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While 2023 was a banner year for Nintendo – The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom made sure of that – 2024 has overall been somewhat quieter for the company. My initial impulse from January 2024 on what to expect from Nintendo this year as "who knows?" turned out to be shockingly prescient. I mean, who could have predicted that Nintendo would, in fact, release new hardware this year… in the form of Nintendo Alarmo, a proprietary alarm clock with music and motion sensors.
That might sound a bit flippant, but it's also simply just true. Nintendo did in fact release Nintendo Alarmo this year at a time when everyone from investors to players to journalists like myself are essentially just waiting for the company to actually reveal whatever the successor to the Nintendo Switch ends up being. We know it exists, but we don't even have an official name yet; momentum does appear to be building behind "Switch 2," however, even if I would personally much prefer "Super Nintendo Switch" because, well, I'm old.
So, it's been a year of waiting. Back in May – seven entire months and some change ago – Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa shared that that company "will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year." That's a pretty wide window considering that essentially means between then and March 2025. And while there's still some time left here before the new year officially commences, it seems nearly certain that Nintendo will run out the clock and finish out 2024 without saying much else about "the successor to Nintendo Switch."
Switch it up
This isn't a value judgment on my part, though some of the more rabid parts of the internet have certainly been expressing discontent over the continued holding pattern. 2024, which I acknowledged previously as a somewhat quiet year, still had plenty of Nintendo first-party releases that weren't quite on the level as a new mainline Zelda. That includes, but is not limited to, a new Zelda-centric spinoff!
I actually immediately purchased a Nintendo Alarmo, and while it is exceedingly charming it's really not meant for anyone that 1) has a large bed or 2) doesn't sleep alone and unfortunately(?) I fall into both categories. While I love the little songs, my partner despises its entire existence in our shared life.
All said and done, 2024 has actually had plenty of first-party video games from Nintendo. There's an entire game with Princess Peach as the protagonist, Princess Peach: Showtime! Famicom Detective Club came back with Emio – The Smiling Man! The aforementioned The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom! A new Mario Party! A new Mario & Luigi RPG! That's a lot of Nintendo to go around, even if none of them are arguably anything resembling a flagship title.
Honestly? That's part of what excites me about the Switch 2, or whatever it ends up being named. I argued a couple of months back that the new Famicom Detective Club actually is what ended up making me excited for a new Nintendo console. Taken as a whole, this year feels much more willing to bring back old oddities, stretch in new ways, and generally experiment. Bringing that vibe into a new console iteration is totally fine by me.
Switching with anticipation
Maybe I'm an outlier, or maybe I'm not, but regardless of how you feel about the past year of Nintendo releases it is fairly easy to define all of 2024 as being all about anticipation. What will the new Switch come with? What upcoming Switch games will be released for it? Any hardware upgrades? Will the Joy-Cons be fixed?
There still aren't solid answers to most of those questions. We know the Nintendo Switch 2 will play Nintendo Switch software just fine, and we know that Nintendo Switch Online is coming along for the ride. But these answers really only beget more questions, unfortunately. How does backwards compatibility actually work in this instance? What will Nintendo Switch Online look like on the successor to the Nintendo Switch? And so on and so forth.
All of the first-party releases define Nintendo's year as much as this anticipation did. There's basically a caveat to anything and everything Nintendo does or releases that hinges on some version of wondering when the Switch 2 will actually happen. Given that March 2025 will mark 10 years since the Nintendo Switch's reveal, there's good reason for that anticipation, but it colors absolutely everything else.
In some ways, this is classic Nintendo. When it comes to Xbox and PlayStation, it's all about what the two did during the calendar year, games released, stances taken, and so on. Instead of participating in that same kind of measurement, Nintendo's 2024 somehow inexplicably feels defined by 2025. Here's to the future.
While Nintendo's year was all about anticipation, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom did still make our ranking of the best games of 2024.
