The Top 5 Games from Nintendo's Holiday Line-Up

Usually, I don't want to see any Christmas promotions before Halloween, but I make an exception for the Nintendo Holiday Tour, which came to NYC in September to showcase games and merchandise Nintendo is selling this holiday season. Many games were on display, including games from earlier in the year like Little Kitty, Big City and Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition, as well as even older favorites like Pikmin 4 and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but this article will focus on upcoming games that fans will most want to include on their holiday wish lists.

These games are tied since they're both exactly what you'd expect from their respective series. If you liked past games in these series, then it's just up to you to decide whether you want this year's installments. Mario Party is probably more fun if you actually have the time for a full round, but we only got to watch a trailer and try 3 minigames. Fitness Boxing is a nice workout in brief bursts, and the new sit-down mode makes it more accessible to players with physical disabilities, though the directional controls aren't perfect and I don't know how much replayability it has vs. other fitness games like Ring Fit Adventure (ANN readers might also want to be aware of the recently released Fitness Boxing feat. Hatsune Miku).

Similar to Nintendo's Super Mario 3D World x Bowser's Fury release in 2021, SEGA is bundling the rerelease of 2011's Sonic Generations with the new Shadow Generations as part of the “Year of Shadow” (those particularly excited for). Speaking as someone who's not particularly a Sonic fan, I had a blast playing the Shadow Generations demo. It keeps up a fast pace while also finding fun uses for Shadow's time-slowing abilities, and the visuals get Inception/Doctor Strange-level trippy.

It's weird seeing a PlayStation logo before a Switch game, but LEGO Horizon Adventures was my biggest surprise from the Nintendo Holiday Village. It might be the game on display whose virtues are best showcased in demo form. The humor is the right mix of silly and sharp, and even this tutorial stage had enough hidden treasures to reward exploration. The graphics are better than I've seen in any other LEGO games, closer to the stop-motion-inspired style and quality of The LEGO Movie. The mecha beasts of Guerrilla Games' Horizon franchise were designed with LEGOs to begin with, so the designs translate back to LEGO form brilliantly.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership technically didn't show up at the Holiday Tour aside from a promotional standee in the corner — but that's because it had its own event to show off a lengthier demo. You can read our full impressions here, but long story short, it's an enjoyable RPG with a fun fighting system and some fresh new additions to the formula of the long-dormant Mario & Luigi series.

I'm sure plenty of Zelda-heads have already completed this game by now, but our demo was on September 25, one day before the game's release, and it's easily the most exciting of Nintendo's new fall releases. The Nintendo team certainly knew it was the main attraction of the Holiday Tour: where most other games were playable on one single TV or handheld machine, Echoes of Wisdom had eight demo stations atop temple-like columns. The first traditional Legend of Zelda game where you actually play as Zelda is a return to the classic dungeons and overhead gameplay of the old-school titles, combined with the player-driven creativity that made Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom so refreshing. At the Holiday Village, we played through a jailbreak section early in the game, which showcased Zelda's “Echoes” ability to copy items and defeat monsters. I made a lot of platforms out of beds.