7 Nintendo Direct announcements fans are begging for

Nintendo's next Direct is set for September 9, and the usual hopes are already starting to pile up. Some are realistic, like finally seeing the next 3D Mario. Others require a little more faith. Golden Sun has been gone for 16 years. Ace Attorney has not moved its main story forward since 2016. Super Smash Bros. 

Ultimate wrapped up its final DLC five years ago, and Animal Crossing is still living off New Horizons and its Switch 2 update. None of these games is guaranteed to appear. That has never stopped anyone from hoping. These are the seven announcements we would most like to see.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn arrived in 2010. Sixteen years later, it is still the newest game in the series. The first two Game Boy Advance adventures are now available through Nintendo Switch Online, so you can at least return to Weyard without digging out old hardware. What you cannot do is find out where the series goes next.

A revival would not necessarily need to be Golden Sun 4. Nintendo could remake Isaac and Felix's connected adventures, bundle the older games into a modern collection or start again with a new cast. The Djinn system remains a good reason to bring it back. Moving Djinn between characters changes their classes, Psynergy and available summons, giving party building much more flexibility than the usual fixed RPG roles.

Nintendo has pulled dormant series such as Famicom Detective Club back into circulation before. After 16 years, Golden Sun deserves its turn.

Capcom has spent years making old Ace Attorney games easier to play. The original trilogy, The Great Ace Attorney, Apollo Justice's trilogy and both Investigations games are now available on modern platforms. The main story has not moved since Spirit of Justice in 2016. A new game could finally answer what comes after Apollo's departure, where Athena fits into the next generation and how much Phoenix should remain at the center of the series. 

There is plenty of room for another courtroom mechanic too. Psyche-Locks, Perceive, Mood Matrix and Divination Séances have each changed how investigations or testimony work without replacing the basic rhythm of finding contradictions and yelling objections. With most of the old cases now readily available, another collection would be far less exciting than opening a crime scene we have never seen before.

Luigi's Mansion 3 turned a haunted hotel into one of the Switch's best-looking games. Each floor could become something completely different, from a film studio to a medieval arena, while Luigi remained terrified of almost everything inside it.

Seven years later, another building is waiting to be haunted. A fourth game has room to improve the parts that became familiar in the hotel. Regular Goobs and Hammers repeated far more often than the boss ghosts, while Gooigi was frequently pulled out for one puzzle before disappearing back into the Poltergust.

A new location could give both ideas more room. An interconnected town, cruise ship or amusement park would change how you move between areas, while more puzzles built around controlling Luigi and Gooigi together could make the second character feel less like a temporary tool. Switch 2 can make the lighting and destruction prettier. Luigi still needs good ghosts to panic about.

There is at least one strange clue behind this one. A title called Metroid Ravenous appeared in Brazilian classification records in July, with Nintendo of America listed as producer and distributor. Nintendo has not announced a game by that name, and the listing did not tell us whether it would be 2D. A follow-up to Metroid Dread would fit the timing. Dread arrived in 2021 and brought the mainline story back after a 19-year gap. 

Its fast movement, demanding bosses and routes that reward sequence breaking gave Nintendo a strong base without needing to reinvent Samus again immediately. Five years between Dread and another 2D game would feel almost luxurious by Metroid standards. If Ravenous is real, a Direct reveal could finally explain what it is. If it is not the next 2D Metroid, then we are back to waiting for that separately.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons let you reshape almost every part of your island. You could move buildings, terraform cliffs, redirect rivers and spend more time arranging furniture outside than actually paying Tom Nook. Nintendo gave the game another push in January with the Switch 2 Edition and a free update, adding higher-resolution visuals, mouse controls, expanded online play and more content.

A sequel can afford to focus less on giving you another shovel. Once your island is finished, the villagers are what remain. More varied conversations, stronger routines and busier public spaces would give you more reasons to check in without immediately redesigning another corner of town. Better inventory management and fewer building restrictions would be welcome, but New Horizons already proved how much control Nintendo can hand you. The next game could spend more time making the town feel alive after you have finished building it.

Nintendo could reveal the next Super Smash Bros. with a logo and create months of arguments before showing a single fighter. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate makes the actual sequel much harder. It brought back every previous fighter and kept adding newcomers until Sora closed out the DLC in 2021. Repeating that roster would make a new game look very familiar. Cutting it would immediately produce a list of characters somebody wants back.

Switch 2 also runs Ultimate, so Nintendo is in no hurry to replace it simply because new hardware exists. A sequel needs a reason to move on. Better online play would help, but the larger question is what comes after a Smash game built around including almost everything that came before it. Even confirmation that a new game is in development would be enough for now. The roster arguments can start approximately three seconds later.

Super Mario Odyssey launched in October 2017. Bowser's Fury gave us another 3D Mario adventure in 2021, but on a much smaller scale as part of the Super Mario 3D World rerelease. Switch 2 is now well into its own library without showing the full game that follows Odyssey. Nine years gives Nintendo plenty of directions to choose from. Another Odyssey could build on captures and Cappy. Super Mario Galaxy 3 would bring gravity back. Bowser's Fury already experimented with placing Mario inside one large connected area instead of separating everything into traditional stages or kingdoms. 

Nintendo could just as easily ignore all three. The first trailer needs to show Mario moving rather than spend most of its time hiding the game behind cinematics. Cappy changed how far you could stretch a jump in Odyssey. FLUDD changed recovery and movement in Sunshine. Gravity defined entire routes in Galaxy. Whatever Switch 2's 3D Mario is built around, watching Mario cross one level should tell us more than a logo ever could.

Not all seven are equally likely. Golden Sun has been gone for 16 years, while another 3D Mario is difficult to imagine Nintendo avoiding forever. Metroid Ravenous at least gives us a name to watch, and Animal Crossing only received new Switch 2 content earlier this year. Nintendo does not need to burn through the entire wishlist in one Direct.

Give us Mario running through somewhere completely new, Samus underneath a Ravenous logo or another defense attorney slamming a desk, and September 9 already has its surprise. Golden Sun fans can keep the clown makeup nearby just in case.