Ahhhhh...

After cooling a bit, I'll wait for the 22nd to get Metroid Prime. This game deserves a physical purchase.

This Direct was sick. Metroid Prime Remastered (and it looks SICK), new Zelda TotK trailer, new Layton game after so long, Baten Kaitos Collection after the franchise pretty much going nowhere, Game Boy/Game Boy Advance NSO, Pikmin 4 trailer, a sneak peak of Xeno 3 story DLC (ALVIS, OMG) and a crap ton of demos. Call it a giant nostalgia trip, I don't care. I want to play EVERYTHING xD

Oh by the way people, just checked and the Nintendo vouchers thing for NSO members now includes TotK. So anyone with NSO can neutralize that stupid $70 price tag by getting the two vouchers at $100 and picking up TotK with it, thereby making TotK $50 instead of $70. I'm definitely gonna do this. And $20 off Zelda already pays for the basic NSO subscription if you don't have one yet so it's a no brainer as you then get $10 off a second game as well. As long as you are cool buying a digital copy of course.

Pikmin 4, Advance Wars, Kirby Return to Dreamland, and Bayonetta Origins were all just added as vouchers eligible software as well.

You get 12 months from date of purchase of vouchers to pick up your two games.

Now just the tough question of which second game to get alongside Zelda...

After watching the new Tears of the Kingdom trailer, I realized that I really hate Nintendo cause when it comes out, I'll be spending endless hours playing it instead of watching porn.

Downloaded GB and GBA.
Bought Metroid Prime remastered.
Bought Nintendo's game vouchers and used one to pre-order Z:TotK for $50.

Boom. Solid day of game buys/downloads!!

The TOTK trailer was kinda meh but the game itself looks pretty good, some interesting new devices and enemies. But also lots of familiar locations, since they're being weirdly secretive about this, maybe they'll give us some glimpses of cool new areas (outside of the sky stuff) later or maybe something will be happening in the game that'll make the world below the sky different and they'll reveal that later?

Regarding other games, I'd like to try out the Baten Kaitos remasters, I remember wanting to buy copies of the OG Gamecube games to play them on my Wii but the prices were prohibitive lol. Also, Pikmin 4 looks pretty good. 

Yes it's obvious, it's not like I said there's no more unknown games coming. The 2nd half has Pikmin 4 so far and I expect it to also have Metroid Prime 4 and a couple other things that are currently unannounced. 2024 will also naturally have at least a few things. I'm just saying that the lack of new announcements combined with the Switch's age is a sign they're transitioning to the successor currently.

Advance Wars is one of my favorite Nintendo franchise, so just seeing that reconfirmed for release was good enough for me. I just hope some else doesn't happen to cause it to be delayed again. 

I'm not sure if Metroid Prime 4 is happening this year. It feels like they will slow roll out Prime 2 and Prime 3 after Prime 1 and that will probably take a while.

Honestly not even sure if MP4 is a Switch (at least Switch only) game at this point, I kinda feel like if it was they would've shown a little bit of it at least at some point in the last little while.

I think the holiday game for 2023 will be a Mario platformer, no idea if its 2D or 3D or something in between like 3D Land sorta.

Which is fine honestly. 

Fire Emblem Engage, Zelda: ToTK, Kirby, Bayonetta Origins, Pikmin 4, Advance Wars, Baten Kaitos 1/2, Metroid Prime Remastered, New Mario platformer (my guess but I think they will want to capitalize on possible movie success), and other things like GoldenEye 007 and GB/GBC added to the online service is a decent enough 2023. I hope maybe F-Zero is still in the pipeline, but realistically how much more do you expect from a console entering its 7th year? 

Playing the Octopath Travaler 2 demo

You can pick any protagonist to play the first 3 hours. I choose Temenos, the cleric

The game seems to preserve most of the core mechanics of the first one, looks absolutely stunning from graphical standpoint and the OST seems to be awesome

I hope this game to be a step forward in terms of story and character interactions. The first one was sorely lacking in this point.

Well yeah of course they are transitioning to the successor. Whether the successor is 12+ months out (2024) or 24-33 months out (2025) they no doubt have numerous next-gen games well into development at this point.

But that doesn't mean they aren't working on finishing up a bunch of current gens games this year and next year. There was no reason to expect them to announce a bunch of stuff for later in the year, as they will use later Directs to do that. They just announced a ton of games for the next few months.