Nintendo’s September Direct ran about 45 minutes and mostly played like a status update. Then the last ten minutes happened. Metroid Ravenous and Kirby and the World Beyond closed the show, and once you sit with both trailers, a strange pattern surfaces: Nintendo’s entire 2027 first-party pitch is built on appetite. Samus drains enemies to survive. Kirby devours everything in sight, only now he does it across an open world he can physically slice open. I don’t think that pairing is accidental, and it’s the most interesting thing Nintendo has shown in months.
What the trailers actually told us
Metroid Ravenous launches January 28, 2027, exclusively on Switch 2, and it’s a direct sequel to Metroid Dread. Samus still carries Metroid DNA, which flips the core loop. Instead of only shooting her way through hostile corridors, she can feed on enemies to restore energy and grow stronger. Nintendo’s tagline is “eat or be eaten,” and the footage backs it up. There’s a new Metroid Suit with green armor and an energy sword, plus a Samus who talks far more than she did in Dread.
MercurySteam returns as developer, and that matters more than any single trailer beat. Dread was tight, fast, and arguably the best 2D Metroid ever shipped. The Ravenous footage I’ve rewatched frame by frame keeps the parry timing, doubles down on Morph Ball traversal, and pushes the tone much darker. A Brazilian age rating quietly surfaced back in July with violence descriptors, so the mood shift was telegraphed weeks before the Direct confirmed it. The eShop listing already flags 120Hz support, too.
Kirby and the World Beyond arrives in Spring 2027, timed to the series’ 35th anniversary. It’s the first genuinely open-world Kirby, a real leap from the semi-open zones of Forgotten Land. The trailer’s strangest beat comes near the end, when Kirby cuts straight through the boundary of the world and another layer peels back behind it. That’s not just a bigger map. That’s a structural promise, and HAL Laboratory rarely makes those casually.
The $120 problem in the fine print
Then there’s the pricing. Ravenous costs $59.99 digital and $69.99 physical, which already stings in 2026. The Special Edition runs $119.99, and the only way to get the Metroid Suit Samus amiibo is inside that box. Nintendo isn’t selling it separately, and pre-orders opened within hours of the Direct ending. Watch the full Direct and note how little warning collectors actually got.
I tracked the pre-order window in real time, and the pattern repeated exactly as you’d expect. Listings wobbled, stock blinked in and out, and collector threads filled with the same cornered question: pay $120 for a steelbook and a figure, or gamble on a scalper’s markup later. One post from a physical release tracker summed up the mood within the hour.
There’s also the exclusivity math. Neither game comes to the original Switch, full stop. That’s far less controversial than it would’ve been two years ago, now that Switch 2 sales have cleared 23 million units. Anyone who skipped the upgrade still faces a hardware purchase as the entry fee for the two best games shown.
And the Direct around these two was uneven. Third-party ports carried long stretches of it, and port quality on this hardware has been a coin flip, as we found with Oblivion Remastered on Switch 2. No new 3D Mario appeared. Metroid and Kirby arrived, fairly or not, as the reveals doing the rescuing.
Same mechanic, opposite ethics
Here’s my actual thesis. Ravenous treats hunger as body horror. Samus is becoming the creature she hunts, feeding to survive, and that green suit reads like a warning rather than a reward. Kirby treats hunger as pure joy, consumption without consequence, scaled up to a world with visible seams. One franchise asks what eating costs. The other has never once asked. Releasing both within months of each other hands Nintendo a tonal contrast it hasn’t attempted before, deliberate or not.
Two things temper my excitement. Nobody has shown how feeding actually works in extended play, whether it’s a resource loop or something with real teeth, and Treehouse footage should settle that. MercurySteam’s crunch problems during Dread‘s development were well documented, and a January 2027 deadline after a July rating filing is a short runway. I want this game to be great. I’d also like to know who pays for it.
My verdict is that this Direct will be remembered entirely by its last ten minutes, and honestly, that’s enough. If Ravenous lands, Nintendo will have shipped the strongest 2D Metroid run in series history inside six years, and Kirby finally gets the open world he’s circled since the Game Boy era. Hunger turns out to be a hell of a sales pitch. I just wish the best amiibo weren’t held hostage inside a $120 box.
