It’s as difficult to believe as any other milestone in the life of the Nintendo Switch, but the little hybrid that could just turned eight earlier this month. You may have missed the anniversary, of course, because the Big N has been as quiet as a joy-con mouse about the system’s upcoming games; in fact for the first time in half a decade, there was no Nintendo Direct presentation in February this year. As Mar10 Day has come and gone and I highly doubt there will be one right before the big Switch 2 blowout on April 2nd (EDIT March 28th: I was somehow wrong, but the below countdown still stands), I think we can declare the time of the Switch 1 Direct pretty much over, and that means it’s finally time to post the nerdiest countdown idea I’ve had simmering for the past several years: let’s rank some Directs.
In the cold light of 2025 it’s perhaps tricky to analyse the strength of shows filled with hype for games that have long since released, but I am a big fan of packaged videogame presentations, and to me each one of these Directs represents a clear point in the Switch’s life – I can still remember exactly where I was when I watched most of them. Revisiting these showcases today brings back enough memories that I can just about compare them on a reasonably level playing field. It’s also hardly controversial to say that Nintendo’s Direct format matured and even peaked during the Switch’s life cycle, and there are some real bangers to revisit as a result.
To determine this ranking, I take into account the significance of what could be considered major announcements within each Direct. However there’s little doubt my own personal tastes, the pace and structure of the presentation, and a dash of contextual nostalgia are probably weighed more heavily in the process. I also do not consider the eventual release quality of any announced games here; these shows are all about hype and so is my assessment of them.
By my count, the era of the Nintendo Switch encompassed at least 23 Direct shows that weren’t explicitly devoted to a single game or franchise, weren’t of the “Indie World” persuasion, and were longer than 20 minutes in runtime (that might seem like a ton of qualifiers but there really were a heap of these things). Out of these, the following are my ten personal favourites.
10. March 2018 Direct
HEADLINES: Mario Tennis Aces deep dive, that Smash Bros finale teaser
PERSONAL GEMS: Okami HD, Octopath Traveller, Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion
Remember when Nintendo Directs had 3DS sections at the start? They often felt like underwhelming warm-up acts at the time they were airing, but looking back now I kinda miss their whimsical ideas and the odd side effect of building anticipation for the Switch stuff even further. This is a Switch Direct ranking, though, so we focus on the meat of the show – and it is meaty indeed. The only March Direct of the entire Switch era followed a uniquely brisk “Nintendo Direct Mini” just two months earlier, during the most delirious period of online anticipation Nintendo had seen in at least a decade. That tiny show was pretty exciting itself – heralding the return of The World Ends With You, announcing Mario Tennis Aces and then confirming portable Dark Souls – but the main course to follow easily overshadowed it.
The age of the pantomime “oh wait, there’s still one more announcement” was still in vogue at Nintendo – in contrast to the comparative lack of pretense at the end of Directs nowadays – and you could argue March 2018 was their best use of that trend ever. One of the seasonal Splatoon update trailers that were already a reliable part of Direct showcases by 2018 escalated to an extremely cool 1980s-dirty-neon trailer for what would become one of Nintendo’s most revered DLC expansions ever: Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion, but then that in turn escalated to an initially-confusing homage to the first Splatoon‘s iconic trailer – which of course dimmed the lights and became a teaser for the then-untitled Super Smash Bros Ultimate. I still get goosebumps watching this thing, complete with its distant echo of that new theme song.
Smash was the kind of announcement strong enough to lift the entire show onto this list all by itself, but its easy to forget the importance of that thorough Mario Tennis Aces deep-dive to its legacy as more than just a lame follow-up to the awful Wii U Ultra Smash. Aces would go on to become my most-played Switch game of 2018, and the clarity of those fighting-game-esque mechanics set the stage for the multiple in-person tournaments I enjoyed that year. The Okami HD port was very well received during that early Switch phase devoid of classic Zelda, and the double-whammy of a release date and a demo (poorly communicated as a progress-carrier) for Octopath Traveller set up an underrated second year for the Switch.
9. September 2018 Direct
Speaking of series destined to jump to the next level of popularity, the kick-off reveal of Luigi’s starring debut in HD via Luigi’s Mansion 3 confused a bunch of Americans who technically never got a 2, and set up a hype cycle that would end with the game smashing sales records. Notably, said reveal came before the customary 3DS announcement block, signalling a shift in Nintendo’s presentation craft that would come to prioritise the impact of both the front and back of almost every showcase afterward.
Nintendo Switch Online is hardly a fun topic of conversation in 2025, but it’s easy to forget that before this Direct the service looked even worse in prospect. When first announced, the plan was to offer just one or two temporary NES/SNES games per month as part of the deal, but thankfully the midsection of the September 2018 presentation definitively contradicted that with a 20-strong NES launch lineup. The slick character-leaning explainer video duly provided meme and headline content for years afterwards, which was a nice bonus.
A strong Ubisoft E3 showing (oh, the days) from Starlink: Battle for Atlas that essentially turned the Switch into the game’s lead platform was backed up by a rad Wolf O’Donnell appearance that upped my interest considerably, but it was Square Enix’s deluge of Final Fantasy announcements near the end of the showcase that knocked my socks off hardest. The return of Crystal Chronicles (long before the release let everyone down) got me to pop off, but the rapid-fire follow-ups FF XV Pocket Edition, World of FF Maxima, Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon, and finally FF XII The Zodiac Age, FF VII, FF IX, and FF X / X-2 absolutely dazed me, and I remember the headlines right afterwards blurring into the background. A re-release salvo bearing that much weight will probably never happen again; well, unless Nintendo themselves goes third-party one day.
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