Metroid Ravenous Preorder: Why Physical Beats Digital on Switch 2

A ten-dollar discount is a ten-dollar discount, but it isn’t the reason a handheld player should preorder Metroid Ravenous on cartridge. Walmart has cut the physical version of Nintendo’s next 2D Metroid to $59.88, down from $69.99 — roughly a wash against the digital price — for a game that doesn’t land until January 28, 2027. The savings are real, but on a Switch 2, the format you choose matters more than the receipt.

Ravenous is the first side-scrolling Metroid since 2021’s Metroid Dread, shown off in a frantic September 2026 Direct trailer that cut between cinematics and Samus dashing, rolling, and brawling through environments and bosses. She’s carrying over the abilities she absorbed at the end of Dread, and Nintendo is keeping the story and any new mechanics under wraps. That’s enough to know this is a proper 2D entry — and on Switch 2, that has real consequences for how you’ll actually play it.

The 256GB Problem: Cartridges Are Storage Insurance Again

Switch 2 ships with 256GB of internal storage, and every big digital purchase chips away at it. The console’s expandable storage runs on microSD Express cards, which are faster than the old Switch’s UHS-I cards and priced accordingly — a 1TB Express card can cost more than a game or two. A cartridge copy of Ravenous, assuming Nintendo ships it as a real game card and not a download-key voucher, installs almost nothing and just runs. That leaves your internal storage headroom intact for the games that genuinely need it.

2D Metroid entries have historically been among the leanest games in Nintendo’s first-party catalog, so Ravenous alone won’t fill a drive. The math gets more compelling as your Switch 2 library compounds — a stack of cartridges is effectively free storage, and it’s resellable. The catch is cartridge swapping: on a commute or a flight, juggling tiny game cards while a suspended session waits is exactly the kind of friction a digital copy erases.

Dread Held 60fps on Weaker Silicon — Ravenous Has Headroom to Burn

Nintendo hasn’t disclosed performance targets for Ravenous, so anything specific would be invention. What we can reason from is Dread, which ran at a locked 60fps on the original Switch’s modest Tegra X1. Switch 2 pushes a 1080p, 120Hz, HDR-capable panel in handheld mode, and a side-scrolling Metroid is close to the ideal showcase for it — clean parallax layers and fast dash animations gain the most from high refresh. Nothing is confirmed, but a 120fps mode here would be a far more natural fit than it was for any 3D Switch 2 launch title.

That framing is why the format question cuts both ways. A cartridge preserves storage but forces swaps; a digital copy streams instantly and never leaves the slot. If you plan to play Ravenous in short bursts — a few rooms on the train, suspend, resume — digital’s frictionless pick-up-and-play is genuinely worth the $10 you’d save at Walmart. If you’re building a physical collection and guarding that 256GB against a growing eShop backlog, the cartridge is the smarter buy.

And if you somehow skipped Dread, fix that before Ravenous arrives — it’s discounted to $41.99 during Nintendo’s Customer Appreciation sale through September 26, and it’s the best possible warm-up for what Samus is bringing into the sequel’s handheld debut.