Nintendo Switch 2's kickflipping cow, 50-ft woman, and steampunk t-rex showed there's still great power in absurdity

The Switch 2 game trailers being weird could almost be taken as an assumption, something so obvious that nobody even bothered to put it on their various bingo cards. In the last few days we've seen a cow skateboarding her way through a grand prix, a kaiju woman lumbering in for a coffee chat, and a new sports game with controls that demand you clap like circus seals and make furious shirt-ironing motions against the clock.

In the wake of April Fools Day, my colleagues and I saw lots of press releases that were largely the same two or three jokes being passed around. But what other companies joke about doing – or don't even dare to joke about – Nintendo brazenly steps in to do, sometimes seemingly oblivious that there even is a line being crossed in the first place.

Tentpoles like Mario have always been conceptually bizarre, even if it's easier to overlook that fact after thirty years of them being normalized in the public eye, but it's not like Nintendo has tried to dial back on the weirdness to any degree. Not when games like Mario Wonder are still coming strong, or Wario Ware... well, continues to exist at all.

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Dare to be stupid

And that's no bad thing either, as it makes what they do very hard to ignore. I was talking to a bunch of people when the Tomodachi Life 2 trailer dropped, and a rippling chorus of "what the f**k"s went through the office when the skyscraper-sized Mii wandered into frame, bellowing out their thunderous demands for small talk.

Strange? Definitely. Memorable? Undeniably. The fact that both an announced Hollow Knight: Silksong release window and a new FromSoftware IP called The Duskbloods have nearly been overshadowed in the public consciousness by a Holstein doing a Vespa tailgrind in Mario Kart World is a real testament to that power. We remember what's strange, and in many ways part of Nintendo's strategy is folding a certain amount of eccentricity into its brand, sometimes framed as the inevitable result of unconventional geniuses at play.

Nintendo has always been an odd company, especially when held up against the increasingly cautious and conventional approach of other major publishers. There's a strong point to be made that this is almost certainly a calculated persona to a large degree, but even artificial oddity is still more engaging than heavily suppressed blandness – and more companies might be well-advised to follow in their footsteps.

Nintendo Switch 2 hands-on preview: After four hours with the Switch 2 it's clear that this is a true evolution.