Nintendo’s Disappointing September Direct Only Has the Switch 2 To Blame

Published Sep 9, 2026, 1:05 PM EDT With great power comes a lot of ports Image: Nintendo Sign in to your Polygon.com account A Nintendo Direct is a water cooler moment. It’s a social event as much as a marketing beat, giving Nintendo fans a good excuse to goof their way through all the exciting and bizarre announcements that tend to come from Nintendo’s eclectic. Even the worst ones — especially the worst ones — are fun to engage with. So, why was Nintendo’s September Direct so boring? Simple: It's a side effect of Nintendo finally having a console capable of running the same games as a PlayStation or Xbox. The 45-minute showcase gave us a better idea of what’s coming to Switch and Switch 2 this fall, and a glimpse of 2027’s early lineup. We got wall-to-wall announcements, including some stunning trailers for the freshly announced Metroid Ravenous and Kirby and the World Beyond. But beyond those highlights, and a few welcome DLC reveals, there was little in the way of exciting announcements. The bulk of the stream was dedicated to third-party developers revealing that their previously released or announced games were coming to Switch 2. That was set up from the very start, as Nintendo opened the show with Monster Hunter Wilds rather than a surprise first-party release. From there, we saw Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Persona 4 Revival, and even the seven-year-old Resident Evil 2 remake (alongside 3 and 4). That left the show feeling like a glorified Partner Direct — the lesser-hyped streams that focus on third-party games — that just so happened to have a few Nintendo game updates sprinkled in. Image: Atlus Expect that trend to continue. Right from the very first Switch 2 Direct, Nintendo made it clear that third-party games are a high priority this generation. That’s a sensible bit of business for a company that once struggled to lock down partners as the technological abilities of its consoles lagged behind increasingly more powerful PlayStations and Xboxes. Now that Nintendo finally has a powerful piece of hardware that can run new releases, it’s opening the floodgates by getting as many games that Nintendo fans missed out on over the years on Switch 2. The natural result here means we're bound to get more Directs that are padded out by big ports rather than new games or surprising oddities. This isn’t a total departure for Nintendo. During the Switch era, Nintendo was infamous for filling its Directs with ports of Wii U games. It became a bit of a meme in the console’s early years, as fans theorized about what game would inevitably be freed from Wii U prison at each showcase. That’s now happening on a much larger scale, as Nintendo can treat a game like Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves as a tentpole release for Switch 2 owners. Once more studios get the hang of developing for the system and are able to release their games alongside other platforms, Nintendo Directs could start to look indistinguishable from Sony State of Play broadcasts aside from a few exclusives. Free sign-up Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later. Sign up free Free. Unsubscribe anytime. On one hand, it’s a silly thing to whine about. As fun as Nintendo Directs are, they are clinical marketing showcases above all else. They have always served as an efficient way to let players know what games are coming to Nintendo’s systems, and these happen to be the games coming to Nintendo systems right now. It’s boring if you keep up with games regularly and have already played Resident Evil 2 to death, but it’s better news for players who have never owned anything other than a Nintendo system. Elden Ring coming to Switch 2 was a big deal for a lot of players, even if it came four years after its meteoric release. There’s a small part of me, though, that finds it bittersweet. Nintendo’s refusal to keep pace with its rivals on a technical level meant that developers had to get creative when making games for Nintendo systems. The Switch brought an end to the innovative era of bespoke handheld games, giving us fewer oddities like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. The Switch 2 has accelerated that even further. It’s hard to imagine that we’ll get a sequel to the excellent Monster Hunter Rise, a game that felt like a solution for the fact that the Switch couldn’t handle Monster Hunter World, when Capcom can just put Monster Hunter Wilds on Switch 2. Image: Capcom There are still a few developers holding onto that spirit at least. This month’s Orbitals feels like a game that was specifically engineered around the Switch 2’s GameChat feature, as does FromSoftware’s The Duskbloods (which was suspiciously absent from the show following its tough late-summer network test). Bloober Team arguably had the most interesting announcement of today’s Direct thanks to Onyx: The Dark Grip, a portable-first horror game that can only be played in handheld mode. I hope to see more developers continue carrying that creative torch as big names like Capcom and Square Enix settle into a new normal where a Nintendo console is just a PlayStation you can take on the subway. I’m still clinging onto a past where a Nintendo platform is a place to try something new.