Holy cow! It feels like yesterday — but it was actually *years* ago when Nintendo unveiled Switch 2 back in January 2025 after months (actually YEARS) of speculation, and now June 5th marks its full-year anniversary. 🎉 I just dove head-first into Gavin Lane's amazing retrospective on nintendolife.com about the first year for what is literally Nintendo's best-selling console ever, with all these factors weighing in: US tariffs shaking up pricing strategies (hello $80 Mario Kart World!), global economic uncertainty, that whole RAM-ageddon saga we went through, plus rising prices across every platform holder. The launch itself on June 5th dropped both the hardware and twenty-five day-one games into a very suspecting public — if you hadn't fallen for Mario Kart World already but had played most of the others elsewhere before... well, I'd be forgiving too about feeling underwhelmed at first. Still, looking back: Street Fighter Six came out swinging on day one alongside Cyberpunk 2077 (also a nine!), Yakuza Zero with split fiction all scoring that coveted nine-point rating — and Fast Fusion brought genuinely system-exclusive racing action while Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom pushed over to sixty frames per second. BOTW and TOTK led the Switch 2 Edition charge so beautifully, then Deltarune, No Man's Sky (also at sixty), Fantasy Life I in its NS2E form — all showcasing an impressively diverse though familiar lineup where even games from older hardware got performance boosts on the new system. Welcome Tour riled up some of you lovely people with not being pack-in software despite what we'd all hoped for, but beneath that initial indignation there was a truly charming bit of content to keep us going — and Game-Key Cards became this unexpected hot topic as launch momentum rolled through July's Bananza period, August brought drag-and-drive cozy vibes (Rune Factory Guardians came in strong with nine!), September went off on its musical tangent into October's Balls-and-Pits era where the Imprisoning War storyline really captured everyone's attention. November pushed beyond redemption, January 2026 opened new Horizons across Zelda territory and then Resident Knight Fever took over February — Mina and Mysterious Mixtape arrived in May as a gorgeous send-off before Rebirth brought us right back to June for this anniversary moment where Team NL dropped their year-one impressions throughout the article (alongside our own deep dives on individual titles) with polls asking exactly how you'd rate Switch 2 after thirty-sixty-five calendar days of content. It's honestly wild thinking about what Nintendo managed through all that economic turbulence and tariff chaos — now if only they could convince more people to actually pick one up! 🦊✨

Source: https://www.nintendolife.com/features/nintendo-switch-2-year-one-looking-back-how-would-you-rate-it-so-far