This week’s partner-focused Nintendo Direct did not set the world on fire. In fact, it was damningly unimpressive. Unless you love Japanese role-playing games, in which case boy, oh boy, even in its first year the Switch 2 is already shaping up to be the console of your dreams. A flood of recent JRPGs and a ton of new ones on the horizon have paved the way for an unprecedented run of turn-based mechanics, epic boss fights, and rewarding grind marathons on Nintendo’s new hardware. If that sounds horrifying, god bless. For all my other sickos out there, hell yeah!
A bust for general audiences, this week’s Switch 2 showcase was a surprise coup for JRPG lovers. It confirmed a whopping nine games in the genre coming to the portable platform between now and the summer, including some really interesting deep cuts that will make a few niche fanbases extra excited. Here’s the list along with release dates:
- Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection – March 13
- Tales of Arise – Beyond the Dawn Edition – May 22
- Final Fantasy VII Rebirth – June 3
- The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales – June 18
- Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok – July 9
- Digimon Story Time Stranger – July 10
- Culdcept Begins – July 16
- Another Eden Begins – Summer
- Kyoto Xanadu – Summer
Okay, let’s dig into a few of these. Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection is a turn-based spin-off in which you hatch, raise, and ride monsters (“Monsties,” lol) instead of fighting them. It’s got a pretty generous free demo out already. The Adventures of Elliot is an HD-2D Zelda-like from the makers of Octopath Traveler. And Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a streamlined action-RPG in which you travel the skies in an airship doing multiplayer Monster Hunter-like raids with really fun combat. It’s coming to Switch 2 for the first time with cross-play and Endless Ragnarok, a new story DLC fans have been hoping for since launch.
Culdcept and more make an unexpected comeback
Now for the deep cuts. Culdcept Begins is a surprise new entry in the long-running, incredibly obscure and esoteric card-based board game series that began on the Sega Saturn. It’s been almost a decade since the last entry came to 3DS, which despite its flaws and rough edges proved that JRPG Monopoly is still a winning formula (with the right people). Kyoto Xanadu is the latest in a series of action-RPG dungeon crawlers from Nihon Falcom. I’ve never played them but it’s a cult favorite.
Finally we have Another Eden Begins, a mobile game that players have been waiting almost a decade to get a proper console port for. Why do people care? Well, its script was written by Masato Kato who worked on Chrono Trigger. The theme music is by Yasunori Mitsuda, who made the music for Chrono Trigger. And overall the game plays like an old-school turn-based RPG with time-traveling hijinks and a literal frog knight so, yeah. The mobile version was free-to-play and had microtransactions. Hopefully the new port feels more like a proper paid release. We’ll see.
That’s a good haul of popular ports and more niche releases, but it’s not coming in a vacuum. This trove of 2026 JRPG riches comes after players got Octopath Traveler 0 and Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake last fall. Earlier this year, we got Dragon Quest VII Reimagined and The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon. Switch players who upgrade to Switch 2 finally got to play Final Fantasy VII Remake, with the sequel coming in just a few months. In the meantime, February has both Ys X: Proud Nordics and Tales of Berseria Remastered. And later this year there’s Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave and Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter.
It’s a wild time. Genre fans are eating well. There’s not enough hours in the day to play even half of these games in 2026, and that’s before we find out about the third FFVII remake game and whatever Monolith Soft is cooking up for the Xenoblade series. Nintendo should probably announce a killer first-party blockbuster for Switch 2 soon, but in the meantime it’s already a JRPG lover’s paradise.
