I had to watch the entire direct again. There's so much I could write about every single segment in it like the little visual flourishes in Luigi's Mansion 3, Panzer Dragoon and a Seiken Densetsu 3 remake showing up out of nowhere, Fire Emblem Three Houses revealing such a massive part of the game like a month before its release, Astral Chain and Daemon x Machina looking better with every showing, Suda throwing us a curveball with No More Heroes 3 and of course Sakurai trolling us hard with that Banjo announcement. Ultimately, what it would amount to is how good Nintendo has gotten at these Directs when they actually try and keep a snappy pace. We knew about most of the high-profile stuff already and it still managed to feel fresh and surprising. I love what they're doing with that bonus mode in Link's Awakening. Animal Crossing was barely on my radar before the Direct but thanks to the local co-op they showed off at the Treehouse, I can't wait to get it. And let's not forget the "impossible" port that is Witcher 3 which somehow looks really good (even though I have no interest in the Switch version). And then the best "one more thing" I could have asked for. All in all, I honestly thought it was one of their best directs ever, top 3 at least and it made me really excited about the system's future.
So all my criticism comes with that in mind, that this was fantastic Direct but obviously not a perfect one:
- Using Smash as (almost) bookends to this Direct made sense but it worked way better for Banjo due to the history Nintendo fans have with the old 64 games and Rare. The Luminary's reveal on the other hand was extremely boring in comparison which is a shame because Joker's was also cool. Not to mention all the stuff with Sugiyama being a bigoted piece of shit and Square Enix being stupid about their music putting a damper on the reveal itself. I hope that we get female alts for Erdrick and Solo at least. His fighting style, however, seems pretty cool.
- As much as I love the timeskip reveal for Three Houses, I really wish they had interspersed the trailer with some more gameplay and teased stuff we don't know about. My mind always drifts off during story/cutscene-only segments. But they're gonna have more about Fire Emblem during the Treehouse so it's no biggie.
- I sometimes don't really get how Nintendo chooses which third party games to highlight. Dark Crystal was okay but nothing special. Contra looked mega ass. However, them giving Resident Evil such a big segment for last-gen ports after what they pulled with REmake, RE0 and RE4 really stung. Combined with the FE stuff that came before, this was the one part in the Direct that dragged because they became indulgent.
In light of this, my biggest personal disappointments with Nintendo's E3 direct and presence:
- Retro's continued absence from these shows is tragic. At this rate, we won't get to play anything new from them until Metroid Prime 4 in 2022 at the very earliest. That we aren't even getting Metroid Prime Trilogy HD any time soon is annoying as well.
- They talked about games for all kinds of players. For months I've been complaining about how they've failed to really capture that shooter/action game audience. Doom, Wolfenstein, Alien Isolation, Resi 5 and 6 go into the right direction but thy still aren't quite there yet. I neither want them to pull an Ubisoft and have half of the presentation drown in gunfire but they have nothing exclusive in this area. They basically need something like Destiny and something like Call of Duty and they have neither.
- NSO is still in a questionable state at best and there's nothing they've done to show me that they are interested in improving it. The NES well is running dry and they're dragging their feet when it comes to SNES games. Tetris 99 is great, I was hoping we'd get more like it. I assume that they're going to show more NSO stuff closer to the end of the year when yearly renewals are up.