Games Inbox: What is the best Nintendo game of 2026?

The Wednesday letters page tries to name the best Nintendo game of the year, as a reader worries about his Xbox Series X breaking down.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Second best
With Nintendo Switch Sports Resort out this week that’s it for Nintendo this year, except for Zelda: Ocarina Of Time and The Duskbloods. I cannot believe, at this stage in the year, that The Duskbloods is actually going to come out – unless it’s free-to-play or something weird like that, but even then it seems virtually impossible.

Obviously, Zelda is going to be the most popular game, and probably the best, but my question is if you discount that what is the next best? After a slow start this has been a decent year for the Big N. Not a classic but a better second year for the Switch 2 than the Switch 1 got.

As far as I can see, the contenders are Pokémon Pokopia, Yoshi And The Mysterious Book, Star Fox, and Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave. I have played all of those except Yoshi and they all seem to have been well received, although I guess you could argue whether a Pokémon game is fully a Nintendo title or not.

My vote goes to Fortune’s Weave. I wasn’t going to get it until I saw the positive reviews but I’m very glad I did. The amount in the game is insane and I’m nowhere near finishing it all even now, and they have DLC coming?! Hopefully 2027 is as big improvement on this year as 2026 was on 2025.
Eggers

GC: As well as The Duskbloods, there are Nintendo Switch 2 Editions of Pikmin 4 and Xenoblade Chronicles 3 still to come, but that’s all for the rest of the year.

Unbeatable graphics
That GTA 6 trailer using GTA 5 graphics was really clever. The ingenuity of fans never fails to impress me. It definitely does bring home just how much the graphics have improved, although I don’t feel that’s something anyone has had any criticism for.

There’s no question that GTA 6 will have the best graphics ever and I would imagine it would stay that way for a long time ever. I agree with the readers talking about the PlayStation 5 being as far as consoles are likely to go for the foreseeable future, with the PlayStation 6 just being an expensive extra that most people aren’t going to have.

The question for me is whether any other games can catch up in the meantime.
Joss

Fine idea
I’m so happy to see how well the Star Wars games are going and that Lucasfilm seems ready to take advantage of it and the lessons learnt. I would love Bungie to make a Battlefront game, but that sounds like maybe it’s not the way it’s going to go, but at least they thought about it.

I really hope they do a modern equivalent to Empire At War soon and I would love a graphic adventure, like someone said before, but I’m not sure who would do that. Double Fine, maybe? They seem to be having a rough time of it lately. Next step is probably Star Jedi 3 though, which I am really looking forward to.
Crossfire

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Don’t break
I live in constant fear of either my Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 ever breaking.

At the current RRP of £670 and £570 I just don’t see myself being in the market to replace either.

But the Xbox Series X price is just baffling, I know Microsoft don’t want to sell their machine at a loss but they can’t be selling more than about five a month at this point. If they dropped the price to £570, to match the PlayStation 5 it isn’t like they wouldn’t suddenly start flying off the shelves, so would it actually hurt them? Surely, it would at least give the illusion that they are still in the market, rather than just quietly quitting.

The worrying thing is console prices are going to stay ridiculous for years, which will put a real stranglehold on the industry and the games that get produced for a long time to come, at a time where it’s not exactly been in rude health for the last couple of years anyway. Every studio seems to be one poorly selling game away from closure.

We are slowly watching the industry collapse just leaving the same old cash cows as the only games to be released.
Irve77
PS: I know GC aren’t fans, but I’ve really enjoyed Gears Of War: E-Day (played in co-op, as recommended). An easy 8 for me and Horde Siege is a nice evolution of Horde mode that I think deserves more credit.
PPS: I do hope that Sony don’t follow Microsoft and restrict the hours of streaming as this make the PlayStation Portal a very useful addition to the household and time limits would just cut this off at the knees.

GC: The logic for Microsoft is thought to be that they don’t have the capacity (and/or the need) to manufacture many Xbox Series X at the moment, so there’s no need to decrease the price for the few people that actually want one.

Mario Sports
Just read your review of the new Nintendo Switch Sports game and its left me wondering why they don’t just include the classic Nintendo characters in the game, instead of generic cyphers? Seems like such an easy win and would add a bit of extra cache to a game that seems pretty uninteresting as anything more than a momentary distraction. I can’t believe there’s much of an audience out there for it as it is.
Chris

GC: Wii Sports has always been about Mii and Nintendo already has a separate line of Mario sports games for tennis, golf, and others. Despite what you might imagine, 2022’s Nintendo Switch Sports sold over 18 million copies, making it the 11th most successful game on the Switch. There’re more people than you’d think that want a simple, vanilla sports game they can play with their family.

Vice versa
Heinz mentioned yesterday that if Xbox had introduced the disc to digital feature in the Xbox One era it could have been a unique selling point, but in fact this is what they introduced and it turned into a key failure point.

The original feature had the same functionally as today’s. Games no longer ran off the dis,c so when it installed, it also automatically linked the licence key on the disc to your Xbox Live account. From that point on you would be able to play the game on any console you were signed into. Any other user could also play the game on your designated home console, no disc required.

It also had the benefit of family sharing, where up to 10 family members had access to your now digital library. So, with one copy, 10 people could play the game on 10 separate consoles (just not at the same time).

However, there were two distinct issues. The home console needed to periodically connect to the internet to make sure you still owned the game, and Microsoft described the resale process as through authorised retailers. Given the system all worked off a licence key existing on a disc I suspect the devs actually built a system where the game always works when you have a disc, and transferring a licence just requires the disc to be put in another machine, but the PR department and the execs messed up the messaging.

It is a lesson to gamers though, as they can be their own worst enemy. The fanboy response of one company can do no wrong while the other can do no right meant the clip of Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes illustrating transferring ownership of PlayStation 4 games became a symbol of PlayStation’s superiority, rather than questioning the PlayStation 4’s missing features.

Coincidentally, they both recreated this at an event this summer, but with the backdrop of Sony announcing an end to discs (and therefore disc drives) and Xbox’s disc to digital feature finally becoming available, I think it’s now a symbol of the point when fanboys sacrificed their games working on PlayStation 6 for an internet argument.

Was it Sony’s plan all along to force people to rebuy games? I doubt it, but even now the only way to play your disc-based games on a PS5 Pro or PlayStation 5 Digital Edition is to either buy a digital copy of the game or a disc drive.

What should have happened was people demand both companies to work how Xbox does now. The tech existed, it could have happened. All it really needed was people to ask why the online check couldn’t have been a message saying ‘insert disc when offline’.
Tim

Slowly inevitable
I had never heard of Stupid Never Dies until I saw your review on Tuesday and now I have, and have watched a trailer… what a waste. It makes you wonder sometimes who is really behind the success of a game, because this is hardly the first time a developer has set up a new studio and not made anything good.

Oh well, it was never going to sell anything at this time of year anyway. Definitely excited about Devil May Cry 6 though. Surely that’s got to be the next big Capcom annoucement, right?
Benson

GC: It seems likely but then that’s been the case for the last several years.

Mainstream pricing
I agree with most of what The Colt is saying about the mainstream market being priced out of next gen hardware but I’m also doubtful the mainstream will even be able to afford a fully portable PlayStation 5, if that’s the recommended alternative. I can see that alone costing over £800. In fact, a PlayStation 5 plus PlayStation Portal combo right now isn’t far off that.

I think most people expect the prices for all existing hardware to go up again next year, so there’ll potentially be difficulty selling a lot more current gen machines as it is. Less of a problem for Sony at likely over 110 million PlayStation 5s sold by late 2027, with the prospect of GTA 6 giving them a boost.

If the speculation is right about the horse already having bolted with Sony’s next gen plans, because of the component agreements they’ve already entered into, their best bet might be to launch the PlayStation 6 in very a low-key way and consciously push it simply as a premium option to play games that’ll also be released on PlayStation 5 for many years to come.

To be honest, there still aren’t that many games that feel like they really need the PlayStation 5’s power (and certainly not that many that look as good as the eight-year-old Red Dead Redemption 2), so if the base PlayStation 5 can reliably run GTA 6, it could be difficult for a PlayStation 6 to justify itself, even if it was less than £500. It’ll be well into the 2030s before games that are more technically ambitious than GTA 6 become anything close to standard, and that’s being optimistic.
Panda

GC: You’re almost certainly right, but the important point is that between the portable and the high cost of the PlayStation 6, Sony will have to continue to make PlayStation 5 games – which would be no bad thing in terms of giving the industry some much needed stability.

Inbox also-rans
Not that I’m complaining, but how many times has CD Projekt Red said they’re not updating Cyberpunk 2077 again? Looking forward to them being wrong again next year.
Gabbo

I respect the fact that Daft Punk were offered infinite money by Rockstar to come back for GTA 6 and still said no. I wish they hadn’t but you can’t argue with that kind of certainty.
Ishi

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The small print
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