The Nintendo Switch is having a surprisingly weak second year

As a lifelong "Smash Bros." fan, it hurts to admit it — but it's true: The "Smash Bros." franchise is a B-tier Nintendo franchise, along the lines of "Kirby" and "Mario Party."

It's an incredible game series, but it's also a fighting game series. It's inherently limited by its genre, even though it stars literally every major Nintendo character (and loads of minor Nintendo characters, to say nothing of guest characters from non-Nintendo games).

To be clear: "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" is likely to sell quite well, and millions of Switch owners will love it. But it's unlikely to see the absurdly high numbers that games like "Super Mario Odyssey" and "Mario Kart 8 Deluxe" did.

The same could be said for the new "Pokémon: Let's Go!" games and "Super Mario Party." The former isn't the much anticipated new "core" Pokémon title being made for Switch, and the latter is, well, it's a "Mario Party" game. Both will sell well and entertain millions of people, but it's unlikely that either will achieve the astronomic impact levels of impact that games like "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" did.

Many Nintendo fans are looking beyond 2018.

Nintendo's "Yoshi" game originally scheduled to launch this year was pushed to 2019, according to Polygon.

And a major new Pokémon game is coming to the Nintendo Switch — the next entry in the main series, in fact — but it's scheduled to arrive in the second half of 2019. It's a big deal that the next game in the main series will be on the Switch, considering the entire Pokémon series up to this point has existed solely on Nintendo's handheld consoles. The first Pokémon game debuted on the original Nintendo Game Boy, and the series continued that tradition through to the most recent release on the Nintendo 3DS.

And what of "Metroid Prime 4"?

That's the big question. The game was notoriously absent from Nintendo's big video presentation this week at E3 2018, the annual video game trade show in Los Angeles.

Since announcing the game in a logo at E3 2017, Nintendo's been quiet about "Metroid Prime 4." It's unlikely to arrive in 2017 given its absence from the big show — it's expected in 2019 or later.