Nintendo Switch 2 games preview: Hands on with SEGA's Yakuza 0 Director's Cut, Raidou Remastered, and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S

With the Nintendo Switch 2 on the way, SEGA of America had me out to preview some of their upcoming games for the console: Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut, Raidou Remastered, and Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S. This was also my first time getting hands-on with the console itself, and while that’s not the purpose of this preview, I can say that the controllers felt incredible, and I was pretty impressed with how the games looked, felt, and the speed at which they loaded.

My familiarity with these games varies, with Yakuza being the one I’ve played the most, and Raidou being a game I was familiar with, but never had time to play during the PS2 era. While I am a long-time Atlus fan, it was something new to me, which was exciting. My love for the Yakuza franchise is great, but the most fun I had the whole time during my Nintendo Switch 2 SEGA games preview was Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S. Here’s what I think of this trio of games.

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SEGA put us hands-on with three Nintendo Switch 2 releases

I spent a few hours at SEGA of America recently, trying out a few Nintendo Switch 2 games being released by SEGA/Atlus, once the console launches in June 2025. They are among the many great third-party titles dropping with the Switch 2 launch:

• Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut
• Raidou Remastered
• Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S

You'd be a fool to pick a fight with Sotenbori's Lord of the Night. So why do they do it? (Image via SEGA)

First, we dove into some SEGA's Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut on the Nintendo Switch 2, and this is the game that made me want the console more than the others. Sure, I’ve put hundreds of hours into Y0 at this point, and it’s one of my favorite games in the franchise.

However, I was really digging the new Raid Mode, and while I didn’t get a chance to see any of the new animated cutscenes, I did bask in the new English dub. We explored some of Chapter 3 — Majima’s first appearance in-game — and saw the sights in Sotenbori. You likely know what to expect from that: getting into fights, learning game mechanics, and of course, singing Karaoke.

When you're used to PlayStation glyphs, this can really throw you for a loop (Image via SEGA)

I have so many fond memories of Karaoke in Yakuza, with 0 featuring some of my favorite songs. As this is a part of the game I invest a lot of time into, whether streaming or playing offline, it’s important that it look and sound good. The Karaoke English dub sounded amazing, too. All sections of this SEGA Nintendo Switch 2 game loaded incredibly fast, and played smoothly.

We were playing on original Nintendo Switch 2 hardware, and there was no lag or slowdown that I could detect. After exploring Sotenbori, we tried out the new Red Light Raid Mode. This is found in the start menu, and players will unlock a variety of characters, and play through a series of battle missions in either single or multiplayer.

Kuze is still the tough-as-nails brawler he's always been (Image via SEGA)

Even if you play in single-player in this Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive mode, you can have a group of NPCs help you out, so you aren’t alone unless you want to. There are a total of 60 playable characters, with six of them being mysteries, locked off from view. Many of the characters are generic folks you’d see in the game, that’s not the case for everyone.

You can play as the three main combat forms of both Majima or Kiryu, as well as many of the other important characters. That’s right, you can play as everyone’s favorite antagonist, Daisaku Kuze! I played as Kuze first, and then as Homare Nishitani, to see how different they would ultimately feel.

Each character definitely feels different, from Kuze’s rough, punch-heavy style, to Nishitani’s expert wielding of his dagger. It’s going to feel very familiar to the Demonfire Dagger, that’s for sure. In this mode, you grind through waves of enemies, boss encounters, and rack up money to level up your characters in this Nintendo Switch 2 Yakuza title.

Nishitani was my favorite to play as, to be honest (Image via SEGA)

You can either Raid Online, Raid with Friends, or Raid Solo. For the purposes of this playtest, I played solo, through Challenge Missions 1 and 3. Each one gets progressively harder, with more stages and more foes to overcome. It’s a real test of your Yakuza skills, because you can’t just spam Tiger Knee Drop, and use tons of healing items.

Each one takes place in a familiar part of the game, from Dojima Clan HQ, the Cabaret Grand, and even the Shibaura Wharf. It’s such a fun, intense part of the game, and I look forward to playing it with friends somewhere down the line.

Raidou Remastered played remarkably well, and I can't wait to finally play it all the way through (Image via SEGA)

Then we shifted over to Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army on the Nintendo Switch 2. We were dropped into the early portion of the game with a good amount of demons at our side, and a mystery in a manor to solve. I won’t spoil this because a colleague of mine has recently done a preview of the game, which you can read about here.

I do want to talk about an important quality of life change that’s coming in this game, though. Investigations are an important part of Raidou Remastered. You use your demons to look around and gather clues for you, but in the original game, it was never clear which demon you needed to use.

This time, the game can help you along. You can use Inspect to help select the right demon, so you don’t accidentally fuse/merge them, or if you’re lacking the demon, you can go get it. I cannot stress how important this is going to be.

The few memories I have of Raidou was that it was an incredibly dense game that really did little to help you solve problems. Sure, you can go to Gamefaqs and look things up now, but that wasn’t always going to be available to everyone.

This feature alone makes the remaster worth playing on the Nintendo Switch 2. The combat also felt incredibly smooth, and I enjoyed running around town, helping people with the power of demons, and solving mysteries. I think this is really going to do a lot to open this game up to people who missed out on it originally.

There's nothing quite as intense or enjoyable as Doubles Tetris. . . (Image via SEGA)

Finally, we played a couple rounds of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S on the Nintendo Switch 2. I love Puyo Puyo/Tetris with all my heart, so being able to try out this new version was very exciting. Truth be told, it’s similar to the original Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 in a lot of ways, but the addition of Doubles Mode, and the chaos of mouse controls was incredibly exciting to me.

Me and three other journalists came together to play 2 vs. 2, the first being standard Doubles, and the second being all players using Mouse controls. Doubles is the ultimate test of friendships and communication. Each player on your team has a block to drop at the same time, and you can’t move on to the next blocks until both players drop theirs into place.

You can’t move around your ally either, unless they hide their block with the R button. It’s so much fun to play against other people this way. The way you can set up outrageous, massive combos using two players is really unrivaled. This is one of the best reasons to play together on the Nintendo Switch 2.

. . . except maybe Doubles Puyo Puyo with Mouse controls (Image via SEGA)

Honestly, I was hesitant about mouse controls, because I owned a Wii. I know how miserable trying to move a cursor can be. However, it was perfectly responsive. It was fast, and admittedly took some getting used to, but before long, my team was dominating just as we did in the previous best-of-three.

It takes advantage of Game Share, so everyone doesn’t have to have it, and it’s playable online. Doubles is usable in most game modes too, so no matter how you want to play, you can put your friendship to the test and see just how well you work together. All told, these SEGA games played incredibly well on the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware.

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These three SEGA games drop at launch with the Nintendo Switch 2 hardcore on June 5, 2025. While I don’t know if the Switch 2 will have the same cultural impact as the previous console did, I can tell you that I loved using it, and want one in my home badly now.