a talking hat that can reduce him to miniature size. Part of the obscure Four Swords timeline, but never mind about that.

Nintendo Music track of the week: "Lon Lon Ranch" from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

There are so, so many indelible melodies in Koji Kondo's classic Ocarina score that would live on in the Zelda series for decades to come, from "Lost Woods" through "Zelda's Theme" to the delirious waltz of "Song of Storms"/"Windmill Hut." But perhaps the most gorgeous of them all is this hauntingly sweet country arrangement of "Epona's Song," as plaintively crooned by Malon. (By the way, I've started keeping track of Switchboard's weekly Nintendo Music picks in this playlist.)