My top 8 games on Switch in no particular order:

Zelda: Botw
Odyssey
Hollow Knight
Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove
Zelda: ALTTP (snes online)
Super Metroid (snes online)
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
Zelda: Link’s Awakening


I was going to do a top 10; but there weren’t 2 other games I would put in the same S tier. The next tier of games were things like Smash Bros where there is at least one major criticism I have of the game (ie SMBU has **** net code that often ruins matches).

It’s immediately obvious that the console doesn’t really do shooters. And several really good games on other platforms suffered in the switch port.

It took me a second to realize you meant first-person shooters, since I have had a lot of fun with Ikaruga, R-Type, OVERWHELM, and a few others, but those are all twin-stick or side-scrolling shooters.

I've noticed I just really gravitate towards roguelikes/roguelites in general, and their pick-up-and-put-down nature is perfect for the portability of the Switch in handheld mode. I hardly ever use it docked, and for what I want out of it, it's more of an indie machine for me since the battery tends to last longer.

Which is not to say I didn't nearly 100% Mario Odyssey (I can't find 3 snow coins), or that I haven't picked up My Pet Eevee Simulator again, but my favorites in my collection have been Celeste, Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Untitled Goose Game, and Golf Story is doing a good job of capturing my heart as well. I could put Monster Hunter GU on the list, but as much as I love it, it's just more damn Monster Hunter and I seem to be straying away from the series over time.

From that post I would recommend Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove.

It’s obviously not a roguelite, but neither is Celeste. And it’s an extremely good platformer with 4 different campaigns that each run roughly 5-8 hours w tons of replay value. Thus it sort of has the same pick up and play feel a lot of the other games you’ve listed also give me.

The game itself is inspired by Megaman and SMB3 as well as other older games; but it has significantly more responsive controls.

——————

I thought about recommending Hollow Knight; but that is much closer to Metroid X Dark Souls than anything you’ve listed so I’m not sure if you’d like it.

I never recommend Cuphead. No one who would enjoy playing it needs my recommendation.

Edit: By shooter i was intending 1st and 3rd person. I tend to lump other kinds into either arcade shooter or arcade sidescroller or bullet hell depending on what I’m trying to describe.

Except for Metroid Prime if those ever see a rerelease; AAA shooters just aren’t being optimized to run on the switch. I can’t think of any good ones I would specifically recommend a switch over other consoles for.

Shooters also by def seem to have become a genre that heavily focuses on multiplayer, which by definition doesn’t gel with the switch very well.

Obviously it's been a hot minute since I've gushed over Shovel Knight, but then again I still haven't finished King of Cards. I own Shovel Knight on both PC and Switch, and I absolutely love it to death, but for whatever reason it just doesn't keep my attention for all that long. I believe I could go screen by screen detailing how brilliant the level design is, but I've only put a few dozen hours between the two copies I own and have only barely touched the King of Cards campaign. Like, I understand the compulsive nature of roguelites explaining why I have over a hundred hours logged on Isaac or Slay the Spire, but I never seem to put much time into the games I uphold as my favorite or best designed. Hell, I even 100% Yooka-Laylee out of spite so that I would never have to touch it again.


I haven't gotten Hollow Knight for the Switch specifically because I never finished the PC version, but the reason was mostly that my controller went kaput, and since my laptop has been seemingly failing on me, I've been reluctant to play games on it. I really, REALLY enjoyed my time with Hollow Knight, but I have to admit to myself that I'm just more enticed by playing a "new" game than one that I've enjoyed already. I should probably get Hollow Knight anyway, considering.


Oh, yeah, I played a bit of a friend's copy and Cuphead is totally my jam. To be fair, I love most games marketed as "tough as nails" -- like Volgarr the Viking, Wings of Vi, and of course Dark Souls -- but it's mostly the aesthetics that appeal to me.


Yeah, no, I understand, that was a me thing since I basically don't play first- or third-person shooters that aren't, like, PS2 mascot platformers.

I don’t like Cuphead very much.

It’s mainly just a boss rush; and none of the upgrades mattered that much for my playstyle, so I kind of just got bored wo the in between parts both DS and HK have.

Hollow Knight redefined what it means to be a good game for me to the point where I feel like it'd be disingenuous of me to make a top N list of Switch games with anything more than a single entry.

Bapa Nada

Good gods, getting work back into operations has been a slog.
Hence my spotty presence, if not outright absence, over the past week.

I may have mentioned this some time ago, when I first started playing Let's Go Eevee, but as I've been playing it again lately, I wanted to talk again about how, like, broken it is.

I do want to say up-front that I've been enjoying what it is, because besides the fact that I can just have one of my favorite unevolved pokemon be combat-capable, I don't have to worry about things like team composition or HM slaves and just focus on collecting and keeping my favorites. The extremely low difficulty also makes it just an incredibly chill game that I don't have to be as neurotic as Pokémon games always make me. It's been extremely enjoyable as a simple game even as I'm seeing the seams.

So, I referred to it earlier as "My Pet Eevee Simulator" because it's rather clear that the game doesn't work very well as a pokémon game. I'm not so much of a purist that I'd try to argue (as a friend of mine does) that Pokémon is "supposed to be an RPG," but it's obvious that the game is being pulled in two directions that don't play with each other. The very core idea that you have this super-powerful Eevee with a whole bunch of extra upgrades (particularly the type moves, which grant you ridiculous coverage) is directly at odds with the whole creature-collector genre which Pokémon pioneered. The game tells you that you're supposed to collect a lot of pokemon, and it levels them up for you both because of the Exp. Share feature, and the fact that it gives you experience for catching pokemon -- potentially a lot as it rewards you for chaining together single-species; however, the game incentivizes you to focus solely on your Eevee by giving it a personality and all sorts of digital-pet options like petting, feeding, dressing up, etc., PLUS giving it all the overworld movement options that used to be taken up by HMs.

Then there's the way they've just broken Kanto like a splattered egg because of all the generational changes they've overlapped onto the gen1 level design. The first generation Pokémon games were kind of busted, when you take a close look at it, but it was balanced for the way the original games worked, for the most part -- there's only a single ghost-type line because their normal- and fighting-immunity actually let them rule over a LOT of the game, for instance. There's a thousand and one little changes that are in here that don't work with that level design. Squirtle learns Water Gun sometime after Bubble, which is supposed to be stronger, even though Bubble has the chance of lowering the opponent's speed; however, in Let's Go, they're the exact same power and accuracy, meaning Water Gun is COMPLETELY USELESS. The 3D overwold and analogue movement also completely wrecks trainer placement, because their vision is so incredibly linear that you can sneak by even trainers that are SUPPOSED to be mandatory. You can even stand right next to a spinner at an angle, and never be seen.

There's more I could say about pokemon typing over the Kanto dex, but I've still yet to beat the game and those are the most obvious things I wanted to say about it.

I thought it was really fun to go through gen 1 with every Pokémon available of the first 150. I view most of the missing features such as abilities to be a positive over firered/leafgreen; with the only negative being the lack of a major post game outside of master trainers.

Bubble vs water gun is a rare occurrence; and it’s a good example of why some moves including one of those two got completely removed in gen 8 sword and shield. The move pool in general got a bit bloated.

The pikachu/eevee focus is a plus. And this game actually let most gen 1 pokes be viable vs complete booty in the games internal meta.

The chaining thing is just a much more visible version of a feature that has existed for a while.

Biggest Complaints About Let’s Go:
1. Mew
2. Meltan/Melmetal
3. Standing on rolling chair
4. Starter Eevee Op
5. Mewtwo Op
6. Brock’s Gym Requirement
7. Version Catching Exclusives
8. Chansey EVERYWHERE
9. Bottle Caps

Edit:

Forgot:
-1: Stealth Rocks

There are things I'm going to avoid commenting on since I'm barely half-way through the game, but for now,

I'm pretty much of the same mind regarding no abilities being a good thing. Partly is that I think the gen1 pokemon pool ends up kind of imbalanced since they weren't designed with abilities in mind (and the physical/special split in gen4 caused a big shift in their balance as well), though I'd be interested in re-examining that though after re-playing... I think I have Leaf Green. Partly is also that abilities add a LOT more complexity that the Let's Go games don't need, IMO. It's fine being as simple as it is, since there are so many OTHER things that were added over the generations that add enough complexity as it is, including move pools and just the entire pokédex.

Now, part of the reason I scratched my head over the fuss raised when Sword and Shield didn't have a full national dex was that I lived through the shift from gen2 to Ruby/Sapphire, when the 'dex was reduced to 200 total and only like 75 of those were old 'mons, but I'm an old fogey who's thought the pokédex has been too large for a while now. It was burgeoning around gen4, and as time has went on, it's adapted more features I used to criticize Digimon for in comparison: besides the stupid mega-evolutions and z-moves and now dynamax (where it's just your pokemon but 5x bigger), they just keep adding on more pokemon AND more overly-busy designs. That's one reason I'm so easy to lure back with gen1 pokemon: their designs are so delightfully simple that it's easy to love them (compare: the Bulbasaur line to the Turtwig line -- the same concept, but one is quite more visually complex).

Also,

Well, it's very clearly the Pokémon Go catching mechanics, which is sort of why I have an issue with it, but not really what I want to talk about. I don't buy the "it's been like this for a while" argument, partly because ANY game can be someone's entry point into a series, but mostly because it's readily apparent in cases like this that they can design it ANY way they want to and that sweeping changes in other areas makes it pretty clear that it didn't have to be this way. It just feels very dismissive to respond like that, in my opinion.

Chaining exists in all the recent Pokémon games for several generations. Let’s Go just tells the player about it.

It has literally been this way for long enough that I genuinely don’t remember which was the first game to have it; and I’m sure you aren’t mad about it in the other mainline games that don’t have a counter on the screen. So it feels like you just don’t like the catching mechanics and are really complaining about that instead of chaining.

Either way, this being the umpteenth game to have the feature kind of does serve as a valid argument for why it’s not that much of a problem.

————-

The catching mechanic itself is a matter of pure taste; but for me it makes shiny hunting less frustrating. It also makes the game feel somewhat fresh instead of the fifth time they’ve rereleased gen 1 in some form. And trust me it’s a godsend if you plan to do a sizeable number of master trainers.

I got myself a used copy of animal crossing and now I'm stuck at naming my island.

What about Hallownest?

(Emphasis mine)

I feel like you don't get what I'm saying to the point that I feel I need to reiterate something I thought I brought up too frequently:

I don't believe anything is so perfect that it cannot be criticized, and neither do I believe that criticizing something makes it bad.

Bob Dylan once said to avoid criticizing things you don’t understand or simply don’t like.

So you're saying we should both shut up?

Eh. There’s some things like Stealth Rocks that are just obviously bad. Wanna talk about those? I need to at least bitch about SR while here.

Let’s Go doesn’t have a way to remove Stealth Rocks; and the only real way to prevent it (temporarily) is to use Taunt. That isn’t really a good way to prevent that for long....

This makes Stealth Rocks completely dominant as a strategy in the metagame. This also hurts the viability of any Pokémon weak to Rock type and almost completely eliminates the viability of Charizard and Moltres. This was already a dominant strategy in gen 7; so effectively removing its counters just made it far worse.

In gen 1 specifically; this de facto made Mega-Aerodactyl by far the best mega in the format besides Mewtwo, and Mewtwo is banned by most house rules.

So a standard good team looks like: Aerodactyl, Alakazam, Mew, Eevee-S, Wall, Wild

It’s an extremely homogeneous meta-game; even when compared to RBY or FR/LG.

I've never liked Bob Dylan.