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Ranking The Switch’s Greatest Shadowdrops (Aside From Metroid Prime Remastered)

by Donald Theriault - March 1, 2023, 9:00 am EST
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The three sweetest words in a Nintendo presentation are “Available later today”, and these ones were especially rich.

The Switch turns six this Friday, and that means both that we’re all old and that there’s a lot of memorable moments worth looking back on. In this case, we’re looking back at some of the greatest Switch surprise launches in the entire history of the platform.

After assembling a list of every Switch surprise presentation release from the first occurrence in June 2018 - all the surprise releases in 2017 were for 3DS - through the Direct on February 8, we narrowed down the list to one that was guaranteed to be the bottom of the top and nine others. After that, a panel consisting of our staff and Patrons ranked the remaining 1 to 9 to determine the rest of the top 10.

The following restrictions were in place for the list:

  1. No demos, or the final list would’ve had at least three HD-2D demos on it.
  2. No drops of DLC. The main thing this excluded was Doom Eternal’s “Ancient Gods” expansion, as well as NSO library updates (Earthbounds, Super Mario All-Stars, the GB/GBC/GBA libraries).
  3. No Metroid Prime Remastered. It’s been reviewed six times on this website - three on the original release, twice on Trilogy, and the remaster - with five 10s and a 9.5. It was our Game of the Decade in the 2000s, and voted the best game of the first 15 years of the website in 2014. If we’re doing the Bill Simmons Semi-Memorial Pyramid of surprise releases, then Metroid Prime Remastered is the apex and we’re ranking level 2.

So with that in mind, let’s run down the top 10…

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