13th September 2018, 11:02 PM
I know, I should start with the crazy part, that one of those ports is, yes, Final Fantasy VII. But other than that, while this Direct was pretty good, almost everything announced was a port:
3DS - Three 3DS games were shown, one "new" -- a port of Kirby's Epic Yarn from the Wii. The other two upcoming games, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story and Luigi's Mansion, were also shown. A port of a Wii game is hardly a huge new announcement, but at this point it's nice that Nintendo announced anything for the clearly-being-phased-out 3DS...
Switch - Most of the Direct focused on the Switch of course. It started and ended with the two announcements in the thread title, Luigi's Mansion 3 and Animal Crossing, but almost everything shown in between was either previously announced or is a port of an older title or multiplatform game. Other than those two games only one other new game was shown, which I'll get to later. That's fine, but it reinforces that for many third parties that is what the Switch is, a platform you put your older games on but not your major new ones.
So, Square announced a mountain of Switch games! None are new games, however. They announced upcoming Switch ports of Final Fantasies VII, IX, X & X-2, XII: The Zodiac Age, XV Pocket Edition (a mobile game?), World of Final Fantasy (the newest game on Square's list of ports), Crystal Chronicles (the first one, now with no GBAs required...), and Chocobo's Dungeon. Even if none are new games though it is It's great to see all this stuff coming to Switch, and most of these games have never been on a Nintendo console before. FF7 on Nintendo is kind of weird, and the Switch has Crash Bandicoot as well... heh.
Otherwise, Nintendo finally showed the Switch Yoshi game again, and it looks like a lot of fun. It's got that same yarn artstyle as the other crafts-platformers Nintendo's made (including Kirby's Epic Yarn of course), and should be a good game. I've never loved Yoshi games as much as Kirby ones so I wouldn't get this over Kirby, but it does look good. Other previously announced titles like Daemon x Machina were also shown; that game looks pretty good.
One other rumor is also true: yes, New Super Mario Bros. U is, indeed, getting a Switch port, as NSMBU Deluxe. Sort of like the port of DKC Tropical Freeze, the game is the Wii U game, including the NS Luigi U DLC addon, with a few new characters: the Neeber guy who can't take damage from enemies now is playable in the whole game instead of just the Luigi part, and Toadette is playable. It's great that there's finally a female playable character in a NSMB game, as this is the first time that has happened, but I wish it was Rosalina and not Toadette... ah well. There is one weird thing to mention here, though -- if Toadette grabs a crown powerup, she turns into... Peachette, a new (?) character who looks a whole lot like Peach but I guess is Toadette actually or something? It's kind of weird, but as the actual Peach is stuck with her usual "she got kidnapped go save her" storyline in this game, they had to do something else and this is it.It's weird but... okay.
The third new game announcement is a new RPG from Level-5 codenamed "Town". It's got very kids-anime-cartoony graphics and is apparently entirely set in one town. It could be fine but looked underwhelming to me, both in gameplay and graphics. The graphical look is kind of bland and, one town only? Will this be a regular RPG, or something part life-management sim... who knows now.
A few more of the games shown include Mega Man 11, Just Dance 2019, and a collection of seven Capcom arcade beat 'em ups, including two that never got home console releases before. No licensed games are included here, but it's still an ice collection. It'll be on all formats (PC, PS4, X1, Switch), not only Switch.
I'm sure I'm not mentioning a lot more games shown, but I need to mention the other thing the Direct covered, Nintendo Online. Most of the presentation here is basically saying 'here are all the things you get for paying!' but they aren't new things, they're just the same thing the Switch has had since day one, but now you have to pay for them! It's the same exact horribly, inexcusably bad internet featureset as before, but now you have to pay for it. Thanks, Nintendo.
The only new things I can think of are access to NES games and cloud saves. Most Switch games will support cloud saving, though certain titles won't, including Pokemon and Splatoon. it sounds like most games will, though, thankfully. The little animation with Luigi's Switch getting crushed by a Thwomp was amusing, as an aside. As for those NES games, at least they finally gave details on that, with full lists of titles for what will be released through December. There will be 20 games available at launch, with about five more added per month. I guess that anyone subscribing has access to all games, instead of the XBL Games with Gold style of limited availability, so it's more a Netflix model. Sure, that works. Giving away so many games for a relatively low yearly fee is interesting, yes you have to pay every year but it's a lot of games. On the other hand though you do need to keep paying to keep playing them, so that adds up over time. There has been a lot of speculation that if they add newer consoles they could add additional fees for those libraries, I wonder if they'll go that direction or if they will just add them all in for the same price... or if the price will just go up a lot. I guess we'll see sometime in the coming years.
So yeah, it was a good Direct, I think. I still dislike the Switch's online system, but otherwise they showed quite a bit.
3DS - Three 3DS games were shown, one "new" -- a port of Kirby's Epic Yarn from the Wii. The other two upcoming games, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story and Luigi's Mansion, were also shown. A port of a Wii game is hardly a huge new announcement, but at this point it's nice that Nintendo announced anything for the clearly-being-phased-out 3DS...
Switch - Most of the Direct focused on the Switch of course. It started and ended with the two announcements in the thread title, Luigi's Mansion 3 and Animal Crossing, but almost everything shown in between was either previously announced or is a port of an older title or multiplatform game. Other than those two games only one other new game was shown, which I'll get to later. That's fine, but it reinforces that for many third parties that is what the Switch is, a platform you put your older games on but not your major new ones.
So, Square announced a mountain of Switch games! None are new games, however. They announced upcoming Switch ports of Final Fantasies VII, IX, X & X-2, XII: The Zodiac Age, XV Pocket Edition (a mobile game?), World of Final Fantasy (the newest game on Square's list of ports), Crystal Chronicles (the first one, now with no GBAs required...), and Chocobo's Dungeon. Even if none are new games though it is It's great to see all this stuff coming to Switch, and most of these games have never been on a Nintendo console before. FF7 on Nintendo is kind of weird, and the Switch has Crash Bandicoot as well... heh.
Otherwise, Nintendo finally showed the Switch Yoshi game again, and it looks like a lot of fun. It's got that same yarn artstyle as the other crafts-platformers Nintendo's made (including Kirby's Epic Yarn of course), and should be a good game. I've never loved Yoshi games as much as Kirby ones so I wouldn't get this over Kirby, but it does look good. Other previously announced titles like Daemon x Machina were also shown; that game looks pretty good.
One other rumor is also true: yes, New Super Mario Bros. U is, indeed, getting a Switch port, as NSMBU Deluxe. Sort of like the port of DKC Tropical Freeze, the game is the Wii U game, including the NS Luigi U DLC addon, with a few new characters: the Neeber guy who can't take damage from enemies now is playable in the whole game instead of just the Luigi part, and Toadette is playable. It's great that there's finally a female playable character in a NSMB game, as this is the first time that has happened, but I wish it was Rosalina and not Toadette... ah well. There is one weird thing to mention here, though -- if Toadette grabs a crown powerup, she turns into... Peachette, a new (?) character who looks a whole lot like Peach but I guess is Toadette actually or something? It's kind of weird, but as the actual Peach is stuck with her usual "she got kidnapped go save her" storyline in this game, they had to do something else and this is it.It's weird but... okay.
The third new game announcement is a new RPG from Level-5 codenamed "Town". It's got very kids-anime-cartoony graphics and is apparently entirely set in one town. It could be fine but looked underwhelming to me, both in gameplay and graphics. The graphical look is kind of bland and, one town only? Will this be a regular RPG, or something part life-management sim... who knows now.
A few more of the games shown include Mega Man 11, Just Dance 2019, and a collection of seven Capcom arcade beat 'em ups, including two that never got home console releases before. No licensed games are included here, but it's still an ice collection. It'll be on all formats (PC, PS4, X1, Switch), not only Switch.
I'm sure I'm not mentioning a lot more games shown, but I need to mention the other thing the Direct covered, Nintendo Online. Most of the presentation here is basically saying 'here are all the things you get for paying!' but they aren't new things, they're just the same thing the Switch has had since day one, but now you have to pay for them! It's the same exact horribly, inexcusably bad internet featureset as before, but now you have to pay for it. Thanks, Nintendo.
The only new things I can think of are access to NES games and cloud saves. Most Switch games will support cloud saving, though certain titles won't, including Pokemon and Splatoon. it sounds like most games will, though, thankfully. The little animation with Luigi's Switch getting crushed by a Thwomp was amusing, as an aside. As for those NES games, at least they finally gave details on that, with full lists of titles for what will be released through December. There will be 20 games available at launch, with about five more added per month. I guess that anyone subscribing has access to all games, instead of the XBL Games with Gold style of limited availability, so it's more a Netflix model. Sure, that works. Giving away so many games for a relatively low yearly fee is interesting, yes you have to pay every year but it's a lot of games. On the other hand though you do need to keep paying to keep playing them, so that adds up over time. There has been a lot of speculation that if they add newer consoles they could add additional fees for those libraries, I wonder if they'll go that direction or if they will just add them all in for the same price... or if the price will just go up a lot. I guess we'll see sometime in the coming years.
So yeah, it was a good Direct, I think. I still dislike the Switch's online system, but otherwise they showed quite a bit.